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ZhugeEX on 25 July 2016
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Shadow1980 said:
Aquamarine said:

Well yeah, silly.

We have video game sales data going all the way back to the 1980's. That was back before the Internet even existed! Everything was archived on paper back then.

Not even The NPD Group has their full archives of numbers digitized. You can't even access old NPD numbers past a certain point on their online portal.

Well, it is 2016, so I figured everything would have made its way to the internet by now in some form or another. There's been sales discussions on GAF and elsewhere going back many years, after all. I had no idea most of the old data was still on paper and apparently scarce enough and buried in reams of offline content to where they just haven't made it to us yet. I guess that does explain why older data has proven so hard to come by in my years-long search for hardware numbers.

I'd make a note though that some of the old data is very unreliable and has been adjusted in later years.