When you’re developing a video game, you have to be ready for inspiration to strike at any time.
For this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look back at how some of the most iconic moments from Journey, Mortal Kombat, and Super Mario 64 went from the drawing board to the screen…
Just days after a sealed and graded copy of The Legend of Zelda sold at auction for $870,000, a similarly-preserved copy of Super Mario 64 sold for nearly twice that amount… $1.56 million to be exact.
This is the first time a single game has sold for more than a million dollars, but surprisingly, there’s not much that’s particularly noteworthy about this copy of Mario’s first 3D adventure.
Today might not be Mario’s birthday, but Nintendo has been celebrating March 10th (“MAR10”) as Mario Day since 2016.
Fans have been receiving little surprises from the consolemaker ever since, and as a big fan of Nintendo’s mustachioed mascot myself, I wanted to see what Version 3.0 of the Video Game Canon had to say about Mario’s greatest adventures. Does one of the classic side-scrollers like Super Mario Bros. 3 or Super Mario World reign supreme? Or perhaps critics prefer a 3D adventure like Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Galaxy 2?
There’s only one way to find out…
Using data from The NPD Group’s vast archive, Mat Piscatella recently shared some historical data on the best-selling video games from the 1990s to today.
Tracking the weekend box office results has become something of a spectator sport for moviegoers of all stripes since the lists were introduced in the early 1980s. Arguing about the financial merits of Star Wars, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Titanic, and Avatar became just as important as discussing each film’s critical reception.
You won’t find this sort of organized ranking of moneymakers in the video game industry, but the closest analogue would have to be the monthly Best-Seller Lists published by The NPD Group. However, the proprietary nature of this report means that the picture will always be incomplete.
Using data from the analyst firm’s vast archive, Mat Piscatella recently tried to pull back the curtain a little bit by sharing the list of best-selling games on several legacy consoles (the Saturn, the original PlayStation, the Nintendo 64, the Game Boy Color, and the Dreamcast) and a nearly defunct handheld (the Vita). He also examined the best-selling games through September 2018 on two modern consoles (the PS4 and Xbox One) and published a list of the top-selling titles for each year from 1995 to 2017.
It’s a very interesting collection of information, and the lists provide our best window yet into what games were considered popular in the United States in the 1990s and into today.
Video gaming went through some massive changes throughout the 1990s, greater than any ten-year period before or since.
The decade began with the familiar beeps and bloops of the NES, as Nintendo launched Super Mario Bros. 3 shortly after the New Year in 1990. The first shots of the “Console War” between the Genesis and the Super NES were be fired soon after, but the late night release of id Software’s Doom (and the rise of the PC as a gaming platform) in 1993 would change everything.
Doom didn’t just cement the First Person Shooter as gaming’s dominant genre, it blew open the door to more “mature” themes that Mortal Kombat hinted at a year earlier. Different philosophies on the public’s hunger for this type of content would lead Sega and Nintendo in opposing directions, and the market would be further splintered by the arrival of the Sony PlayStation. Emerging from the ashes of the planned “Nintendo PlayStation” add-on for the Super NES, Sony’s console introduced cinematic games like Resident Evil, Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid, and Tomb Raider.
Nintendo would strike back with the Nintendo 64, and a decade that began with pixelated plumbers flinging fire at a giant turtle would end with GoldenEye 007, Perfect Dark, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, and a vastly changed landscape for games.
That said, it was still Super Mario 64 on top. Find out where all 337 games released between January 1, 1990 and December 31, 1999 placed in Version 2.0 of the Video Game Canon after the break.
