What were the top 100 best selling Amiga games on release?

[vbgd]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Rainbow Arts and Thalion were both not as big as you would imagine.

Their distribution was terrible outside Germany.

Turrican series despite its popularity didnt sell well at all because of it.

Had Psygnosis or Ocean been publishers, I think the Turrican series would have been significantly bigger sellers.

Yes, I know Holger Flöttmann, the former CEO of Thalion/Ascon/Ascaron personally. I met him a few times in Gütersloh (Germany) on press events and when I visited them for reports on Patrizier, Patrizier 2, Anstoss 1-3, Anstoss action, Sacred and so forth.

Here`s a good story about about the life and the dead of Ascaron in German:
https://www.gamestar.de/artikel/die-...e,1958674.html

Holger Flöttmann is a guy who gives his last tshirt for a new feature in a challenging game. They developed many good games. Be they are always demanding too much half baked features in their games, many bugs at the end and huge management problems. They are gamers, not business mans. And in Germany its very hard to get money from the banks for an unfinished product.

So sad!

And I think Turrican has a superb gameplay with brilliant technics. Ocean or Psygnosis would have five times more sales outside of Germany.

[nobody]

Andreas Axelsson (Digital illusions) gave an interview to a Greek magazine, June 1993, stating Pinball Dreams already sold more than 40.000 and still selling at small amounts. Probably around 50.000 total.

[funK]

The Settlers surely belongs in there as it seemingly sold 60.000 units on day one only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Source: BlueByte's Thomas Hertzler in a recent Retro Gamer interview, could take a picture of the actual quote in the article if needed.

[Juz400]

Wow, I didnt know WHSmith`s first shop opened in 1792!

It would be interesting to look at thier books from 1986-1996 to see what they Purchased month to month to sell in thier stores.
That would be a fairly good indicator, thier stores were/are pretty widespread in the UK.
I remember spending quite a bit of time in there reading the magazines before buying. Had a mate who would Fart and clear the magazine isle in 30 seconds flat

[dreamkatcha]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll get to work on tracking those down and adding them to the list.

It's now in Google Sheets format by the way, to make it easier to update and whatnot.

I got rid of the platform column because very often the people making the sales figure claims don't refer to which system they're talking about so you have to assume, or just fill in the box with all the systems the game was available for. Anyway, I've now quoted the relevant information from the links, which will include the system info if given. I also got rid of the two joke entries. I agree, a bit pointless.

I added a few dozen more entries, mostly from The Games Machine magazine, not necessarily related to Amiga games. Just because they're interesting. I'll keep adding more as I find them. This time I used Adobe Acrobat's 'advanced find' feature which allows you to search for keywords inside a whole folder worth of PDFs, saving oodles of time. Obviously it only works if the mags have previously been OCRed. That said, I'd imagine Adobe has a solution to that too. They're the biggest player in the biz after all.

[sokolovic]

In this issue of the One p23, an US Gold producer speak about 250 000 copies sold of SF2. He doesn't say if this for all the version produced by US Gold or just the Amiga one thought.
http://amr.abime.net/issue_362

[oscar_ates]

Richard Castello gave these sales figures on his eab thread:

MK2 120.000 sold
Primal Rage 9000

Apparently not much people had 2mb ram on those days

[ImmortalA1000]

The thing to remember is it took something like 4 years to sell 1 million Amiga units worldwide, so big figures probably are not going to be for earlier games.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Richard Castello gave these sales figures on his eab thread:

MK2 120.000 sold
Primal Rage 9000

Apparently not much people had 2mb ram on those days

Or not enough pocket money and MK2 / Super Street Fighter 2 was the safer bet

[fisken uno]

While this might be borderline off topic...

Being a huge Sierra fan, I always wondered how much of their sales came from the Amiga ports... Obviously, they boast quite amazing numbers for several of their biggest hits but I would assume they accumulate game sales across platforms.

I just read Ken Williams' biography recently and was terribly disappointed... Not ONCE did he mention the Amiga. It just seems kind of surreal to me. In their heyday, the Amiga was THE home computer - or so I thought. Pretty much all of my friends had Amigas. The PC's and Macs in those days were lagging behind massively as for multimedia technology. We all remember the blips and blops of the PC internal speaker. And CGA, or even EGA graphics, weren't particularly impressive compared to the Amiga's possibilities (yes, we have to admit the Atari ST was a competitor worth mentioning as well).

And yet... It seems the Amiga wasn't that big in the U.S., is that correct? I just think it's strange. All of my old Amiga pals played the Sierra ports and loved them. It IS true that Sierra did not fully take advantage of the hardware possibilities of the Amiga - and I've learned that many Sierra fans actually don't like the Amiga ports. Dunno why, I think the SCI games for the Amiga were latest developed versions and they did support PCM sampled sounds as well as the Roland MT-32 module. I still prefer the Amiga versions of the SCI0(1) games.

As for the SCI1 games... I definitely think they did not do well on Amiga, only supporting 32 colours when the PC ports supported 256. I can't imagine why you would play them on the Amiga. Also, I seem to remember back then many people still ran games from floppy - and these games came on like 10 or 15 floppies. Ridiculous, if you did not have a hard drive you would end up with read/write errors on the disks from all the swapping.

And as for the old AGI games... Maybe the difference to the PC versions was not that big. I don't know... To me, I will NEVER forget the first time I booted Space Quest III from floppies on my A500. It was... something else. Of course, not the first Sierra game I played. I think that was Police Quest 1, which also blew my mind. As a matter of fact, the Sierra games were the first games I REALLY wanted to OWN and BUY, because I thought the packaging and manuals just oozed something magical. I collect all Sierra stuff I can find, to this very day.

[Amigajay]

Adventure games were pretty niche especially in the 1980’s. From looking at old mags that fact, along with the price of Sierra games being £35-£40 would put off a lot of people. I suspect they had much larger success on the PC in that states and thrived mainly on that, any other sales on other platforms was small fry in comparison.

And yes Sierra Amiga ports were pretty badly optimised and ran slow unless you had beefy hardware.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Adventure games were pretty niche especially in the 1980’s. From looking at old mags that fact, along with the price of Sierra games being £35-£40 would put off a lot of people. I suspect they had much larger success on the PC in that states and thrived mainly on that, any other sales on other platforms was small fry in comparison.

Not sure you define niche or if you are only talking about the Amiga, but adventure games were quite successful in the 80s. There are two interviews that picture the situation in the 80s quite nicely: Ken Williams Co-Founder of Sierra On-Line [ Show youtube player ] and Memories of Lucas Arts with David Fox [ Show youtube player ].

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Not sure you define niche or if you are only talking about the Amiga, but adventure games were quite successful in the 80s. There are two interviews that picture the situation in the 80s quite nicely: Ken Williams Co-Founder of Sierra On-Line [ Show youtube player ] and Memories of Lucas Arts with David Fox [ Show youtube player ].

I’m not saying they weren’t successful, they clearly were, as the number of sequels prove, and this increased up to the mid 1990s with the Lucasarts games, after which it died down again.

But imo they were still inside a niche market especially in the 1980s, but this clearly improved into the early 1990s (mostly in the US). But i just don’t expect to see them in any top 100 sales charts, as in general, action, racing and sport games always have, and always will sell more copies.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

But imo they were still inside a niche market especially in the 1980s, but this clearly improved into the early 1990s. But i just don’t expect to see them in any top 100 sales charts, as in general, action, racing and sport games always have, and always will sell more copies.

In early 1984 Sierra On-Line was estimated to be the 12th largest computer software company, with $12.5 million in sales.

Source: https://vglegacy.com/developers/sierra-on-line/

Overall in the video game market they might have been 'niche', but on home computers at that time they were quite huge. Sierra became one of the biggest game publishers in the US based (mainly) on their adventure games.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by fisken uno

And yet... It seems the Amiga wasn't that big in the U.S., is that correct?

That is correct.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

Source: https://vglegacy.com/developers/sierra-on-line/

Overall in the video game market they might have been 'niche', but on home computers at that time they were quite huge. Sierra became one of the biggest game publishers in the US based (mainly) on their adventure games.

I never said they weren’t successful, they clearly were in the US, but this thread is about best selling games on the Amiga.

I was just taken them out of the equation as, one, the Amiga was more business based in the States, and two, Sierra games were IBM PC based and marketed first and foremost, and to hazard a guess 75%+ of their sales would be stateside.

Btw Kings Quest V was their best selling game upto the mid 1990s, and that took 3 years just to sell 250,000 across all formats, even if 5% of sales was Amiga (12,500) puts it nowhere near the best selling Amiga games.

[TCD]

Amiga Joker had a 'sales chart' in their magazine and it might be specific to Germany, but quite often the top games weren't 'action' games. Here's an example from October 1990 that has Larry 3 as the 6th best selling game on Amiga in that month:



Surely not best-selling, but I'm not convinced that they (adventures) didn't sell quite okay on the Amiga Especially Lucasfilm games seem to have done quite well when looking at those charts.

[eXeler0]

I asked ChatGPT:
"List the amiga games you DO have reliable information about regarding sales numbers"

ChatGPT replied:

While sales data for individual Amiga games is not always readily available, there are a few games for which reliable sales figures have been reported. Here are a few examples:

Lemmings: One of the most popular games on the Amiga, Lemmings reportedly sold over 55,000 copies in its first two months of release on the platform. By the end of its lifespan, it is estimated that the game had sold over 15 million copies across all platforms.

Sensible Soccer: This football (soccer) game was another big hit on the Amiga and sold over 350,000 copies on the platform alone. The game was also released on several other platforms, including the PC and various consoles.

The Secret of Monkey Island: This classic point-and-click adventure game was also released on the Amiga and reportedly sold over 100,000 copies on the platform. The game was later remastered and re-released on various platforms, including modern consoles.

Shadow of the Beast: This action-platformer was a showcase for the Amiga's impressive graphics capabilities and reportedly sold over 150,000 copies on the platform. The game was also released on other platforms, although it was not as successful on those systems.

It is worth noting that these are just a few examples of games for which reliable sales data has been reported, and there were many other successful games on the Amiga that did not have their sales figures publicly disclosed.

[Megalomaniac]

Plenty of 'serious' games topped the monthly (UK at least) charts, especially in summer - Armour-Geddon, Eye of the Beholder, F-15 II and Thunderhawk all topped Amiga Power's monthly chart in 1991 alone, and F-19 and Powermonger topped Amiga Format's in successive months too. Pretty sure The Settlers topped the chart too, and remember A320 Airbus reaching number 2 as well, to everyone's surprise?

[TCD]

I remember that several friends were really into simulations and since those games weren't 'swapped' often they would buy them. Might be one of the reasons.