Home › Consoles › Generation 4
Console generation 4 · 1988–1990
Super Famicom/Super Nintendo Entertainment System won it, outselling Mega Drive/Genesis by 18.4 million units — 60% more hardware. Across all 3 machines the generation sold 82.8 million units, and games released on them collected 4 Game of the Year awards in our database.
| Console | Maker | Released | Units | GOTY awards on it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Super Famicom/Super Nintendo Entertainment System | Nintendo | 1990 | 49.10M | 4 |
| Mega Drive/Genesis | Sega | 1988 | 30.75M | 0 |
| Mega Drive (Brazilian variants) | Tectoy | 1990 | 3.00M | 0 |
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.
Yes. Super Famicom/Super Nintendo Entertainment System both outsold this generation and carried the most award-winning games on it (4 awards) — the two races agreed.
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.
| Game | Year | GOTY awards |
|---|---|---|
| Final Fantasy IV | 1991 | 1 |
| Street Fighter II | 1992 | 1 |
| Samurai Shodown | 1993 | 1 |
| Donkey Kong Country | 1994 | 1 |
Updated 2 October 2026 · Source: the Meta Awards database, where every award row cites where it was published.