Does a list exist that has the # of VCS carts sold?

[Schizophretard]

I'm wondering if anyone has made a list of how many VCS carts of each title were sold ranking them from the number one seller down. The reason I'm wondering this is because if I knew the most carts that have existed for each title then I would know their original rarity. Even though the same amount wouldn't exist today it may give me a more accurate rarity guide than my subjective experience. I'm looking for a list that ranks as many of the games as possible with sources of where the numbers came from. Maybe even numbers for each year to get an idea of the original rarity of each label variation.

[jhd]

Companies are not going to publish this sort of data for competitive reasons. I've seen some statistics from the 1980s of relative market share for cartridges (e.g. Atari vs. all others), and data on the total production of cartridges by a firm, but nothing on a per-title basis.

 

My local Sunday newspaper routinely publishes a top-10 list of video game sales and rentals for the prevous week. Were such data available for the 1980s, it would provide a handle on the *least rare* games.

 

Titles that were discontinued relatively early (e.g. Slot Machine, Starship) would also have sold fewer titles, but that is impossible to quantifiy from the information available.

[+bcombee]

Well, it's actually quite possible to get this data, at least for Atari. The guys working on the new Atari history book, Curt Vendel and Martin Goldberg, have a dump of the ATARI Vax system that was used for interoffice communication and storing documents, so we actually are getting a better and better view into what was really happening then.

 

If you want to dig for info, check out http://www.textfiles.com/games/ATARIMAIL/ as a starting point. There's also a 111MB file out there called atari-engineering-information-system-item-master_list.pdf that has a master list of internal part numbers, although it doesn't seem to have production numbers.

[+bcombee]

Oh, also see this thread - http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/144750-2600-sales-86-90 - with some info Curt dug up for the later years.

[Schizophretard]

Oh, also see this thread - http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/144750-2600-sales-86-90 - with some info Curt dug up for the later years.

 

That's close to what I'm looking for. I like how Omegamatrix sorted the best sellers (revenue wise) largest to smallest. The list would be what I'm looking for if it was sorted the same way but unit wise but not per year. It would show the best seller based on total sells for all years and then rank the best selling years of that title. It seems like with sources like this it could be possible to form a rarity guide of the original rarity of each title and the original rarity of each label variation.