What was #1 in the UK when you were born? Most people will take the question to mean music, specifically the singles chart. A quick search on the Official Charts website’s comprehensive database confirms that for me it was a Madonna song. That’s not the only chart, though. It’s easy enough to find out the answer for the albums chart. But what about other media? What was the #1 book? Film? Game?
In music, the British singles chart is a national institution, still capable of occasionally generating headline news, especially at Christmas. It helps that a list of 40 singles can be turned into an afternoon’s radio programming where you get to experience the contents in their entirety, or a shorter TV programme where you can experience a decent proportion of them. For a long time our national broadcaster did both. You can’t do the same with games. The charts do not translate as easily to something that can be experienced as its own entertainment.
It makes sense then that the computer games/video games chart has never had quite the same reach. It also doesn’t help that there’s no searchable database, no easily accessible records to make breaking them get noticed. Piecing together a list of chart-topping games is a mission in itself. Doing so can tell a story about what games people were actually buying and playing in the UK, rather than what has made it into the popular memory, and about the UK public’s evolving relationship with games. That’s why I’m playing and writing about every game to have been #1 in the UK’s games sales charts, from 1983 to the present day.
This project has had a few different starts. I have to credit my brother Martin’s AAA, which took on a similar idea, and Tom Ewing’s Popular which inspired us both. It also wouldn’t exist without the incredible Internet Archive and its collections of magazine scans. I originally started from 1984 and got as far as 2012, before deciding to go right back further still and take a more research-based approach. I have been able to fill in a lot more gaps thanks to the sterling work of Computer Hits (for the 8-bit era) and Retro Game Charts (from 1990 onwards).
People have been interested in the games charts, right from the beginning. Magazines published them for a reason. Companies trumpeted their #1 achievements in their adverts for follow-ups.
Reading coverage in various magazines over time makes clear that the charts they were their own minor institution . Sara Biggs and unnamed colleagues, writing the charts page in Your Sinclair as if they had been given the gig presenting Top of the Pops. Computer + Video Games’s tetchy exasperation at the rubbish people kept buying. ‘90s issues of Edge magazine comparing the UK, Japanese, and American charts, a fascinating display of just how far apart what we were playing was. The charts meant a lot to them and others, and I’m excited to use them as my map.
I have still not got a complete picture. Some magazines dropped and picked up charts seemingly at random. There are periods when I have to rely on monthly magazines’ publication of weekly charts, leaving gaps even where they include last week’s position. Maybe the same games were at #1 in between; maybe something else rose and fell unseen. All the games I’ll play were definitely a number one, but possibly not the number one. They each have their own story, and I’m looking forward to telling them.
Super Chart Island is a British history of popular video games, told one sales chart #1 at a time.