No gamer plays every title on the market and even game journalists overlook the old school. What about the general public? How many gamers missed out on the Legend of Zelda even though it’s been released on the NES, Game Boy Advance, Gamecube (via The Legend of Zelda: Collector’s Edition disc) and most recently, the Wii? GameFAQs had a couple of polls up where they asked if their readers played some of the first entries in long running franchises like Super Mario Brothers. The results are a little surprising…
Despite Zelda’s immense popularity and brand recognition nearly 25% of GameFAQs readers never tried out the first game. The original Sonic game for the Genesis is arguably more ubiquitous than Zelda 1 since only 12% of GameFAQs readers missed out on the title. Final Fantasy has an even larger gap, over 40% never played the first game despite Square-Enix’s multiple re-releases. Possible reasons for this are Europe missing out on the Final Fantasy franchise until Sony brought it over and its cult status until Final Fantasy VII made it mainstream. According to their survey, Super Mario Brothers has the highest play rate. Only 6.5% of gamers missed out of it and more than half of the gamers who missed playing the original want to try it out. In no way is this a scientifically accurate study, but since tens of thousands of GameFAQs readers responded the data has some relevance. What do you think of the results?
