1. Tetris. Launched 1984. 495 million copies sold.
How’s this for video game irony: the best selling video game of all time traces its roots to anti-capitalist, Soviet Russia, where game designer Alexey Pajitnov thought that a puzzle game involving the fitting of different shapes made of four square blocks against each other would be a fun thing to play. Tetris was initially made for the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC, two machines that you would least associate with gaming consoles. But from there, Tetris spread across different computers and consoles, notable on the Nintendo Game Boy, where the game started hitting widespread popularity. The game’s publisher, Henk Rogers, later on commented that Tetris and Game Boy made each other popular. Three decades after the game’s launch, Rogers would then say that the game sold 70 million physical copies and a staggering 425 million paid mobile phone downloads. That’s like saying one in every 14 people in the entire world owns a paid copy of the game.
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