Those over thirty will fondly remember consoles like the Mega Drive, the NES, the Nintendo 64 or the Sega Master System . Video games with which we have spent hours and afternoons of childhood and adolescence and that are still part of the evolution of video games today. But what are the best-selling consoles in history? Which have been the most successful? How many units were sold? Below we see the ranking of the best-selling consoles in history, both desktop and portable.
Although we can use our common sense and memories to get an idea of which ones sold the most (everyone had a PlayStation 2, for example) we can rely on the units sold of each of them to know which one was more successful. We should keep in mind that the 9th generation consoles (the PlayStation 5 and the most recent Xbox Series X and Series S) are behind the top 20. At the moment.
Ranking of home consoles
Although the Nintendo Switch is a hybrid (we can take it everywhere without having a television or a plug) we will include it among the options that allow us to play in a classic way using the TV as a screen. In the top consoles with the most sales in history we see that Sony and Nintendo are the queens and we do not find a Microsoft console, the Xbox 360, until seventh place.
Playstation 2
Launched in the year 2000, the PlayStation 2 is the best-selling console in history with 155 million units since its launch 22 years ago. A console that you surely remember and that you had or that your neighbor, your cousin, your friend from school had. Sony first launched the PS2 on March 4, 2000 in Japan, but it arrived in Europe at the end of the year, in November. It has around 3,870 titles in total that we can play with its Dualshock controllers.
The PS2 was manufactured for 13 years and continued to be sold until it was decided to stop manufacturing on January 3, 2013, although new compatible games continued to come out. In addition, he had a second model, the Slim. The PS4 Slim was launched at the end of 2004 and was a revision of the console but with a slimmer design and much smaller than the original (32% smaller, specifically).
Playstation 4
Sony is also after the second best-selling home console in history. We must bear in mind that it is not the second best-selling console and that ahead of it are the Nintendo DS and the Game Boy, both portable and that we will explain in future sections. The PlayStation 4 arrived in 2013 and managed to sell 116.9 million units, today being one of the most common in any home and still on sale despite the launch of the PS5.
The PS4 was announced on February 20, 2013 and arrived in Europe in August of the same year. Eighth generation and with notable improvements over its predecessors, the PS4 has an AMD octa-core processor with x86-64 architecture and adds improvements beyond the device itself: PlayStation App with compatibility with mobile phones and tablets or PlayStation Vr to play with virtual reality. Also a “share” button from the games that allows you to show it on social networks or the PSN software to access services in the Sony cloud.
switch
Nintendo launched in 2017 a console totally different from all the previous ones and that has already achieved 103.54 million despite being much more recent than many of its rivals. The most recent of the 20 best-selling consoles in history and that is characterized by a hybrid format: we can play in a classic way by connecting it to the television and with controls but we can also take it to play in a portable way by connecting the joy-cons to the sides of the screen and playing anywhere.
With the Switch, Nintendo managed to overcome the poor sales of its predecessor, the Wii U, and managed to sell more than 2.74 million units in its first month on sale. Today there are thousands of games that we can access. Among them, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe (the best-selling for Nintendo Switch) or Animal Crossing: New Horizon in addition to the Pokémon saga or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Also, since October 2021 there is a new version: The Nintendo Switch OLED Model. A model that improves the screen, larger and with OLED technology.
PlayStation
Sony’s first console for its PlayStation range arrived in 1994 and became the most popular of the fifth generation. It worked with games in CD-ROM format and was available on the market until 2006. During this time, it is estimated that it managed to sell around 102.4 million worldwide.
Among the best-selling games we find Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy VII, Gran Turismo 2, Tekken 3 and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The first, released in 1997, went on to sell over 11 million copies worldwide.
Wii
Nintendo launched the Wii in 2006 betting on a totally different format from the others. Beating its main seventh-generation competitors (the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360), the Wii didn’t use a conventional controller that we used for different titles , but the wireless controller was capable of detecting movements in a three-dimensional way. The Wii won awards for its innovation and was a success at the sales level: a record as the best-selling console in a month in the United States and more than 101.63 million units in its history.
A control with a totally different format: a rectangle with only a crosshead and a button in the center, as well as buttons to synchronize and the home button. That is, we could use the controller as a golf club or as a racket. We moved to play games, as is the case today with the Nintendo Switch and that has allowed successes such as Just Dance, for example. In addition, sports accessories were released, such as the Wii Balance Board for yoga or aerobics or the Wii Zapper to use as a weapon in some games such as Resident Evil. A versatile and mythical option that is still in millions of houses around the world and that marked a milestone.
portable consoles
Beyond desktop consoles, portable consoles represented an advance that allowed us to play anywhere thanks to batteries. Small, they fit in a pocket and didn’t need a TV or plugged in. From mythical like the Game Boy of the late eighties to models still sold today like the Nintendo 3DS with touch screen and all kinds of titles.
nintendo ds
It is the second best-selling console in history and the first in the portable segment. It came as a successor to the Game Boy and the Gam Boy Advanced and arrived in Spain in 2004 with up to four models in total: the Nintendo DS, the Nintendo DS XL, the Nintendo DS Lite and the Nintendo DSI . They were released in different years and between them there was a difference in screen size, brightness levels, memory, having or not having a camera, storage, etc.
A portable console with a battery of up to 19 hours in total in its most durable model and that included a touch screen, microphone and camera in some of its models… In addition to the classic A/B/X/Y, L/R buttons, and START/SELECT.
Among the best-selling games for the Nintendo DS family are New Super Mario Bros, Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, Mario Kart DS and Nintendogs. All of them with more than 20 million copies sold and released between 2005 and 2009.
Game Boy and Game Boy Color
At the end of the eighties a fourth generation console arrived that would mark an era. The third best-selling in history (along with its color model) and the second best-selling among laptops. The Game Boy and Game Boy Color sold 118.69 million units worldwide since its launch in the late 1980s for the conventional model and in the late 1990s for the model that featured a color screen and some changes and improvements.
There were games released for the Game Boy Color exclusively , games released for the Game Boy Color but compatible with the Game Boy, or original Game Boy games that we could play on the console released ten years later but monochrome. Among them, some of the most popular were Donkey Kong, Pokémon Red and Blue, Super Mario Land, Kirby’s Pinball, Pokémon Yellow.
GameBoy Advance
Game Boy Advance or GBA is another of the best-selling consoles in history and part of the sixth generation of consoles. It was launched worldwide in June 2001 and managed to sell, as of 2010, around 81.51 million units. It opted for a different format than the previous one: The Game Boy was vertical and the Game Boy Advance came in a horizontal format with buttons on the sides and the screen in the center: buttons A and B on one side and the crosshead on the opposite side. A format that would later be imitated on the Nintendo DS or even on the Nintendo Switch itself.
Game Boy and Game Boy Color games were perfectly compatible so there was an extensive catalog with almost 2,000 titles available. Although the GBA also had its own titles that we were able to buy during these years.
Other models
Other models also sneak into the top of the best sellers in the portable ranking , such as the PSP or PlayStation Portable or the Nintendo 3DS . The first managed to sell around 80.52 million (ranked 11th in the total) and the second has managed to sell around 75.94 million (ranked 12th in the total) although it is a device that was launched in 2011 and even today it is still on sale in different models or colors and with all kinds of games and accessories.
For its part, the PlayStation Portable or PSP was launched in 2004 to become the rival of the Nintendo DS (second best-selling console in history) and was Sony’s first portable worldwide, with a memory card slot and a port for connecting a portable camera.
