Sonic Conquers UK's Favorite Games Poll
Thanks to GamerFeed for its report on UK videogame trade organization ELSPA's poll to find
"the 30 most popular games of the past 30 years." In somewhat of a surprise, Sonic The Hedgehog was voted most popular title of all time, and the top 5 were rounded out by Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Pac-Man, Tomb Raider and Space Invaders. Interesting votes further down the list included Elite at No.7, Championship Manager at No.23, and Shenmue at No.26.
Sega always sold better in the UK than Nintendo until the Saturn debacle.
As for Elite and Championship Manager. UK games players have never been console crazy until recently, during the 80s as Atari suicided the Home computer was doing very well in Europe.
From Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, through Atari ST and Commodore Amiga the consoles didn't really get a look in until Sega & Sonic broke through with the 16 bit Megadrive (aka Genesis).
Given that statistic and the tendency of these lists to produce mainly recent successes, I'm surprised that CM and is so low down the list! I guess it's because a lot of people who don't typically play computer games that much play CM, and don't get included in the poll..
Sonic is no surprise at the top, though Tomb Raider seems higher than I would have expected
ANY poll done on a website is biased. It's affected by the fact that the only people who respond are
1) People with internet access
2) People who know of the site
3) People who care about the poll
Which severely limits the sample space, and can severely skew the results.