Order Games by Copies Sold — 100 of the Best-Selling Video Games
Each card in this quiz names a video game. The board starts with one card already on it. The quiz then gives you one card at a time, and you put each card in the row from the fewest copies sold to the most.
A correct placement shows the sales figure and keeps the card on the board. One wrong placement ends the run. You cannot move a card after you place it, so each choice is final.
Each run deals 20 games from a pool of 100, so no two runs are the same. The pool spans two orders of magnitude: Super Smash Bros. on the Nintendo 64 sold 5.5 million copies, and Minecraft has sold 400 million. The ends are easy. The middle is not: did Skyrim outsell Terraria? Did Hollow Knight outsell Halo 3?
How to play
The row is sorted by copies sold. The game with the fewest sales is at one end and the game with the most sales is at the other end.
One card starts on the board. Its sales figure is shown.
The quiz gives you one card at a time. Put it in the gap where you think it belongs.
A correct placement shows the sales figure of the game. The card stays on the board and the quiz gives you the next card.
A wrong placement ends the run. The quiz then shows you the correct gap.
You cannot move a card after you place it.
Each run deals 20 games at random from the pool of 100.
Your score is the number of cards on the board at the end. The maximum score is 20.
A perfect run places all 20 cards with no mistake.
What counts in this quiz
Each figure is the latest reported number of copies sold worldwide, for that game on all of its platforms.
Remasters and re-releases count with the original game. Remakes count as a separate game, so the 2019 Resident Evil 2 and the 1998 Resident Evil 2 are different products.
Figures are rounded to two significant figures, because studios report sales at milestones such as "over 20 million".
Two games can therefore share a figure. Both positions are then correct.
No two different figures in the pool are closer than about 3 percent, so the order between any two cards is never a coin flip.
What's not included — and why
Free-to-play games are not in the pool. Fortnite, Apex Legends, League of Legends and Roblox report players or downloads, which is a different measure. You cannot compare a download with a sale.
A game that sold copies first and became free later keeps its sales figure. PUBG: Battlegrounds and Rust are both in the pool for this reason.
Games that came in the box with a console, such as Wii Sports and Duck Hunt, count those bundles in their figure. The makers report the sales that way.
The quiz compares copies sold only. It does not compare revenue, players or reviews.
Good to know
Reliable sources disagree about first place. The 520 million figure for Tetris adds every paid version of the game, so some sources rank Minecraft first instead.
Terraria has now outsold Super Mario Bros. A team of three people made the first version.
Grand Theft Auto V has sold more than 20 copies for every person in Australia, and it is still on sale after more than ten years.