Family Computer/Nintendo Entertainment System won it, outselling Sega Mark III/Master System by 48.9 million units — 376% more hardware. Across all 4 machines the generation sold
83.9 million units. No Game of the Year award in this database was handed out before 1990, so this generation sits entirely outside the award record.
61.9MFamily Computer/Nintendo Entertainment System
83.9MGeneration total
4Machines
2GOTY awards — era predates our record
Why the award column is empty.
This generation ran to 1989, and the earliest Game of the Year award we can source anywhere is from 1990. The zero is the edge of the record, not a statement about these machines — the awards of that era were printed in magazines that were never transcribed. Why so little survives from before 2000 →
A game that
shipped on three machines of this generation is counted for all three, because the
question is how much award-winning software each box could play — not which console had
it exclusively.
Did the best-selling machine also have the best-reviewed games?
Yes. Family Computer/Nintendo Entertainment System both outsold this generation and carried the most award-winning games on it (1 awards) — the two races agreed.
Family Computer/Nintendo Entertainment System1
Sega Mark III/Master System1
A console's figure counts every awarded game that shipped on it, so
multi-platform releases raise several boxes at once and an exclusive raises only one.
That makes this a measure of what you could play, not of what you could play
only there — and it is why the numbers here are larger than any single
console's exclusive line-up.
All consoles, sales against awards.