The Metal Gear franchise has done remarkably well for itself since its introduction 25 years ago. Including every single Metal Gear release, from the original Metal Gear on the MSX2 through Metal Gear Solid HD Collection for the 360 and PS3, Hideo Kojima's groundbreaking masterclass in theatrics and stealth has amassed 31.1 million units sold, as of December 31, 2011.

To put that in perspective via a completely arbitrary and meaningless number crunch, that's 3.8 Metal Gear games sold for every person living in New York City. Put another way, if you took every Metal Gear game ever sold and laid them all end to end, the resulting line of cartridges, discs and boxes would stretch all the way from San Francisco to somewhere else.

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/03/17/metal-gear-series-sells-31-1-mill-over-lifetime/

____________________________________________________________________________

Our numbers are ~32m: http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=metal+gear

However considering we have zero numbers for the PC and older versions, I'd say we have the newer games a bit overtracked.

Almost as many as Mario Kart Wii

(sorry, had to)

One of the best franchises in the video game industry !

"as of December 31, 2011."

Since then 3DS Snake Eater released, Metal Gear Collection HD collection in Europe plus the accumulation of other games, that should make up at least 500k of the difference.

The old games are pretty solid since we have shipped numbers and know all are sold at this point, I figure each of the PSP games are overtracked by 100k - 200k, along with MGS4.

Holy crap. 

Like... I stopped paying attention to sales due to well, most discussion around it being annoying and grating in nature do to people putting company allegience ahead of logic.  

So I hadn't realized it'd reached such numbers.

That's nuts.

Metal Gear Solid

Well, a lot of recent sales have been through bundles (although Metal Gear, particularly MGSIV have also had bundling) but it had passed 25 million before it even started to be bundled, and I expect without the bundle it would be around 28 million by now.

Wii top games are a bit odd like that though, there are 7 games over 20 million sales, but only 2 between 10 and 20 million (SMGalaxy only just that)... the same games keep selling because they are brilliant, and now helped a lot by bundles, but also because there hasn't really been a suitable replacement for them.... the Wii release list has been very barren for 2 years now, with only an occasional gem, and nothing really huge.

you know I love Just Dance and still you are hurting my feelings!!

I wonder how much MGS Touch on iOS sold..

Wow talk about impressive! Obviously without considering the family friendly wii best sellers (wii sports, wii fit, etc...)

Great news, it's rare to have such a marriage of quality and mass market appeal. Genre-defining entertainment.