Bestselling Games of All Time

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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

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

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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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, 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, 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, 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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

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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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

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. 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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,

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.

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. 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 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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. 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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 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, 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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, 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.

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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.