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Sonic Conquers UK's Favorite Games Poll

Posted by simoniker on from the knuckles-best-supporting-actor dept.

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.

6 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Quite interesting... by TitusC3v5 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That both GTA3's made the list, coming in at 10th and 15th, no less. One thing I did notice, is that the majority of the list is fairly recent. I'm quite disappointed that neither Thief or the original System Shock made the list, however...

    --
    And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
  2. No Surprise by megalomaniacs4u · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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).

  3. Re:hmm... by Ianoo · · Score: 3, Informative

    The games don't take 90 minutes to play, more like 10 minutes. Basically it's all a matter of strategy, you're the manager, not one of the players. You decide what players to put in different positions (attacker, midfielder, defender, goalkeeper), what substitutions to make, what style of play you want, and when not playing, you buy and sell players, train them, manage club finances etc.

    It's quite addictive, even for someone like me who isn't a massive football (soccer) fan.

  4. Championship Manager quite low? by TwistedSquare · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Championship Manager 3 and 4 and possibly other versions as well set new records in the UK for being the fastest selling PC games on their release (Diablo 2 set the record at one point but has now been toppled).

    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

  5. Sonic NOT "UK's Favourite" by FortissimoWily · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Keep in mind that this poll was conducted in association with ComputerAndVideoGames.com. The article describes ComputerAndVideoGames.com as "the UK's leading multi-format video games website", but it's really quite a biased magazine/site combo. I know plenty of people in the UK who prefer better games/characters than Sonic (such as Mario, Mega Man, Dizzy, Klonoa, and more), so the poll is only really representative of the readership of ComputerAndVideoGames.com...

    But then, what do I expect? It's an opinion poll just as meaningless as those 'Best Character' polls GameFAQs does every summer. ;P

    1. Re:Sonic NOT "UK's Favourite" by SuperMo0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.