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?
The British singles chart is a national institution, still capable of occasionally generating headline news, especially at Christmas. Part of this has to be 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, and that for a long time our national broadcaster did just that. 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. I still think there’s a great story in there and in the games that were at the top of it, and that looking at the week-to-week of that over the decades will tell us a lot about games and about the UK public’s evolving relationship with them. That’s why I have decided to play every game I can find which has been #1 in the UK’s games sales charts, from 1984 to the present day.
My brother Martin’s AAA started from that same idea of UK #1 games, discussed between us and inspired by Tom Ewing’s Popular. We decided it was impossible to get to such a list, and as a result AAA was about a month-by-month imagined canon that includes a lot of ‘this seems right’ and personal whims. A couple of things changed my mind about the impossibility of gaining a list of #1s. One was an exchange with Chart-Track, the UK’s games chart compiling body. They are not a very approachable organisation. Their website doesn’t even include a contact email. When I tried to get more from them, I tried phoning them and then contacting them via their parent organisation’s site and got nowhere. Eventually I found an actual person’s email address and asked if they had an archive that goes back past the one that on their site ends at 2003. Maybe to 1996 when Chart-Track began? They replied within half an hour to confirm that they had one back to the ‘80s, and to ask what I wanted it for. Once I explained, I got no further replies. Presumably it’s valuable commercial information and not something they’re interested in giving out. That confirmation and frustration spurred me on to research a lot more.
There have been continuous UK games charts since some point in 1984. They were initially compiled by Gallup, also responsible for the music charts at the time. Chart-Track’s 1996 beginnings turn out to have been a management buy-out, so it was effectively the same people carrying on. This is a much more consistent and straightforward history than the music charts, in fact, although similarly the games chart compilers have overseen changes in methodology and the precise nature of the charts they publish.
Gallup compiled sales charts with the industry in mind, but other people have still been interested, right from the beginning. Games magazines published them for a reason. The second thing to change my mind was stumbling upon the Amiga chart database. Many, many thanks to Dreamkatcher for their painstaking work, and in particular for the fact that their scans of Computer + Video Games include not just the Amiga charts they were interested in but the all formats chart I wanted. With that lead, I found the amazing resources of the Internet Archive and their collections of magazine scans, and began to piece things together, and to see how much people did care about the charts over time.
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 that’s why I think it will be cool to look at what was at the top of them.
I have not got a complete picture. Some magazines dropped and picked up charts seemingly at random. Having to rely on monthly magazines’ publication of weekly charts means regular 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. One such game is prevented from falling through the gaps by Your Sinclair noting that very fact. For some years, I am going to have to go with games which were top of the individual format chart for the dominant format at the time and hope they were top overall too. I’ll make same notes about different eras and my methods as we get to them. All the games I’ll play were definitely a number one, but possibly not the number one.
The earliest chart I have got to is the chart for Spectrum games from somewhere around June 1984, published in Your Sinclair’s first issue in January 1986 via a sidebar on the charts from 12 and 18 months ago. Tantalisingly, given the timeline, that might or might not be from the first ever Gallup charts. Either way, it’s not the beginning for games, any more than the first UK #1 single, Al Martino’s “Here in My Heart”, was any kind of beginning for pop music. It’s fitting, then, that the first games #1 is already a sequel. The start is an arbitrary point to begin looking at lists drawn up over arbitrary periods of time, which collectively tell some great stories.
Super Chart Island is a British history of popular video games, told one sales chart #1 at a time.