Above is a visualization of global video game sales over time since 1982. Because not all of the years were included in the dataset after processing, you can mouse-over any part of the line to see which years were included, as well as the amount of sales from that year. There seems to be a clear rise and fall in global sales between the early 2000s and now, peaking at 2008 (almost 500 million global sales!).
Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft --- the three biggest companies in console gaming have kind of been battling it out since the start of the
millennium. You may choose to view specific console video game sales by clicking the colored box next to each console.
Each console's path may be a good indicator of how popular (or unpopular) it was since its release.
Something that I found very interesting was that Nintendo's Gamecube faired very poorly in comparison to Sony's Playstation 2 and Microsoft's
XBOX. However, Nintendo was able to come up from the very bottom and with their release of the Wii --- outselling both Sony and Microsoft in 2009.