Looking for best selling game charts from the 1980s

[SWCasper]

I am an academic researcher (and gamer) working on a project on the origins of the US video game industry. I'n trying to locate data on the best selling games of the 8 bit era. I could swear I've seen scans of 1980s era magazine that had a monthly table of best selling games, but I can't figure out which magazine might have this info. Any ideas?

[Areala]

EGM in the 90s used to compile a table of the most popular games in Japan and the US, including rental information supplied by Blockbuster, but it doesn't sound like this is what you're looking for since it never showed actual numbers.

*huggles*
Areala

[bucephalus]

Would some of the information here be any good to you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games

Edited February 16, 2013 by bucephalus

[TheRedEye]

Billboard very briefly had a chart in the 80s along with their record charts, that's probably what you're thinking of?

I believe they were provided by the (now defunct) Software Publishers Association.

[KiwiArcader]

CVG used to print a monthly chart looking like this ....

Is that what you were looking for?

Kiwi

[SWCasper]

Thanks for the suggestions. The Wikipedia article is good, but I'm looking for a bit more data - something similar to Kiwi's chart from CVG. Ideally the top 50 or so games across all platforms yearly or twice-yearly fromn the late 1970s to about 1990 (the 8-bit era). I'll check out these suggestions.

I'm thinking about using Mobygames which has a composite ranking for all games - this is useful but some sort of sales based ranking would be better.

In any case, thanks again!

[mrgrissom]

i would try uk leisure software charts.

they may have a complete history somewhere i know for a fact they did the gaming charts back in the 80`s..

but cvg mag always had charts think it was top 20 games on each format ie spectrum,c64 amiga and atari st.they also had an allformats chart.hope that helps.

Edited May 2, 2013 by mrgrissom