A look back at the top-selling games of the '90s

The NPD Group’s Mat Piscatella has used the firm’s sales data to put together a light report on the top-selling games for some notably older consoles. Shared in a thread on Twitter, Piscatella’s data tracks the top 10 best-selling video games for the game consoles that dominated the mid- to late 1990s like the Sega Saturn, Sony PlayStation, and Nintendo 64.

Piscatella notes that the data itself only goes back to 1995, but given the release dates of the consoles he’s listed, that caveat shouldn’t affect too much. All in all, the sales rankings are based on physical sales from January 1995 to September 2018. 

Crash Bandicoot reigns as the best selling games on the Sony PlayStation according to those numbers, though specific sales figures aren’t provided in the roundup. Gran Turismo Racing was the second most popular PlayStation game, followed by Final Fantasy VII, Gran Turismo 2, and Crash Bandicoot Warp. 

As tracked in the Twitter thread Sega Saturn’s best seller is Madden NFL 97, Pokemon Silver tops the Game Boy Color’s list, Super Mario 64 is the Nintendo 64’s top game, and NFL 2K  reigned supreme on the Sega Dreamcast.

While there’s no real overlap between the top sellers on different consoles, it’s interesting to note how many the listed franchises are still around today. To just name a few, Crash Bandicoot saw a remastered release last year, SoulCalibur had SoulCalibur VI release last month, and a new Pokemon game for the Switch is due out in just over a week.