Ridge Racer 6 Crawls Into Charts

Few surprises in this week's ChartTrack weekly report, but it's certainly managed to generate some rose-tinted nostalgia in the SPOnG office. Games-wise, January is almost always a time for ruminating on how things were generally better when we were kids. Then in February and March, when decent games start appearing again, we realise we were wrong.

EA’s Need For Speed: Most Wanted secures its eighth week at number 1 in the All Formats Chart, King Kong leaps back up to the number 2 slot after some strong retail promotion from Ubisoft, and The Sims 2 drops back down to number 3. EA's Ridge Racer 6 for Xbox 360 is the main new release of the week, debuting at a rather disappointing number 25 in the chart. Activision have also had a good week, with two of their titles, Star Wars: Battlefront 2 and Call of Duty 2, jumping back up the chart into the top ten.

As Chart-Track also point out, 20 years ago, back in the ancient days of videogame history and in the early days of the UK games charts (which back then were under the Gallup banner, from which ChartTrack emerged from 10 years ago) the All Formats Top 40 of the time had Konami’s classic Yie Ar Kung Fu at number 1, published by Imagine and available on six different formats – Sinclair Spectrum, Commodore C64, Amstrad CPC, Acorn BBC Micro and Acorn Electron. It is at this point that most of SPOnG’s staff stop typing and start looking doe-eyed into the middle distance at the mention of these older machines.

However, whilst we all remember the above five formats with a degree of fondness, there is also a sixth format listed back then, which few of us could recall - the MSX. Errr, MSX anyone?

Chart-Track kindly remind us that the MSX format was a range of Japanese machines from the likes of Sony, Toshiba and Panasonic that used an extended version of MS Basic, never really took off in the UK. Indeed, there were only three games in the UK Top 40 Chart in week three of 1986 available on MSX. Pity the poor kid at school who thought he was buying into an MSX-shaped future.

In the same week back in 1986, there was only one new release in the top 20 – Bounder from Gremlin Graphics on the C64. Fast forward 20 years to today and the situation is very much echoed, with EA’s Ridge Racer 6 for Xbox 360 being the only new release of any note. Ridge Racer 6 has also provided a shot in the arm for 360 software sales, after an eight week period with no games since launch, with Xbox 360 software up 40% in units (34,088) and 36% in value (£1.5m).

Sales of Xbox 360 software have in fact overtaken those of its younger brother (older uncle?) with 360 software becoming the fourth largest selling format in terms of value, behind PS2, PC and PSP.

Perhaps SPOnG should invent a calendar based around either Pong or Space Invaders as Year Zero – therefore all years since the beginning of videogame history would be demarcated AP, or ASI. Please post your suggestions in the forums below.