Bestselling Games of All Time

What are the bestselling video games of all time? Find out some of the top performers for systems dating back to the Atari 2600.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I am your host, Jonathan Strickland, senior writer for how
stuff works dot com. And as I record this, my
email is starting to fill up with messages about E three.

(00:28):
That's the big computer and video game trade show that
happens in Los Angeles every year. This year, it's a
little different from previous years. This year, for the first
time in Ages, E three is going to open up
its doors to the general public. You can actually attend
E three as a member of the general public. I
think you have to purchase a ticket to go. I'm media,

(00:50):
so it's different for me. I'm covering the event. I'm
not attending it the way other folks are. But this
is the first time in the Ages that the general
public has been allowed to go to E three. Before,
it's been one of those things where you had to
be an industry professional or part of the media in
order to get uh in there, or you just had
to know somebody and kind of leverage those personal relationships

(01:14):
in order to get access to it. So it should
be a really interesting show. But it does mean that
things are starting to get real busy. In my email inbox,
I do plan on going to E three. I plan
on recording at least one show about what I see
out there if I can, if I can manage it.
Uh And I thought, in honor of all that, in
honor of E three and video games, I would do

(01:36):
a show in which I talk about some of the
best selling games of all time, and some of these
might get a more thorough treatment in a future episode
of Tech Stuff. I might dedicate a full episode either
to a specific video game franchise or more likely the
company that created the franchise. In some cases, I might
talk about a specific video game designer. Uh. So it's

(02:01):
very possible that some of these that I mentioned today
I will revisit in some future episode. But today, let's
take a stroll down memory lane and talk about popular
video and computer games. And I'm really gonna cover sort
of all the major eras of video game and computer
game history. Now, one thing I have to mention early

(02:22):
on is that video games sales were very different in
the early days than they are today. Today we talk
about dozens of millions of units sold for a truly
blockbuster game, but back in the day that was way
too big a number to even dream about. Uh, it

(02:42):
was more of a niche market in the early eighties
when computer games and video games were really first starting
to take off. So with today's world, where you've got
pre sales and you've got these these digital delivery systems
where it means you don't even have to go to
a store to buy the thing anymore, the numbers obviously
are very very different. Also, video games are much more

(03:03):
mainstream now than they were in the eighties. You know,
it was a bustling industry back then, but it was
still very much a niche industry. Back in those good
old days, when you were happy to have eight bits
to rub together in order to make a game, things
were a little different. And I'm not going to cover

(03:24):
every console or every system because that would take way
too much research, honestly, to have to look at the
different sales figures for every single platform that was out there.
But I covered all the major ones, including the major
ones of the past. Um and to start with, we'll
take a look at the good old at now is

(03:46):
not the only early video game console. There was Collique Vision,
there was in television. There were other Atari models like
but they is what I think of when I think
of classic home video game market. It was the big
daddy out of all the systems that were out there,
at least as far as a dedicated video game console,

(04:11):
and it was one of the most successful ones of
that time. So let's take a look at the top
ten titles featured on that system. And I want to
tell you right now that when I talk about the
ones at the very end of the list, or really
the beginning of the list, because I started ten and
work my way down, you could substitute a few different

(04:32):
names for the top numbers ten, nine, and eight and
seven or so like those those top four. You could
probably switch this out with some others because these sales
were very similar, like around a million units each. So
that is something to keep in mind when I'm talking
about these top selling ones. They were so close that

(04:54):
if you were to look at a different list of
top ten best selling games for the attor, I would
bet the last few entries on the list would be
a little different than the ones I have. But I'm
the one running this show, so I get to pick
which ones end up on the list. Since they were
all so close that it really is kind of a
judgment call in the first place, and I wanted ten

(05:16):
because that's a nice round number. So number ten, depending
upon the version that you're looking at, was Kaboom. Kaboom
was a game from Activision, so that was a third
party developer for games on the Autar and in Kaboom,

(05:36):
you used a paddle style controller to move a bucket
or sometimes a series of buckets back and forth across
the base of the screen. At the top of the
screen was a naughty little man, the mad Bomber, dropping
a series of bombs down and your job was to
catch the bombs before they could hit the ground. So

(05:56):
you would slide your bucket back and forth using this
paddle controller to catch the bombs. Pretty simple gameplay, Very
compelling though, because it was fast paced and it got
much more challenging the longer you played. Most of these games,
that's the way they worked. The difficulty would increase the
longer you played the game. This one came out and

(06:19):
sold more than a million copies. Number nine was one
of the games that I would argue ranks among the
best that ever came out for the at In fact,
I would probably put this as a tie for number
one of my favorites, and it was called River Raid.
River Raid was a top down shooter in which you

(06:41):
would control a jet and you flew back and forth.
It would scroll vertically, so you're flying over a river,
uh and the screen would change scrolling from the top
down to the bottom. Meanwhile, you're flying back and forth
shooting down boats and also helicopters, and and you would

(07:02):
end up destroying stuff in order to try and find
fuel because as you flew, you would actually consume the
fuel that you were using, meaning that if you didn't
pick up more fuel, your jet would eventually crash. Even
if you were able to avoid all the enemy fire
coming at you, you would still need to pick up
more fuel. So this was another game from Activision. Activision

(07:25):
produced lots of games for the Atari. A lot of
the big successful ones came out of Activision, and I
thought that River Raid was one of the more exciting
and interesting games on there. It was the one of
the ones that got closest to replicating the sort of
experience you might have at an actual arcade. The graphics

(07:47):
weren't arcade level graphics, but the action was similar to
what you would find in an arcade machine. Number eight
was a game called Adventure, one of the best known
games of the era. I have played Adventure, but I
did not own it. I did have an Atari twenty
when I was a kid. Sometimes people say the Adventure

(08:09):
was one of the earliest, if not the very first
action adventure game. I think that might be going a
bit far, but I see where they're coming from. It
came straight from Atari, so it was the first party game.
It didn't come from a third party developer, and it
required you to navigate a maze searching for a chalice
while simultaneously trying to avoid three naughty little dragons and

(08:34):
a little action adventure game. You go through these different
maze like areas finding components that would allow you to
get access to the chalice, and if you could then
you could win the game, essentially win that level more
or less. Also, this game has the honor of being
the first video game that anyone was able to point
to and say, there's an Easter Egg in that video game,

(08:55):
and the easter Egg was the name of the developer.
So back in those days, Atari did not allowed developers
to include their names on either the packaging or the
game itself. Atari didn't want developers to have any connection.
They didn't want this to become a personality thing. They
wanted to be known as just a company that produced
great games, and they didn't really see the value of

(09:18):
allowing developers their chance to claim any of the credit,
and this caused a lot of consternation in the video
game developer world. So in this case, the developer decided
that it might be a little cheeky and fun to
hide his name inside the game itself, and if you

(09:38):
knew the right place to go in the game, you
could go down an invisible go through an invisible door,
down a corridor into a room that had the developers
name in it. And uh. Eventually, a Tori stance on
not allowing developers to include their names attached to games
would lead to a lot of people leaving Atari to
form their own company. That's how Activision got its start, actually,

(10:03):
was that there are people who are working for Atari
who got tired of the fact that they could not
claim any credit to the games they developed, and so
they left to form their own company where they could
make their own policies. So it's actually a policy that
would ultimately hurt Atari in the long run. The seventh
best selling game for the hundred is a title that

(10:24):
tech Stuff once declared the worst video game of all time,
though to be fair, that was actually the result of
a poll that we put out among tech stuff listeners.
We asked our listeners to nominate what they thought was
the worst video game of all time, and the number
one response, not the only response, but the one that
got the most votes was ET the Extra Terrestrial for

(10:48):
the Atari dred and that is the number seven best
selling game on the at now. I don't really think
it deserves the title of worst video game of all time.
I think there are way worse games there than ET.
But man, it was not a great game. It had
a lot of problems. It was also really expensive for
Atari to produce because they had to pay for the

(11:09):
license to get ET so they could make a game
about it. Uh And it sold a lot of copies.
It was on number seven on this list, but Atari
produced way more copies and they were actually able to sell,
and a lot of those would end up buried in
a landfill. And you can learn more about that story.
There's a documentary called Atari Game Over. You can actually

(11:30):
watch that, and it has the whole journey of of
identifying the landfill where supposedly these games were dumped, and
then they do a dig to see if they can
actually find the games. And I don't want to spoil anything,
but it's a good documentary, so you should check that
out if you're interested in this story. And a lot
of people point to ET as being an expensive mistake

(11:53):
that ultimately contributed to Atari's collapse. Uh, and that seems
pretty fair. Atari into up over committing on these big,
big projects and then not selling enough units, and they
took a math on it. They they suffered losses as
a result that ultimately led to a massive crash in

(12:14):
the home video game market. This is one of those
games I had as a kid. I had E. T. D. Extraterrestrial,
so I experienced this pain firsthand. I played it and
it was one of those things where in my mind
I had never really completed the game, but then when
I watched the play through, I realized I had completed
the game on numerous occasions. I just kind of blocked
it out of my mind. It helps to remember that

(12:37):
the game developer, Howard Scott Warshaw, it was working under
a crazy deadline. He was given something like five weeks
to develop this game from start to finish. So he
really had an impossible task ahead of him when it
came down to making this game, and that should give
you at least some sympathy for him, and it explains
why the game turned out the way it did. He

(12:58):
didn't have enough time to develop, you know, a more
well rounded, interesting game, and everything in the game works.
It's just not particularly fun to play. So there are
other games that don't even have components that completely work,
So that that alone tells me this is not the
worst game ever developed. Uh. Then we've got a game

(13:20):
called Atlantis, which was the first game on this list.
I actually don't remember ever playing or seeing played. So
in this game, you would protect the city of Atlantis
from enemy aircraft flying overhead, and you had a set
of three cannons that you could use. You can control
with the joystick, so you could switch between the cannons
using the joystick, and then you would fire with the

(13:41):
button and tried to shoot down the aircraft that flew overhead.
As the aircraft would pass overhead, they would get a
little lower on their subsequent passes, and at certain points,
once they reached an altitude, they would start firing down
and destroying your cannons, so it became a race to
destroy the aircraft before your can ends were destroyed, similar
to another game that's on this list called Missile Command.

(14:04):
UH also kind of tied with Atlantis around this same area,
so technically I guess there are eleven items on this list.
Was a game called Demon Attack, which I had heard about,
but I also never played this one. I didn't know
Demon Attack. This one came from a company called The
Magic and was launched in two Now. Atari had actually
sued a Magic over this game, saying that they had

(14:27):
copied another game called Phoenix. And if you look at
Phoenix and you look at Demon Attack, they do, in
fact look extremely similar to one another, although Phoenix is
a faster paced game than Demon Attack is Demon Attack
you play a little cannon that can move back and
forth across the bomb of the screen, kind of similar

(14:48):
to Space Invaders, and you fire up at these three
flying objects that are at different levels of altitude. So
there's one in the low position, one a middle position,
and one in the high position and UH, and your
job is to destroy wave after wave of these three things.
And each time you complete one wave, you get a

(15:09):
new set of three, and they might have slightly different abilities,
like the kind of projectiles they fire change a little bit,
and eventually get to a point where when you destroy one,
they'll it'll split into two smaller entities that can swoop
down at you and also shoot at you. Interesting note,
if you do ever play this game and you want
to look like a total pro playing it, only the

(15:31):
bottom most creature can actually shoot at you. So if
you concentrate on destroying the bottom most creature in each
wave and and they do respawn, but they only respond
a certain number of times per wave. If you destroy
that lowest level one, you can take all the time
in the world to destroy the next two because they

(15:52):
will never shoot you ever. Uh. The only difference is
that if you get to the levels where you shoot
one and it splits into creatures, those that pair of
creatures will move down levels until they're at that lowest level,
and at that point they can shoot at you and
swoop at you, but in their big form, they'll just

(16:13):
like you can set your controller down and go order
a pizza. You're fine. They'll never shoot you. Spoiler, I
guess if you're talking about a game that came out
in the early eighties that is on an obsolete system,
but interesting that it was one of those where Atari
would actually take another company to court. By the way,

(16:35):
the case was settled out of court, but yeah, it was.
It was. It caused some consternation. Next on the list,
number five, since that was kind of a tie. Is
a real classic in arcade game history Space Invaders. So
similar to what I was just saying before. Space Invaders.
Of course, very very successful arcade game uh A debuted Japan.

(17:00):
The arcade version debut in Japan in nine. Now a
company called Tito created Space Invaders, and then Bally's Midway
division would end up licensing it and distributing it here
in the United States and in Europe. The Attori version

(17:20):
of Space Invaders came out in nineteen eighties, so two
years after the game had come out in arcades, and
they sold around two million copies, which was a huge
number for home video games at this stage. Two million
is enormous. Space Invaders was one of those titles that
helped sell consoles because people remembered how much fun they

(17:41):
had playing it in the arcade and they wanted to
have that experience at home. So it's a known quantity
and you'll often see games come out where people will
say that's that's the the killer app or that's the
one that will sell consoles because it creates a an
experience that people want to have or that they associate

(18:03):
with being fun. So in this case, Space Invaders was
a really popular game in the arcades and it really
helps sell some Atari consoles um and it was more
or less the same game on the Atari twenty hundred.
It wasn't as colorful or as a uh you know,
the graphics weren't as good, which is weird to say

(18:24):
when you look at the graphics of Space Invaders, but
it's true. But it had the basic game elements fairly
well represented in the twenty version. Number four is was
Missile Command. This is the game I was talking about
earlier when I was talking about Atlantis. Missile Command came
out in nineteen eighty, with the Atari twentyre port debuting

(18:44):
the following year, so was when the arcade version came out,
and the arcade version had a roller ball control, but
the Atari version used the basic joystick. It still was
a big hit with the with fans. They bought two
and a half million units of this thing. So it's
very successful gameplay for Missile Command if you've never played.

(19:07):
It involves moving a little set of crosshairs over the
horizon as missiles are coming in towards a city, and
you can fire anti missile projectiles and what happens is
they'll they'll fly out, and then at the point where
you designated with your crosshairs, the anti missile projectile will

(19:27):
explode in a little circle. Any missiles that make connection
with that circle will disappear. They're nullified. So the game
becomes one of fast reflexes and also just strategy figuring
out where you can place these anti missile projectiles to
take out as many different enemy missiles as possible, because

(19:49):
you have a limited number of shots per level, so
you want to make sure that you get two or
three per level instead of trying to dedicate one for
one thing. You would run out of time before you
it take down all the missiles and you would start
losing parts of your city. But anyways, again another one
of those games that had very simple gameplay, but it

(20:10):
was compelling. It It encouraged people to keep playing and
keep trying to get better and beat that high score.
So while these games were simplistic, especially compared to today's games.
What they had was some sort of hook that latched
on to that reward center in our brains, that lizard
part of our brains that wants to achieve something, and

(20:32):
it just gently presses that button saying good job. And
if it presses that button just frequently enough, not so
frequently that you get tired of it, but not so
infrequently that you get frustrated by it, it becomes a
compelling game. Number three was another classic port Asteroids. Asteroids

(20:53):
was one of the very first arcade games, especially one
of the first successful arcade games, and the port came
out in ninety one and it would go on to
sell just shy of four million copies, again a huge
number in those days. This game involves controlling a spaceship
that has to blast asteroids before they collide with the spaceship.

(21:14):
If you collide with an asteroid, your spaceship is destroyed.
But when you shoot an asteroid, it splits into smaller
asteroids until they get to such a level that they
just are disintegrated. So it then becomes a game of
shooting asteroids to break them apart, but not shooting too
many big asteroids, because otherwise you just have a huge
field of smaller ones you have to maneuver around. The

(21:36):
Arcade game was really challenging because all it had were
buttons to control your spaceship. You can control the direction
you were facing, your thrust, and your rate of fire
as was a little hyperspace button, whereas the Arcade the
the Atari version used it all as a controller, so
you would control your spaceships orientation and thrust with the
joystick part and then the fire with a button. So

(21:59):
it made a little sim blur, but I still thought
it was really fun back in those days. Um number
two is the only game on this list that I
think is as good as River Raid, which was Pitfall.
Number two. Best selling hunter game was Pitfall. It was
an early platform er, so platform ring games were not

(22:23):
a thing, uh from the get go. Like a lot
of the early games were war games or strategy games
or puzzle games. This was a platform er and you
control a little dude named Harry. And you have Harry
running through the jungle, swinging over ponds, jumping on alligators,
dodging scorpions, and picking up random treasures to generate the points.

(22:46):
And you had a timer so you had to try
and get as many treasures within that timer as possible,
or you know, obviously if you ran into enemies you
could lose lives, so your your game was over either
when the timer ran out or more likely when you
died three times. Pitfall also was well known for the
fact that when you had Harry jump on a rope

(23:08):
a vine and swing, he made a little Tarzan like noise,
although it was the eight bit version of a Tarzan
like noise, so not exactly perfect audio, but it was
really charming and it was another reason why people really
liked it, And it was a glorious eight bit sound
that I still love to this day. And that game

(23:29):
sold four million copies, so very popular. The number one
a game I think goes neck and neck with the
worst game for the ATY. I think this one in
some ways is worse than et It is pac Man.
So it was a port of an arcade game, a
very popular arcade game, one of the iconic arcade games

(23:53):
in the early eighties, late seventies early eighties pac Man.
The version was ugly compared to the arcade version. Things
that were nice and smooth and round were blocky instead
of pellets, you were eating dashes. The ghosts were flickering
in the Utari version because the sprites wouldn't be able

(24:14):
to stay solid. It was a mess. The sound effects
were terrible and and clangy, and it just wasn't It
didn't represent what pac Man was like in arcades, so
it was a bad port in many ways. However, it
sold seven million copies. Unfortunately, Atari had produced twelve million copies,

(24:39):
so five million copies went unsold. That's a huge investment
that they did not see a return on. So this
is another example of Atari making a big, bold move
that would end up costing the money, and ultimately it's
what helped push the entire industry toward a crash, although
there were a lot of other factors there too. Um So,

(25:02):
it sold more copies than any other Atari game, but
not as many as what Atari was hoping for, and it,
along with a lot of third party games that had
very little quality control, help sink the home video game
industry in um let's talk about that just for a second. Now.
I've done episodes about the video game crash of three,

(25:24):
so I'm not going to go into a whole lot
of detail here, but basically, What you had was a
huge amount of competition with lots of different consoles trying
to make their their spot in consumer electronics. So you
had hundred the Collique of Vision, the Intellivision, You had

(25:46):
countless other video game consoles. You had hundreds of titles
from third party developers, some of which were really good games.
Some of the best games of that time came from
third party developers. But some of them were terrible. They
were buggy, they were not fun, some of them barely worked,
and they were being sold side by side with first

(26:07):
party game titles, and so you were diluting the product
over time. This is what eventually got consumers fed up
with home video game since what led to that huge crash. Now,
in our next segment, we're going to talk about the
company that helped resurrect the home video game industry after

(26:32):
this massive crash. But before we get to that very
special company, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
All Right, it is time to talk Nintendo. The Nintendo

(26:52):
Entertainment System gets a lot of credit for resurrecting the
home video game market after that crash, and it should
get that credit. The previous incarnation of the video game
industry had collapsed in on itself due to its own
massive bulk, and consumers were completely sick of it. They

(27:13):
felt like they had been burned by home video games,
and the rise of the personal computer meant that people
were starting to take more attention um and pay more
attention toward personal computers than to video game consoles. So
it was a big deal to get into that game
after the entire industry had collapsed. But luckily, not really luckily,

(27:34):
due to hard work, Nintendo had a compelling product that
was running compelling games, and it was enough to get
people interested in it even after they had lost all
faith in the industry because of the issues I had
just talked about. That is a huge thing. Uh, And
if you've listened to my podcasts on Nintendo, you know

(27:57):
the history of the company. It started off as a
playing card money so to get to a point where
it became a video game company, that's a huge journey there,
and I recommend you listen to those if you're not
familiar with them. They were a lot of fun to record.
So Nintendo saw where some of these problems were with
the home video game industry, and one of the things
they said was we want to make sure the quality

(28:19):
of the games is at our level of standards, so
we're gonna have a certification program. People will have to
submit their games to us and we can certify them,
Otherwise we will not allow them to run on our consoles. Eventually,
people would develop workarounds to that. They would develop adapters
that would allow you to play games that were not
Nintendo certified on Nintendo hardware. But initially, what this meant

(28:44):
was it gave Nintendo a very clear level of control
for their games, and you could argue because of that,
the quality of the games was much a step better
than what you had seen in the previous generation of
video game consoles. Then s game Nintendo Entertainment System game

(29:05):
that sold the most copies was a launch title. Uh,
not a big surprise. Most of the titles that you
will see that are the top selling title for a
video game console tend to also be the ones that
were bundled with the console when it was initially sold.
Of course, not all consoles came with a bundled game,

(29:26):
and in those cases it could be a very different result.
But in this case, we're talking about Super Mario Brothers,
one of the most popular platform or games of all time,
one of the most popular games of all time period.
It sold more than forty million copies. Forty million. I

(29:47):
was just talking about seven million being a big number.
So more than five times as many as Atari's top
selling game forty million. Now that's largely because the nes
was such a huge success and because the game was
bundled with it, but still that's just such a huge,
huge number. If you're not familiar with Super Mario Brothers,

(30:10):
welcome to the modern world. I hope that you are
comfortable out from beneath the rock you were under. Just kidding,
I know not everyone's interested in video games. So maybe
you don't know about Super Mario Brothers, or you've heard
the name but you don't know what it's about. Well,
Super Mario Brothers. Here's how the game works. It's a

(30:32):
got either one player mode or two player mode. In
one player mode, you're playing as Mario. In two player,
one person plays as Mario, the other person plays as Luigi.
You are a jumpy little plumber and Mario had previously
appeared in other games like Donkey Kong, although at the
time he was just called jump Man and Mario Brothers.

(30:54):
There was a game just called Mario Brothers, which involved
running around in a little level that was to be
like a sewer and you would knock turtles on their
backs and kick them over because those turtles were bad anyway.
They You also had a Donkey Kong Jr. Where Mario

(31:14):
was technically the bad guy in that game, but in
Super Mario Brothers, your job was to navigate a world
filled with various little monsters and things that could hurt
you so that you could get to the correct castle
after visiting a series of incorrect castles and rescue Princess
Peach from the clutches of the Evil Bowser. There's a

(31:39):
lot of jumping and running involved. That's what a platform
er is called called a platform er because you typically
are jumping from one platform to another platform, and you're
trying to get the timing rights that you avoid gaps,
you avoid enemies, you avoid enemy fire, that kind of stuff.
Other games that also sold well for the Nintendo Entertainment

(31:59):
System included Duck Hunt. Now, Duck Hunt was a light
gun game, and it became packaged with the Light Gun system.
So again not a big surprise that it's sold really well,
but uh, it was. It was a big seller. Like
there were many millions of copies of it sold. The
first two sequels to Super Mario Brothers also sold very well,

(32:22):
so the Super Mario Brothers two and three did extremely well.
Just shy of the top five slot for the best
selling video games of the Nintendo Entertainment System was the
Legend of Zelda. That was the sixth best selling game
for the NES. The Legend of Zelda was the first
game and another beloved Nintendo franchise. And you're gonna start

(32:43):
seeing things as I go through these Nintendo games where
a lot of the names start popping up over and
over again. Nintendo, more than any other company, I would argue,
depends heavily upon it's franchises that it created, more so
the third party games that were developed for Nintendo. The
first party franchises are what get Nintendo fans excited and

(33:07):
it's what sells Nintendo consoles. So with Nintendo Super Mario Brothers,
anything Mario Brothers related, that's obviously one of the top performers.
Also Zelda another top performer, and Legend of Zelda was
the first of many mini games in that franchise. That
particular version Legend of Zelda sold six and a half

(33:30):
million copies. So this is number six on our list, right,
and it hits six and a half million copies. Remember
number one of Atari hits seven million, So we're already
talking about a totally different industry at this point. Metroid,
which is another franchise people love with Nintendo, got edged
out of the top ten, just barely. It was number
eleven on the best Selling Games of Nintendo and it

(33:54):
sold two point seven million copies. So yeah, popular system.
The success user to the Nintendo Entertainment System was, of course,
the Super Nintendo Entertainment System or the Super Famicom. The
Famicon was the name of the NES in Japan, and
then the Super Famicon was the next one, so we
called it the Super Nintendo Entertainment System or the s

(34:16):
NES or SNEES, depending upon the circles you run in.
The top selling game for that one, again not a
big surprise. It was a bundled to launch title was
Super Mario World, sometimes referred to as Super Mario Brothers four. Now,
you could argue that Nintendo's reliance on franchises like the

(34:41):
Mario Brothers franchise was cemented by the fact that these
were the best selling games in consoles and their consoles history,
but in many cases these were games that were also
bundled with the actual system, So it's it's it's like
you can't really do apples and apples because the game
comes of the console, than just buying a console means

(35:02):
you I have become a customer of that game. Even
if you were to never put the game in the
system and you weren't really interested in it, you still
technically bought one. So it's a little complicated. But Super
Mario World sold more than twenty million copies, already half
of what the NES sold. So even though the NES

(35:23):
ushered in a new era of video games of home
video games, it didn't mean that we were immediately just
going to keep on building with each new system selling
even more copies than the one before it. It got
a little more complicated than that. Other top performers in
the Super Nintendo Entertainment System World included Donkey Kong Country,

(35:44):
in which you took control of the former villainous Donkey
Kong that was the bad guy in the game Donkey Kong,
where you played Mario slash jump Man. Uh. He was
also the captor our captive rather in Donkey Kong Junior,
you played as Donkey Kong Junior and you were trying
to rescue your dad, but Donkey Kong Country meant that

(36:07):
you were actually controlling Donkey Kong himself. Uh. Super Mario
Kart was also a top seller and would become another
franchise within Nintendo. Super Mario Kart, of course, is a
kart racing games, So you're playing like go karts, uh,
and you're playing as various iconic Nintendo characters, typically from
the Super Mario world, and you can pick up a

(36:29):
little power ups and use them to completely infuriate all
of your fellow players. And if you hit me with
another BLUESLL so help me, you get no more Cheetos
you know I'm talking to Well. These were or that

(36:52):
that joined the Donkey Kong franchise, the Mario franchise, and
the Metroid and Zelda franchises to come yet another longstanding
franchise with Nintendo. You could argue it's a spinoff because
it's the Super Mario characters, but the Mario Kart franchise
is really kind of its own things, sort of like
the way Super Smash Brothers is its own thing. But again,

(37:16):
It really showed how Nintendo would rely heavily on these
franchises in order to make big sales because that's what
their fans loved. You could tell because those were the
games that were selling the best, So we might as
well stick with Nintendo. Other console systems were coming out
the same time as the S and E s and

(37:37):
shortly thereafter, but we might as well focus on one
company at a time. So next would be the Nintendo
sixty four or in sixty four, which was the system
I really loved it was the system was the last
of the home console systems Nintendo would sell that was
a cartridge based system. The other ones would become disc based.

(38:00):
This was a cartridge based system. I never owned a
Nintendo or Super Nintendo, but I did have a Nintendo
sixty four, and I thought it was pretty keen. The
top selling game was Super Mario sixty four, which did
not necessarily come within Nintendo sixty four, So actually this
one is legitimately a top seller because I never had

(38:21):
that game. I always wanted it. It was also one
that even years and years and years after it came out,
you could not find it for a real discounted price
because there were still a demand for it. That's how
how highly regarded this game was. Super Mario sixty four
always was pretty expensive, even if you were trying to
buy a used copy. This was eleven point nine million

(38:44):
units sold. So again you look at the story, the
nes top selling games sold forty million copies, the S
and E s twenty million, and then the n sixty
four eleven point nine million. So you see there's this
trend of decreasing diminishing returns, if you will, which would
end up being a little troubling and more so in

(39:05):
future generations of Nintendo consoles. But not too far behind
Super Mario sixty four was Mario Kart sixty four, which
firmly established the Mario Kart franchise as a thing in
its own right. And third place was unusually a licensed game,
not a Nintendo first party game, but a licensed game.

(39:25):
It was Golden I Double O seven And anyone who
had an in sixty four and played Golden Eye, I
guarantee you right now they have a big smile on
their face. Why because this game was awesome. You played
as James Bond, and the game loosely followed plot lines
that were inspired by the film Golden I. It was

(39:47):
cool because you got to run around different levels as
James Bond and try and defeat various enemies and make
sure you didn't get shot in the process. But even
better than that, you could argue, was the multiplayer. You
could a first person shooter multiplayer against friends in a
split screen environment, and it was one of the earliest
console based multiplayer first person shooters that I can think of,

(40:11):
and it did it really well. The controls were fun,
the weapons were fun, the maps were fun, and it
was hilarious to listen to a group of people play
this game because they would come up with some very
creative curse words to yell at each other as they
would get shot while trying to shoot someone else. One
of my favorite games to play and favorite games to

(40:32):
watch people play. Fourth place for the Nintendo sixty four
would go to the Legend of Zelda the ok Arena Time,
which sold seven point six million copies, so fourth place
seven point six million. First place was eleven point nine.
You're seeing less of a drop off from one to
two to three to four, which is good. Out of

(40:54):
all the versions of Zelda I've played, and I've only
played a few of them, There are a lot more
out there that I haven't touched, but all of all
the ones I have played, Oak are Enough Time is
my favorite. Then we come to the Nintendo GameCube. The
best selling game for the game Cube was Super Smash
Brothers Melee. This was a game that our franchise that

(41:15):
had previously been established with just Super Smash Brothers. This
one involves playing various iconic Nintendo characters, and you're playing
on on levels against other players, typically other human players,
although you can play against computer controlled ones too, and
the object is to knock your opponents off of the

(41:37):
platforms that you can stand on, so you want to
be the last character standing in a free for all Melee. Ah,
this one did really well. The other ones had done well,
but not as good as this that they sold more
than seven million units. However, that means that you also
see another drop from eleven point nine million as the

(41:59):
top one of the inn sixty four to seven million
for the game Cube. I shall also point out that
I'm concentrating on platform exclusives here for the most part.
Keep in mind some games would appear on multiple platforms,
and that means that they might do well overall. When
you add up all the different platforms they were sold on,

(42:21):
but because you could play them on various different consoles,
it was they rarely reached the top five for most
game platforms because you've diluted it by allowing people to
buy it on whichever console they most prefer. It's the
console exclusives that tend to be in the top five
simply because that's the only place you can buy them,

(42:43):
it's the only place you can play them. Rather, the
rest of the top five for the game Cube includes
the usual suspects. Another kart racing games again, other Mario
Kart game in there. You have another Super Mario game
with like Super Mario Sunshine. You had another Zelda game
in there, and you had Metro Prime. So again, the
top selling games for Nintendo are the franchises that they established.

(43:07):
The Golden I Double O seven was kind of a
exception to the rule, and now we're back to the rule,
which is Nintendo depends very heavily on the intellectual property
they have created. It's also one of the reasons why
they were very reluctant to have that stuff appear on
other platforms, because clearly those are the titles that sell consoles.

(43:30):
They're the ones that have the highest sales rates. So
that explains why Nintendo is never really eager to put
their stuff on a different platform. Doesn't mean that people
haven't done it. Obviously. They've got the Mario Jump game
for iPhone, but that didn't do as well as what
Nintendo was hoping and kind of reinforce their idea that

(43:52):
their intellectual property works best on their own platforms. The
Nintendo WE tells a slightly different story than the Predace sessors.
Louise most popular game was WE Sports because it was
bundled with the console, although to be fair, it's also
a very fun game, so I'm not here to suggest
that it's a bad game, just that if you bought
a WE you got WE Sports is one of your games,

(44:13):
at least early on. Initially, it's sold eighty two point
eight million copies. Now that is mind blowing, eighty two
point eight million, more than twice as many as the
nes Super Mario Brothers game, and that helps illustrate how

(44:33):
the Nintendo WE had become a huge powerhouse in the industry,
at least temporarily. It had a big impact on the
video game industry. It was insanely popular, you couldn't find
them anywhere when they first came out, because they would
be bought as soon as they would hit store shelves.
But when you start looking down the list of the
top performing games, you see that there's an issue because

(44:55):
number two on that list was Mario Kart We and
that one sold thirty six point eight three million copies,
so less than half of number one. What that tells
you is that the console was what was popular, and
then gamers differed on which games they felt were the best.

(45:21):
Because you see a huge drop from number one to
number two. Number one sells more than eighty million copies,
number two sells thirty six million. It's an enormous gap. Uh.
Nintendo had several big hits for the Weed, but nothing
that approached the level of interest for the console itself.
So once you get the tenth place, which was We Party,

(45:42):
you're talking about nine million copies sold, which is still
a lot. I don't mean to take anything away from it,
but remember we started at eighty million, So you go
from eighty million at number one to nine million at
number ten. That shows that there were not any standout
games that really demanded a huge push from the consumer level.

(46:05):
And that was an issue. You got to see more
and more players kind of put their Nintendo we to
the side and allow it to gather dust, and they
would only take it out if they had a group
of people over to play party games or group games.
The WU is even more jury story. The top selling
title on the WU was Mario Kart eight and the

(46:26):
sales were hitting around eight million units. So the number
one selling game of the Weiu sold fewer units than
the number ten for the Wei itself. That's not a
great story, and in fact, if I were to talk
specifically about the WEU, it would be a pretty sad
story from beginning to end, particularly because I think the

(46:47):
WU was a very innovative approach. It just didn't have
the games or the experiences that were compelling enough to
really push it into a success. Switching over to handhelds,
just briefly, the top selling title on the Game Boy
is one that I'm going to chat about later. And

(47:08):
I'm sure a lot of you will guess what the
top selling title for game Boy was, but again I'll
i'll address that one in a little bit. So apart
from the number one spot, Pokemon Rules the Land for
the original game, Boy, the Pokemon games Red, Blue, Gold,
and Silver made up nearly fifty million units sold. That's

(47:32):
collectively the four games fifty million units, huge number. The
Game Boy Advance continued that trend with Pokemon Ruby, Sapphire, Fire,
Red Leaf, Green, and Emerald, which collectively accounted for more
than thirty million units, which tells me that Pokemon fans
love their games. Then you have the Nintendo DS. That's

(47:56):
top game was the New Super Mario Brothers, followed by
An ten Dogs and then Mario Kart DS. The three
DS returned the title to Pokemon, with Pokemon X and
Y leading the charge with more than sixteen million units sold.
And I guess someday I'm just gonna have to do
a full Pokemon episode. She means, I'm gonna have to

(48:16):
understand it. Pity me. Before I take another quick break,
I thought it'd be cool to chat about the top
selling games for some of the consoles that weren't nearly
as popular as the Nintendo line. And we're talking about
the Vegas Sega systems here, So what were the top
games on those systems. It's a little tricky because most
of them didn't really hit a full million units and

(48:39):
that's what you need to show up on a lot
of lists. The Sega Genesis, which was better known as
the Mega Drive and other parts of the world, had
Sonic the Hedgehog as its top performing title with fifteen
million units sold. It's another title that got bundled with
the Sega Genesis in most cases. Sonic two came in
second place with six million units uh, which is much

(49:03):
more modest than the fifteen million that Sonic One sold,
and third place went to Disney's Aladdin, which was another
licensed game, and it managed to buck the trend that
trend being a licensed game that ends up being pretty lousy.
I'm sure any video gamers out there are familiar with
tons of different games based on licenses that just were

(49:24):
not fun or we're a bad representation of whatever the
license was. But Aladdin was a fun platform or that
a lot of people liked, so it did really well
on the Sega Genesis. Uh. Following that up, We're the
Game's NBA Jam, one of the few sports related games
to a show up on our lists so far, although

(49:45):
NBA Jam is a very arcady version of sports and
Mortal Kombat to our first fighting game besides, uh yeah, no,
it's our first one first fighting game where it's kind
of like Street Fighter sort of stuff, Mortal Kombat too.
The Sega Saturn had only a few titles top more
than a million sold. That would include Virtua Fighter Too,

(50:08):
which was another fighting game kind of like Mortal Kombat
or Street Fighter or tech In or one of those,
and Sega Rally Championship, a racing game. The Dreamcast, which
is still one of my favorite consoles of all time,
had Sonic Adventure as its top selling title, followed by
the fighting game Soul Caliber. Soul Caliber is kind of

(50:28):
like more more like Mortal Kombat, I would argue than
Street Fighter because you have a lot of weapons involved.
There are also other elements of gameplay that we're not
common to Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. I spent a
lot of time playing Soul Caliber on the Dreamcast trying
to unlock all the different stuff. My favorite character was Servantes,
who was a pirate yar. Anyway, Third place would go

(50:53):
to a Crazy Taxi, which sold a little bit more
than one point two million units. Now, I would take
time to talk about the top selling Turbo Graphics six
team games, but those didn't get to sales figures large
enough for me to find in a really reliable source.
I'm sure that certain games did pretty well, but none

(51:15):
of them were breakout successes. So you might find a
game like Ninja Spirit or Legendary Acts or BOMBERMANE that
did pretty well, but again couldn't find any sells figures
that made it stand out. Now, in our next section,
I'll take a look at the top games on Sony
and Xbox consoles, as well as the big names in

(51:37):
PC games. But before that, let's take another quick break
to thank our sponsor. All right, let's talk about Sony now.
Sony's PlayStation was the first console to seriously give Nintendo
a run for its money, and it also ushered in

(51:58):
a new era of big say hills in video games.
The original PlayStation's top selling game was Grand Tarismo, which
was a racing game and a driving simulator. Still is
a racing game and a driving simulator. It didn't magically
transform over the last few years, but Grand Tarismo was
the number one selling title for the original PlayStation. And
I find this interesting since we didn't really see any

(52:20):
actual driving simulators in our other lists. Really, we saw
some arcady things like Mario Kart, but this was an
honest to goodness driving simulator and a race car simulator.
Other big PS one games included Final Fantasy seven, so
a video game role playing game, one of the most

(52:40):
popular of the Final Fantasy franchise, and Grand Tarismo too.
As it turns out, Grand Turismo really was dominating PlayStation one.
Fourth place went to tech In three, which was another
fighting game. But then let's take a look over at
PS two. So the PlayStation two's top game was Grand
Theft Auto San Andreas. So this is an action adventure

(53:05):
game and the first sandbox style game on our list. Now,
to be fair, consoles really didn't have the power to
give you a sandbox kind of experience. And basically a
sandbox game means that you get dumped into a game
world and you have a lot of freedom of choice
as to what you do next. You can wander around,
try and do different things. You don't have to go
down a linear pathway in order to complete the game

(53:28):
right away. You can do a lot of side missions.
You can explore the world uh to to greater or
lesser degree. Grand Theft Auto series tends to have things
that keep you in certain areas at least to a
certain point of the game before it opens up the
next area, but you still can explore large portions of
the game right away as soon as the game starts.

(53:52):
So Grand Theft Auto San Andreas takes place in a
fictional version of Los Angeles. Then you play a cominal,
as you do in all the Grand Theft Auto games.
You play a criminal who is going on a series
of missions in order to pursue specific goals, which usually
involved becoming more and more powerful in the crime scene

(54:13):
of whatever area you are in, as well as eliminating
various enemies and rivals that you encounter throughout the story.
And you're playing a specific character in each of these games,
different characters for each game, but a specific one. You're
not able to create a character, at least not in
the single player version. So Grand Theft Auto San Andreas

(54:36):
sold seventeen million copies, and again we see a nice
big number here, much bigger than than the lagging we
numbers were later um which actually happened later at this point,
because we're still talking about the PS two. But then
Grand Rismo three and four take second and third place, respectively.

(54:57):
So the driving racing games, those were still really popular
in Sony's world. This is kind of interesting to me
because I would argue that by looking at the top
selling games of each console, you start to get kind
of a profile of what the hardcore fans of those
consoles really liked. So it's Sony, you're getting the Grand

(55:18):
Theft Auto games, these sandbox games, and the Grand Turismo games,
the race card games that seted apart from something like
Nintendo that was looking at things like the Super Mario franchise,
the Zelda franchise, or other companies as well. When we
get the Xbox, we'll see that they have a different
style of games that are the most popular, and you

(55:41):
get a little bit of a feeling of the personality
for each console in a way. The next two games
on the list after Grand Tourism three and four were
other Grand Theft Auto games. Actually, so this is still
for the PS two. So number four on the list
for top five p US two selling games was Grand

(56:02):
Theft Auto Vice City, which sets you in a fictional
version of Miami during the nineteen eighties, and number five
was Grand Theft Auto three, which puts you in a
fictional version of New York City. So three Grand Theft
Auto games and two Grand Thereismo games took the top
five spots for PS two, not a whole lot of
variety there. The PS three would continue this trend with

(56:26):
Grand Theft Auto five raking up twenty one million units sold,
and that game would take you back to San Andreas,
that fictional version of Los Angeles as well as surrounding areas.
It was a much larger map than the one for
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Second place would go to
Grand Thereismo five, So again, no surprise, you're still having

(56:48):
Grand Theft Auto and Grand Theresmo dominating the top of
the charts for the Sony PlayStation line. Really sinsing a
trend here, but third place would change things up a bit.
Third place went to Battlefield three, which is first person
shooter games set in modern day, a fictional version of
modern day, and it had both single and multiplayer modes

(57:08):
that made it very popular. Slots four and five would
go to Uncharted three and Uncharted two, respectfully respectively. I
should say not respectfully. I'm sure they do respect it,
but that's neither here nor there. Uncharted three and to
carry on the series of Uncharted, which follows the exploits
of a character named Nathan Drake who's kind of a

(57:30):
mix between Laura Croft the tomb Raider and Indiana Jones.
He's a treasure hunter who gets in trouble, gets in
over his head all the time, and they has to
try and escape, usually ends up escaping without whatever the
treasure was he was going after it gets lost to
all time or something along those lines. Um very cinematic
style games, very popular for the PS three. Now, one

(57:56):
game I was surprised didn't show up on the Best
Selling Games for the p S three was The Last
of Us, which is a post apocalyptic zombie survival style game,
although I guess you could argue they're not really zombies.
They are humans that have been infected by some sort
of fungal um infection for lack of a better word,

(58:20):
I'm gonna be repetitive and redundant here that makes them
go crazy and attack people. So The Last of Us
is a great game, but is not on the Best
Selling Games for the p S three. However, the remastered
version would end up being number eight for PS four,
but was on the top of PS four's list. All
The top selling game for PS four is Uncharted four

(58:44):
that just seemingly concludes Nathan Drake's storyline in the Uncharted series,
although never say never. Number two is a game called
Horizon zero Dawn, one of the more recent games on
this list in this entire episode, really is Horizon zero
Don's interesting post apocalyptic science fiction game that I recommend

(59:06):
checking out because it's kind of cool. Third place, we
go to kill Zone shadow Fall, which is a first
person shooter game, and then would you would have Blood Born,
which is an action role playing game. In fourth place
and fifth place, we go to Drive Club, which was
the only racing game to make the top five of
Sony's most recent console. So that is kind of a departure,

(59:27):
partly because of delays with Grand Tarismo series, but it
is a departure from the Sony h appeal because you
saw in the earlier consoles that Grand Treismo was always
taking a top place in those those top fives. Now,
those who know me, and they know me well, they

(59:47):
know that I'm an Xbox guy. I'm not a PlayStation person.
I do own a p S three, but I do
not own a PS four. I like the PS three
just fine, and I like the games that I played
on it really well. I like the Uncharted series, but
I just tend to be more of an Xbox player
than a PlayStation player. I do fully recognize that each

(01:00:09):
generation the PlayStation is a more powerful console than the Xboxes,
but I just prefer the Xbox ecosystem. I prefer the controller.
I in large part prefer the games that are exclusive
to the Xbox, although they are not that many of them,
only a few. Most of them are multi platform games, um,

(01:00:29):
but you know, just interest of full disclosure so I
can get that bias out of the way. For the
original Xbox, the best selling game is Halo two, which
I find really interesting. I would have thought the first
Halo would take the top spot, but it's actually in
second place. Halo two is the best selling game on

(01:00:50):
the original Xbox, with Halo following suit. The Halo series
follow you playing the role of a hero called master
Chief who's fighting off aliens and various fun guy that
are infecting aliens and humans alike. So it's the first
person shooter. You're blasting aliens a lot. There's a lot
of science fiction e plot around it, but the important

(01:01:12):
thing is you're blasting aliens a lot unless you're playing multiplayer,
in which case you're blasting other master chiefs a lot,
and uh, it's it's a first person shooter game with
a really popular multiplayer feature, at least starting with Halo two.
It's a really popular multiplayer feature. The first Halo, if
you had a whole bunch of people over at your
house or you were going to a land party, it

(01:01:33):
was popular. But Halo two was when you started getting
this over into the actual internet world. Um So, Halo
two and Halo take spots one and two in the
top five for Xbox. What's number three? That would be
a game called Fable, which sold three million units, So
you're already seeing that the number of units is significantly

(01:01:54):
lower than that for the PlayStation. But Fable is a
fantasy role playing game that it was supposed to depend
heavily upon the players choices. In other words, the actions
you took as a player were supposed to have a
huge impact on the game world. But you could argue
that as the game got closer to release, more and
more of those features got removed, so that your impact

(01:02:17):
on the game world was actually kind of minimal. It
wasn't as big a deal as it was made out
to be in the development process. It disappointed some fans,
although it's still kind of a cool game. Fourth place
was splinter Cell. That's a franchise where you play a
special ops stealth operative and you have to stealthily make
your way through various levels and and achieve special mission

(01:02:40):
goals while not being spotted. You can either go super
stealthy or you can go loud, although it's very difficult
to do so. Very popular series, and the first one
was one of the top selling games for the original
Xbox and the fifth slot went to Project Gotham Racing,
which sold two point one million units. Again, a racing

(01:03:01):
game made it into the top five for the original Xbox,
but it wasn't selling nearly the number of units that
you would see Grand Turismo on the PlayStation now. One
thing Microsoft has been really really good at, something they
do amazingly well is naming its consoles and following a

(01:03:21):
strategy that makes perfect sense because you have your original Xbox,
followed by the Xbox three sixty, and then after that
you get the Xbox One, So yeah, that makes sense anyway.
The top selling game for the Xbox three sixty was
actually Connect Adventures. It's a sports game that moved twenty

(01:03:43):
four million units. I suspect because it was bundled with
the Connect, so if you bought a Connect, you got
a copy of that game. Second place for the Xbox
three sixty was Grand Theft Auto five, so again we
see the Grand Theft Auto franchise making a big impact
on consoles. It was popular on Microsoft's console, just as

(01:04:05):
it had been over at Sony, and it sold nearly
eighteen million units. That's a lot. Halo three would come
in third place with fourteen and a half million units,
and then followed by Minecraft with thirteen million units. And
I've done a full episode about Minecraft, so I don't

(01:04:26):
feel like I need to go into it very much.
Here you can listen to that, although I have been
told I need to update my episode on Minecraft, so
keep an ear out because eventually I will update that
episode and I will release a new version. But no
need to go into it here. And then in fifth
place you had Call of Duty Black Ops, a first
person shooter style game that sold twelve million units. So

(01:04:49):
while their numbers weren't as big as some of the
PlayStation numbers, they were grouped more closely together, which could
tell you that your hardcore group of game mers are
buying similar games because they're all you know, they they
seem to be hitting the same spread because those those
are pretty consistent numbers. You don't have a huge gap

(01:05:11):
between one and two and two and three. In other words,
So now we've got Xbox one and seriously, Microsoft, I
know everyone has criticized you for this nonsensical naming strategy
that you've been employing, but what the heck man? Come on? Anyway,
the top selling game for the Xbox One so far
is Halo five Guardians with five million units sold. So yeah,

(01:05:35):
top selling game, but fewer copies than what you would
see in previous UH console generations, and it shows that
the Xbox One hasn't been performing at nearly the same
level as the SONYPS four. Second place would go to
Dead Rising three, which is a survival horror game with
some weird comedic undertones. It's set in a zombie infested California.

(01:05:58):
Third and fourth place went to two entries in the
four motorsport racing series UH for for the Motorsports five
and then six, So again we see racing games starting
to make a big impact on the top one sold
and fifth place spot went to Gears of War Ultimate Edition,
which is a third person science fiction based shooter. And

(01:06:22):
this brings us to the PC, which is interesting, Like,
there was a time where I was devoted to gaming
on personal computers because I felt that they gave a
superior experience to consoles. Then I felt that consoles were
superior for a while because you didn't have to upgrade

(01:06:43):
a console after you bought it. All the games you
bought for your console were guaranteed to run on it
more or less as opposed to a PC game that
you might buy and it ends up being incompatible with
your video card or you need a new three D
based video card in order to play it, and you
have to upgrade your computer over and over again. Eventually
we get to a point where now I feel like

(01:07:05):
PC gaming has overtaken console again. I think PC gaming
is out on top. So let's talk about some of
the top selling PC games of all time. Number one
with a bullet is Minecraft. It has sold more than
any other PC game. But next after that is World
of Warcraft, which is a fantasy based massively multiplayer online

(01:07:28):
role playing game or m m O RPG. Uh kind
of like Dungeons and Dragons, but on the computer, you
play a character that's part of one of two sides,
and those two sides are in opposition to one another,
and you can't really push the story forward too far,
but you can advance within the world and feel like

(01:07:49):
you're playing a part in this bigger story. Third place
was Diablo three, which is a dungeon crawler and that
will end up wearing out your mouth button faster than
anything else. A hacking slash style game where you keep
on clicking that mouse button trying to whack enemies before
they whack you. After that as counter Strike, which is

(01:08:10):
a game that came out but it really found its
legs with the moderate community, as in people who modify games.
There are tons of different modifications for Counterstrike and that
made it last much longer than other games of its ilk.
And then fifth place would go to The Sims, which
is a family or life simulator game which really drives

(01:08:32):
home the notion that no matter what you want, you
cannot do all the things you need to do in
a day, like exercise, eat well, do your job, find
time for entertainment, hygiene. Something's got to give you, guys,
know where your priorities are. I'm not making any commentary here. Now,

(01:08:54):
just for funzies, I thought i'd take a look at
how some classic computer games measure up in sales. So
modern games you can get massive numbers of sales, millions
and millions of units, particularly on day one of a
game hitting the virtual shells, because of digital delivery and

(01:09:16):
pre game or pre sales. I should say that's not
the case with classic games. Let's take a good old classic,
Zorke one. Zorke was a text based adventure game, meaning
that the whole game plays out almost like a choose
your own adventure book, and you would type in what
you would want your character to do, and as long

(01:09:37):
as you were typing in commands that the game recognized,
you would continue on through the game until you got
eaten by a group. One of the most popular games
of the early computing era, one that a lot of
people have heard about, and it sold a grand total
of around four hundred thousand copies, so not even half
a million, which is kind of crazy to me because

(01:09:59):
I think of zork is being synonymous with early PC gaming,
But it does show you that it was a very
small niche market back in the day. Or how about
the Bard's Tale, which is a very popular dungeon crawler
or fantasy game again kind of like Dungeons and Dragons,
very similar to other games of the same style, like Wizardry.

(01:10:22):
So how did it do? It's sold three hundred thousand units.
Or Ultimate four, which is a game that changed up
computer role playing games by requiring the player to not
act like a complete psychopath. One of the issues that
Richard Garriott, who created the Ultimate series, had with computer
role playing games is that the computer role playing games

(01:10:44):
were not very good at inspiring players to make ethical choices.
Most of the time, there were very few consequences if
you did something unethical, like if you tried to steal
money from the good guys, or you just started to
slaughter good guys for no reason. Often there'd be very
few consequences to that. With Ultimate four, he designed a

(01:11:05):
game that you could not win unless you played a
model ethical character. You had to become the avatar, someone
who embodied the the virtues of this fantasy world, which
meant that you had to play as a super duper
goody two shoes, and in parts of the game it

(01:11:27):
was actually really challenging because it felt like two different
virtues were at slight odds with one another, so you
had to figure out how to navigate your way through
situations in order to actually achieve what you needed to
in order to win. The game sold three copies, So
the Ultimate Series is one of the more popular franchises
in the early PC gaming era. But you're still talking

(01:11:49):
about sales that amounted to less than half a million
in most cases. So remember when I say something like
six million units, isn't that much? It's all a matter
of context. Obviously, six million units back in the early
days of PC gaming would have been a huge number,
an unimaginably huge number. Oh and what was the greatest

(01:12:10):
video game or best selling video game of all time?
Not greatest video game, but best selling video game of
all time. Well, it's sold more than four million units
across all the different platforms that appeared on. But it
was That's the reason why it sold so well, as
it's on multiple platforms, not just a console or a

(01:12:34):
family of consoles or PCs, It's on pretty much everything.
It's one of the most addictive puzzle arcade games of
all time, and the original game Boy version had a
killer soundtrack. I am, of course talking about the one
the only Tetris, in which blocks of different shapes fall

(01:12:56):
down a board and it's your job to arrange them
into to complete layers so that they disappear. Otherwise the
board just keeps filling up with shapes until you get
to the top and your game is over. Well, the
story of Tetris is interesting in its own right, and
I could probably do a full episode just about the

(01:13:17):
Tetris story, but I'm gonna give you kind of the
cliffs notes version here. There was a software developer named
Alexey paget Nov, and I apologize for butchering the name,
but my Russian is yet. That just means my Russian
is no. That's how bad my Russian is. It's not
just not good, it's just no. Alexey pat paget Nov

(01:13:41):
created the game in four and he was a citizen
of what is now Russia, but at the time was
the Soviet Union, and those young uns among you might
not know how chilly relations were between the U S
SR and the good old USA back in those days,
but suffice it to say we were not besties. The

(01:14:02):
name of the game he took from the Latin prefix tetra,
which generally means four and his favorite sport, which was tennis,
and he had Tetris. And the reason he chose four
is because every block in Tetris is made up of
four smaller blocks. So if you have a long piece,

(01:14:23):
that's actually four small blocks in a row. If you
have a box, that's a two by two square of blocks.
So if you look at any shape in your standard
Tetris game, you'll see that's made up of four of
these little blocks. In some configuration or another. The Soviet

(01:14:43):
Union was keeping a really firm grasp on what could
leave its country legally, and that included money, and included
physical goods, and it included software. So this game that
was made in eight four, it might have just stayed
in the Soviet Union. It may not have ever gotten

(01:15:04):
beyond that, except that paget Noov was able to show
it off at a software symposium in Hungary. And someone
else who attended that was a guy named Robert Stein,
who owned his own software company in the UK, and
he was able to secure an agreement with the Soviet

(01:15:25):
Union that he would be able to license Tetris to
distributors in the United Kingdom and in the United States,
but only for a computer version. Of Tetris. In other words,
it couldn't go to video game consoles, it couldn't go
to arcades, It could only be computer based versions. What
Stein started to do was talk up Tetris to other

(01:15:50):
entities and say, hey, I'm gonna work on getting these
other deals in place so that we can also make
arcade games or make versions for home video game consoles.
So go ahead and get to work on that. I'll
take care of the the bureaucratic nonsense. This really upset

(01:16:10):
government officials in the Soviet Union. They had not given
him any authority to do this, and so it had
a had a the opportunity to potentially shut all this down.
But then a second software developer was able to smooth
things out. His name was Hank Rogers, and he was
able to convince the Soviet Union to license this over

(01:16:32):
to Nintendo and they put it out for the Game
Boy uh and that once the Game Boy edition came out,
it really caught fire, and from that point forward it
was one of the most popular games. In fact, it
was the most popular game in video game history. Sad
side note Pageantanov didn't profit from this. He didn't get

(01:16:54):
to collect profits from these sales that was pretty much
going to the Soviet Union government. Paget Nov, even though
he built the thing, wasn't getting rewarded for it. Eventually,
hink Rogers would travel to Moscow and actually argue that
paget Nov should be reawarded the rights to the game
he himself had developed. But by then it was so

(01:17:17):
you're talking about more than a decade and a half
of sales where the so Union had been benefiting from this, uh,
this piece of software, and paget Nov had not. So
kind of an interesting story and maybe one day I'll
do a full episode on Tetris to really dive into

(01:17:37):
that and give you like a blow by blow of
how that played out, because it's interesting political story as
well as a technological one. But for now, it's time
to wrap this up and say goodbye. So here's a
question for some of you guys. Have you any of
you played any of the games that I've mentioned here,
Are any of them like really stand out games? You
would say that makes sense that that's on that best

(01:17:59):
selling list because as that game is amazing, or were
there any games that you feel should have been on
the best selling list? But for some reason, I have
been overlooked. Are there games that you wish got more
attention because you think that they were really, really good,
but they just never got that mainstream adoption that would

(01:18:22):
have put them as a best seller. Let me know.
Or if you have suggestions for future episodes of tech
Stuff or guests I should have on the show, anything
like that, send me an email. The address for the
show is text stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or you can drop me a line on Twitter or Facebook.
The handle for the show at both of those locations
is tech Stuff hs W. Remember I live stream tech

(01:18:46):
Stuff now, so if you ever want to watch me
record one of these shows live on camera like people
are doing at this very second that I'm recording this,
not when you're listening. That wouldn't make sense, go to
twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. My schedule is up
on the website. I live stream on Wednesdays and Fridays,

(01:19:07):
so check that out. I would love for you to
join us, and I will talk to you guys again
really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how staff works dot com.