Best selling video games (#1 may surprise)

[fragger]

Just been looking at some lists of the highest-selling video games of all time (all plats). There are a bunch of these lists on the net and they don't all agree with one another, but collectively they reveal fairly common trends (some lists are calculated on a per-unit sold basis, some on total sales figures, and some on user-ratings systems, so there are variations).

The Mario Bros. franchise consistently holds multiple spots in all the lists, often with three or four variant titles. Wii Sports and a few other Wii titles are always present. CoD Modern Warfare/Black Ops games almost always appear, usually near the lower end of the lists. GTA V generally comes in at or just above the middle of the lists, persistently slightly beaten by Minecraft.

No Far Cry games made any of the lists (this was no surprise).

Which game is number 1? Most lists seem to agree on a winner: the humble Tetris. The coloured block-dropper still remains the highest selling and most popular video game ever, no matter how the lists are computed.

So there you go. A game doesn't need high-end graphics and expansive play worlds to be successful. Is there some sort of lesson there? Maybe. What is it about Tetris that makes it so popular? I've never been super-crazy about it myself (although I did get hooked on a similar game, Bejeweled, for a while). Maybe for similar reasons that the five most popular board games ever are (in descending order): Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, Scrabble and Monopoly - generally speaking, easy to learn but difficult to master.

It's interesting.

[Binnatics]

Interesting indeed. And surprising. I wonder if the gameboy, the platform on which it became the standard free-included game for many years, is also the best sold console ever? ????

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yeah, there are games that come with certain consoles (Mario Bros and Duck Hunt for instance) that aren't actually sold as a separate game, but everyone who has that console has that game. I wonder how that figures in. Plus, I wasn't aware that Tetris was that big a deal, but considering it's so simple, and can be ported to almost any system, it's probably the reason it's essentially everywhere. I spent some time with the arcade version, both in an actual arcade on a stand up cabinet, and with the MAME version on PC.

[Art Blade]

A game doesn't need high-end graphics and expansive play worlds to be successful. Is there some sort of lesson there?

Yes, high-end graphics aren't as common as low-end graphics.  :-D

[OWGKID]

Regarding graphics and video games (quote from Ahoy's "A Brief History of Graphics part 5"): "However, the true value of visuals is not in their realism: a game's aesthetic does far more to establish its character than polygon count" ;)

[Art Blade]

 :-X :)