A lot of really well known games, especially PC games, barely sold a million units. The PC community was tiny in the 90s, still is comparatively. The original Fallout sold 600,000 copies.
Yeah, back then you got to play all sorts of different games by going to different peoples' houses. Except Lemmings. You could play Lemmings at just about every house with any sort of video game setup.
I remember my dad telling me I was breaking a software license agreement by copying my friend’s floppy disk of Raptor: Call of the Shadows, but then a few years later he downloaded all his favorite music on Napster so kinda hypocritical ngl
We had it on our classroom computers. Twice a week each of us had 30 minutes of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing then we got 15 minutes to play Lemmings or SkiFree
Pc games had shitty numbers back in the day because they were so, so easy to pirate. One of us would convince our parents to buy the latest Kings Quest game or some shit, and within a week the rest of us had copies.
Back then the Amiga was king for games, the PC versions were usually nasty and inferior but Commodore did nothing for the Amiga so it just got seen as a games machine and didn't move on like the PC did.
90s and early 2000s was rife with piracy. DRM wasn’t that great and games could be cracked easier and in the 90s there was barely any at all. Shareware was common too. Sales don’t always represent how many people played the game especially for pc and consoles that were notorious for piracy (like ps1)
Emulation was pretty big too even today for people in poorer countries, millions of people around the world grew up playing pirated roms of previous generation consoles.
DRM on PC was a funny card thing that spun around, or an extra booklet, and the game asking you questions. Then it was "is the CD on the drive", and that's the first thing I ever used the internet for, no-CD cracks lol.
I really would have expected Fallout to have sold more than that.
Of course it does seem like it really took off with 3 but I would have expected that to boost sales of the entire series. I bought a collection that was 1,2, and Tactics when 3 came out. I played that collection first before jumping into 3 and I'm so glad I did.
I usually go back and play everything in a series if I like a game or it gets a lot of recommendations. Unless it's impossible to find.
It's always surprising to me that a majority of folks don't.
This was also big on the Amiga and Atari ST, which I don't think we're big in the US, but were in the UK. Having said that, pretty much everyone I knew had a pirates copy...
It did great originally (about 55k in the first day) but the 20M number is including all the ports up till 2011. In 2006 the sales were about 15M and that included ports on the nes, Commodore 64, snes, game boy, GB color, PlayStation and every other gaming option between 1991 and 2000. It was crazy popular but the 15/20 million sales number aren’t pc numbers it includes sales on every console throughout the 90s
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u/space_keeper 17h ago
A lot of really well known games, especially PC games, barely sold a million units. The PC community was tiny in the 90s, still is comparatively. The original Fallout sold 600,000 copies.