Bar chart data visualization of the best selling video game consoles of all time 1972 - 2022.
Ralph H. Baer, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch licensed their television gaming technology to contemporary major TV manufacturer Magnavox. Magnavox Odyssey was released in 1972, it was the first commercially available video game console.
Atari was among the first game consoles manufacturers. The company's products, such as Pong and the Atari 2600, helped define the electronic entertainment industry from the 1970s to the mid-1980s.
Game and Watch is a series of handheld electronic games developed, manufactured, released, and marketed by Nintendo from 1980 to 1991. Game and Watch series became the most popular handheld consoles before the release of Nintendo’s Game Boy in 1989 and continues to dominate the handheld console market.
The Japanese Sega had several succesful consoles in the late 80’s, such as Genesis and Sega Master Systems. The company took a downturn in the early 2000’s when its Dreamcast console flopped.
Nintendo was dominating the game console market in the 80’s with their multiple consoles such as Game and Watch, Gameboy, NES and SNES, until the release of Sony’s Playstation in 1994. The original PlayStation console was the first console of any type to ship over 100 million units, doing so in under a decade.
PlayStations successor, the PlayStation 2, was released in 2000. The PlayStation 2 is the best-selling home console to date, having reached over 120 million units sold by the end of 2007. Microsoft saw the PS2 as a threat to the PC and began to envision a competing console based on Windows OS. The result was Xbox, released in 2001. The series has grown to 4 generation of consoles.
Nintendo Switch released in 2017, is the first hybrid console that can either be docked for use as a home console or used as a portable device.
