most common games

[bobdrywalls]

what are the most common games ever made?

[jaybird]

Combat & Pac-Man for Atari.

Super Mario Brothers for NES.

Any Genesis EA Sports game.

[Starcade]

SMB/DH

[Sylentwulf]

I wonder, anyone know the REAL Answer to this?

I would have to say either Combat, E.T., or SMB/DH

I'm just interested in production run #'s :)

[Arqueologia_Digital]

I wonder, anyone know the REAL Answer to this?

No, because there are a lot of very common games like Sonic for Genesis, SMB/DH, etc. So, it´s a difficult answer

[CrazyImpmon]

I'm inclined to give the shameful award to ET for 2600. Any games that had to be destroyed and buried due to overproduction had to be the most common.

[Griking]

Can there really have been more ETs than Pacmans?

I thought that I'd read somewheres that there were more Pacman carts made than there were actual Atari consoles.

Atari couldn't have made this kind of blunder twice could they?

[Alex Kidd]

I'm inclined to give the shameful award to ET for 2600. Any games that had to be destroyed and buried due to overproduction had to be the most common.

I would use this fact to state it as NOT being common.

I mean, sure they MANUFACTURED a lot, but how many actually made it into circulation? They may have printed 10 million copys, but if they buried say 4 million in the landfill that means only 6 mil made it to circulation.

I would say SMB/Duck Hunt or Combat

Damn near EVERYONE had an Atari 2600 and/or an NES and guaranteed 70-80% of poeple with these systems had these carts!

Alex Kidd

[Arcade Antics]

I'm inclined to give the shameful award to ET for 2600. Any games that had to be destroyed and buried due to overproduction had to be the most common.

I would use this fact to state it as NOT being common.

I mean, sure they MANUFACTURED a lot, but how many actually made it into circulation? They may have printed 10 million copys, but if they buried say 4 million in the landfill that means only 6 mil made it to circulation.

I would say SMB/Duck Hunt or Combat

Damn near EVERYONE had an Atari 2600 and/or an NES and guaranteed 70-80% of poeple with these systems had these carts!

Alex Kidd

DP's own Scott Stilphen interviewed Howard Scott Warshaw back in 1997. Let's listen in...

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"DP: Why was it that, although E.T. was a best-seller, many considered it a failure?

HSW: It sold around a million and a half copies, but Atari had over-produced the game, making something like 4 million, and then ended up dumping all these carts. It’s still the 8th all-time best-selling Atari cart. It probably wouldn’t have sold as many if it weren’t E.T., but then again I would have had more time. All 3 of my games are in the top 20, and they’ve all sold over a million."

(You can read the complete interview right here at DP in the archives!)

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So there you have it. Possibly 4 million produced, 1.5 million sold.

Grand Theft Auto III SOLD 4.5 million copies as of last November. GTAIII is still in stores, so conservatively guesstimating that there are another half million copies on store shelves right now... And you've already got at least one game that's a million copies more common than E.T., even if none of the E.T. carts were destroyed.

:D

[Raedon]

Check out the classic Disccussions.. http://www.digitpress.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7431&highlight=common+games

SMB/DH won

[Atari7800]

I'm thinking that some of the PSone's budget games may be into super-common territory. How many Tekken 2's have you seen out there? Some of those Final Fantasy's have got to be really damn common by now, too.

How about all those Madden carts for the Genesis... even counting year-by-year, there have got to be a crapload floating around out there, although I'm sure people are much less likely to hang onto a Madden than say a Herzog Zwei or even a Sonic.

Is this my hundreth post? :P

[RetroYoungen]

The most common game ever? I thought that Super Mario Bros. 3 would have made it on there; I think I read somewhere that there were like 15 million sold when it was new. I could be wrong, but it's either that or SBM/DH I think.

[123forever]

Is there any place on the 'net that has concrete sales figure information? For one platform or many. It's easy to find out how much a movie grossed or how many copies any particular album sold, but I have no idea where I could look to find out how many copies of, let's say, Intelligent Qube were distributed.

[zmeston]

Is there any place on the 'net that has concrete sales figure information? For one platform or many. It's easy to find out how much a movie grossed or how many copies any particular album sold, but I have no idea where I could look to find out how many copies of, let's say, Intelligent Qube were distributed.

Videogame publishers are VERY secretive about production runs and sales figures -- unless they're talking about a hugely popular game, in which case they issue press releases with pre-order and sell-in and sell-through figures.

NPD/TRSTS (http://www.npdfunworld.com/funServlet?nextpage=index.html) has a sales-tracking service, although it's not without flaws (NPD doesn't receive sales figures from every retailer, and thus use estimations/extrapolations), and it's a multi-thousand-dollar yearly subscription.

Access to the NPD stats is perhaps the only thing I miss about working at a videogame publisher. Heh.

-- Z.

[Anonymous]

The thing is, about 40 million NESes were sold ever, but the popularity of video games has risen so high that there are probably a dozen or so PSX games that have sold through or been produced that outnumber the SMB/DH carts. Atari is right out. The most common game in my opinion is either a PSX game (probably Gran Turismo or some such), or SMB/DH, as the archives say.

[zmeston]

The thing is, about 40 million NESes were sold ever, but the popularity of video games has risen so high that there are probably a dozen or so PSX games that have sold through or been produced that outnumber the SMB/DH carts. Atari is right out. The most common game in my opinion is either a PSX game (probably Gran Turismo or some such), or SMB/DH, as the archives say.

The best-selling PS1 game, last time I checked (which was admittedly a while ago), is Frogger, but my totally unsubstantiated hunch is SMB/DH.

-- Z.

[Sothy]

As far as what is in every godamned pile of games being sold

SMB duckhunt in its many forms NES
GOLF NES
Conkers bad fur day..everywhere lately N64
Gaiares..always loose I could have 500 of them by now Genesis
Madden and EA games Genesis
Combat E.T. Pac-Man atari 2600
Sealed DOOM SNES..every guy with a spot at swap meet has 20 of them
Zelda 4 for PSX me and Lexicon found so many of those