The UK’s Official Charts Company — the fact they don’t need to have “music” in the name is indicative — publishes many different singles charts each week. There’s the streaming chart, the audio streaming chart, the video streaming chart, the sales chart, the download sales chart, and the physical sales chart. And then there’s the Top 100, which is the chart, the ultimate combination of all of the others.
There have been various points, as the music business has shifted from physical sales to downloads to streaming, where whether the chart is using the correct measure might be disputed. But the overall purpose remains clear: to see which is the most popular song that week. There may be the occasional complication with remixes, but there is no chart where those get separated out.
In the world of video games, GfK and Chart-track have tried to maintain a similar sense of the chart. While they publish a lot of different charts, including ones for different consoles and handhelds, they quote all of their stats based on one continuous chart of record: the one which combines different formats of the same game. Since 2019, they don’t even make available the chart which separates those formats out.
Back in the early ‘90s, though, that was the one which Computer & Video Games magazine published. In determining #1 games to cover for Super Chart Island I continue to use both. The charts for the week ending 24 July 2010 are a perfect illustration of the fundamental difficulty of the concept of one definitive games chart, and of why I find the whole thing fascinating.
It was a slow summer week, with previous #1 Crackdown 2 fading fast. On the combined formats chart, the one Chart-track refers back to for all its stats, Crackdown 2 fell from #1 to #10 and Toy Story 3 climbed in its second week from #5 to #1. The obvious explanation for this is that the film came out that Friday, hitting the top of its own box office chart with a gross of £21 million, a figure that no other movie in 2010 came close to.
Toy Story 3 the game was pretty well received critically for something based on an animated sequel, too. Reviewers at the likes of The AV Club and Eurogamer were particularly taken by its open world ‘toy box’ mode, the former calling it Grand Theft Auto: Toy Story. This was, perhaps, one more triumph for the genre which was expanding to an ever larger share of the medium.
Look at the individual formats chart for the same week, and a different picture emerges. For a start, it doesn’t have Toy Story 3 at the top, or even close. Climbing from #6 to replace Crackdown 2 at #1 was the Wii exclusive Dance on Broadway. Behind that there’s Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii), Just Dance (Wii), a new entry for Dragon Quest IX (DS), and Red Dead Redemption (360). You even have to go down past Crackdown 2 (360) to get to the first Toy Story 3.
No fewer than four different versions of Toy Story 3 appear on the chart. In ascending order there is the Wii version (#11), the 360 version (#10), the PS3 version (#9) and the DS version (#7). The fact that Toy Story 3 was #1 on the other chart is entirely due to having been released on so many different formats. Those positive reviews were of the PS3 version (Eurogamer) and the Xbox 360 one (AV Club), two versions which as was usually the case were largely, but not completely, the same as each other. Both were made by Avalanche Software, who will unhappily make an eventual Super Chart Island appearance in 2023. Avalanche also made the less identical Wii version. Thanks to my approach of playing whatever the highest selling version was in the chart-topping week, I didn’t play any of those, but instead the Nintendo DS version, made by n-Space.
n-Space’s versatility is evident in the fact that before 2010 was done they also developed a DS version of Call of Duty: Black Ops. The Nintendo DS, for all its wonders, was not a machine capable of replicating an HD console game. For the story mode of Toy Story 3, then, it got a series of levels which only pass as the same settings at a very brief glance, with added touch controls. Make Woody jump between train carriages, with running on rolling logs handled by drawing circles on the screen. Tap to fire Buzz Lightyear’s lasers as he flies through gates in the simplest of on-rails shooters. In between, there are scenes of action and of conversation between characters, which are barely more than slideshows.
In place of the toy box mode, there is something called ‘Playtime’. I tried this out early on, and was met by a tower defence game, where you set up marbles and darts to take out approaching toy soldiers. It’s a charming fit for the setting, and I played through to the end of the first stage of it. Then I went back to the story mode, and found that the next level I hadn’t played was the exact same tower defence game, complete with the unskippable tutorial. It was not engaging enough for my interest to survive a second go round.
Was Toy Story 3 on the DS, in any real sense, the same game as the other versions? Chart-track’s preferred chart says it was. The fact that all versions were likely often being bought for a chance to spend more time in the world of the movie, rather than for their merits on their own, could come into an argument, perhaps. There is also a thematic line to be drawn to a movie about different use cases for the same toys, about value coming from what each person brings to them.
Having vastly different versions of the same title was no new thing in 2010. The earliest days covered by the charts and my project were full of the same thing. I played the ZX Spectrum version of Impossible Mission and found it both familiar and alienating compared to the Commodore 64 one of my youth. Again on the Spectrum, I found something bizarrely powerful in its seeping, spectral take on Ghosts‘n’Goblins. My childhood experience of the video game of The Lion King was of playing the PC version at half speed without realising.
More widely, having different experiences of the same thing for technological reasons isn’t limited to games. When I watched the film Arrival on a tiny Picturehouse screen where the speakers couldn’t quite cope with the depth of the bass, the resultant overload made for a different otherworldly experience. My fond feelings for Natasha Bedingfield’s “These Words” are inseparable from encountering it via its video on a chart show on Channel 5 on a TV which couldn’t pick up any other channels, one bright spot in each week. Beyond technology, every person’s experience of an artwork differs from the next person’s for a hundred tiny reasons. It’s nice to be able to look at such an irrefutable, definitive version of the same thing. In July 2010, lots of people played Toy Story 3, but they didn’t all play the same game.
Top of the charts for week ending 24 July 2010:
Top of the charts for week ending 7 August 2010:
Top of the charts for week ending 14 August 2010:
