Last year around this time, The NPD Group’s Mat Piscatella shared some historical sales charts of the “Best-Selling Games in the US” from a wide variety of modern and classic platforms (including the Saturn, PlayStation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, and more).
Perhaps this means it’ll become a regular thing, as Piscatella popped up earlier today with another batch of charts, this time slicing the data from a few “obscure” corners of the industry.
Anyone have an obscure sales ranking chart they'd like to see?
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) November 25, 2019
[Tweet Removed – View at Internet Archive]
Taking requests from his Twitter followers, Piscatella’s research pointed him towards Nokia’s ill-fated N-Gage handheld, as well as popular third-party games on Nintendo platforms, and RPGs on the PlayStation. Finally, one person wanted to see the sales chart from the (sort of) uneventful February 1996.
All four charts offered plenty of surprises, which you can see for yourself in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History…
If you can believe it, Blizzard is just as well known for franchises like Diablo and Warcraft as it is for the monstrous statues that tower over the desks at its Irvine campus. It’s even become something of a tradition for newly-hired employees to pose in front of The Orc Statue on their first day.
The road to a finished product is long, and inspiration can often come from the weirdest places. But if you follow that muse, you’ll often come up with something amazing. And even if you run out of gas, you’ll always have people wondering what could have been.
Before GameTrailers made its debut in 2002, it was fairly difficult for publishers to make trailers for upcoming games available over the Internet. Large file sizes and slow download speeds made the entire thing rather impractical (not that we didn’t try).
The development process to create a video game can vary wildly from game to game. Sometimes, a character that’s first envisioned on paper can make their way into a game virtually unchanged. But more often than not, games will go through drastic revisions before they’re made available to consumers.