From ‘Frogger’ to ‘Minecraft’: Leaping from one bestseller to the next

Over the past four to five decades, video gaming has gradually risen from a niche hobby to a multibillion-dollar industry. Asking a stranger if they’ve ever heard of “Mario” is about as silly as asking if they know of the film “Star Wars” or the song “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” by Journey.

Although the medium began to gain momentum in 1977 with the release of the Atari 2600, reliable statistics on sales weren’t widely available until 1989 via the NPD Group. Video games are often depicted as a vehicle to fulfill humanity’s violent fantasies, but the most ubiquitous of them throughout the years tell a different story.

From 1989-1991, the bestselling game was “Frogger.” Following on the heels of “Pac-Man” and “Space Invaders,” arcade-style gaming was still the undisputed champion – when you press start, you expect to play for 5-10 minutes and try to beat your previous score before starting all over again.

But with the release of 16-bit consoles – notably the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System – games became more sophisticated, with popular platformers “Mario” and “Sonic” asking players to commit several hours to complete games. Not coincidentally, that’s when the pause button became an industry standard.

By 1992, “Super Mario Land” surpassed “Frogger” for the title of the bestselling game of all time. The year after that, “Tetris” stole its place. But the success of these two games arguably rides on the platform they released on – the Game Boy. Despite being underpowered and even mocked internally at Nintendo, the Game Boy proved to have unprecedented international appeal for its battery life, durability and cheap launch price of $90.

Between 1989 and 2003, the Game Boy sold more than 118 million units, and “Super Mario Land” and “Tetris” were commonly bundled with the device itself. Riding on its simplicity, the ease of porting “Tetris” to every game console and mobile device imaginable kept the game at the top all the way through 2012.

In 2013, “Minecraft” finally stole the crown of bestselling game of all time and has kept it since with 180 million games sold to date. A relatively simple sandbox game, “Minecraft” is nearly as accessible as “Tetris” but with incredible audience retention – the most recent estimate is 112 million gamers who play at least monthly. None of these figures even include “Minecraft China,” a localized free-to-play version with some 300 million players.

This free-to-play model has made significant strides in recent years, and it is gradually making the NPD Group’s sales figures less relevant. Publishers can make more revenue by offering games for free via digital download and instead charging for additional “downloadable content” and “microtransactions” such as cosmetic items for in-game characters and additional chapters for story-driven games.

It is the bread and butter of “Fortnite” and “League of Legends,” among many others. Game publishers can control the flow of their own sales information. Moving forward, it will be difficult to measure the success of individual video games as the medium makes its inevitable shift toward free-to-play payment models.