Nintendo Switch becomes first console to hold all 30 best-selling Japanese retail games in one week since the Famicom in 1998

Over 30 years later and Nintendo is still pulling in numbers.
Image via [Nintendo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmTjdPoORQw&feature=emb_title)

Famitsu, one of the Japan’s oldest and largest video game publications, gathers and publishes data on game sales from across Japan every week, compiling it into various reports. And, over the last week between Aug. 2 and 8, an achievement last seen over 30 years ago was achieved by Nintendo. 

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The Nintendo Switch has dominated sales charts across the globe, with many of its games ranking in the top 30 every week since its launch in 2017. However, it is now the first console since the Famicom, better known in the West as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES,) in 1988 to hold all 30 of the best-selling games in a single week. 

This information came from the Game Data Library, a database that hosts one of the largest collections of Japanese game sales data, which acknowledged the accomplishment on Twitter. 

Led by a surge in sales for Minecraft, the Switch is now the first console to have held the top 30 games in terms of software sales over a week. Minecraft actually broke its own record too, becoming the best-selling game on the chart 163 weeks after launching on the platform. This broke a record held by Pokémon Red and Green, which did it in late 1997, 89 weeks after launch on the original Game Boy. 

This is the first time one console has held the top 30 since the Famicom on November 21, 1998. At that time, multiple other platforms, including PC and the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, started popping up on the top 30 rankings, and the competition only grew over the years as the industry evolved. 

The Game Data Library does note that it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence to see Nintendo hold the top 30 spots in weekly sales reports throughout the late 80s and early 90s, but that was across the NES, SNES, and Game Boy, not for a singular console. 

You can read the full sales report on Famitsu, but it is highly likely that the only reason something like this was possible in the current game’s market is the lack of larger new releases pushing sales at the moment.


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Cale Michael
Lead Staff Writer for Dota 2, the FGC, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and more who has been writing for Dot Esports since 2018. Graduated with a degree in Journalism from Oklahoma Christian University and also previously covered the NBA. You can usually find him writing, reading, or watching an FGC tournament.