Bestselling Console In The United States By Year Since 1986

[Shadow1980]

That looks pretty accurate to me, at least from Gen 5 onward.

However, what data we have prior to Gen 5 is generally considered not as accurate as what we have in later generations, as there are some discrepancies. This matters in a generation as close as Gen 4. I was able to procure some numbers second-hand about a decade ago that indicated that the Genesis won in 1991 while the SNES won in 1992, not the other way around, though those same numbers did indeed show the Genesis winning in 1993 & 1994 and the SNES winning in 1995. Shipment data is too close to tell given how regions are defined differently. The NPD Group estimated that the SNES did eventually edge out the Genesis in the U.S., with a final count of 20M vs 18.5M, but the SNES only accomplished that later in the generation, after the PS1 had released.

Regardless of who won specific years, it was indeed a very close back-and-forth between the SNES and the Genesis. The "16-bit Wars" was the closest console generation in the history of the U.S. market. The next closest race was between the PS4 & XBO, but the PS4 beat the XBO every year, even if the differences weren't very big in some years (the PS4 only sold 330k & 370k more than the XBO in 2013 & 2015).