This is something that always fascinated me - I was born on Christmas Day 1992, and I've always been interested in the video game market around that time - what was selling? What would your typical Electronics Boutique / Toys R' Us / Lechmere / Wal-Mart game section look like? What were the market shares for each system and games? What would YOU have stocked if you were in charge of Toys R' Us' video game section then?

From what I've been able to gather, Sega Genesis led that holiday season, and Sega as a whole was the leading company in the console race. By this time, the Genesis had at least a couple hundred games out and Sonic 2 was the must-have game that holiday season. Nintendo was fractured between the NES and SNES, the SNES was building up momentum but the game library wasn't huge yet and the NES was still getting a supply of new games with many SNES games getting a downgraded NES port. Sega didn't have this problem with the Master System being all but dead, though I'm sure used systems and games were still easy to find in stores. The TurboGrafx-16 was beginning to die as its technical specs were underpowered and its game library lackluster next to the Genesis and (increasingly) the SNES. The Neo Geo was there if you had a lot of money, but I don't think a whole lot of stores carried it.

For portables, Nintendo with the Game Boy dominated. The Game Gear was there if you wanted better graphics and sound and color. The Atari Lynx was dying.

I've actually heard that video game stores had the largest supply of NES games then, they probably weren't selling many NES systems but probably still a good number of games.

If I were stocking a video game store for that Christmas, first off I'd have a "mainstream" section and a "retro" section, though this being 1992 the retro section would be much smaller than the mainstream section and would be all pre-Crash stuff. As for the "mainstream" section, let's say I had 100 shelves of equal size to work with for console games, 25 for portable games, and space for systems and peripherals, etc as well. I'd probably give 35 shelves to Genesis, 23 to SNES, 7 to TurboGrafx, 30 for NES, and 5 for "other" (Neo Geo, CD-i, Sega CD, any leftover Master System, Atari 7800, Atari XEGS). Portable - 15 for Game Boy, 5 for Game Gear, 5 for everything else.