When Was the Golden Age of Video Games?

6 min readSep 10, 2023

Mustafa Germec, PhD

One of DataCamp Projects that I completed.

The ten best-selling video games

Video games are big business: the global gaming market is projected to be worth more than $300 billion by 2027 according to Mordor Intelligence. With so much money at stake, the major game publishers are hugely incentivized to create the next big hit. But are games getting better, or has the golden age of video games already passed?

In this project, we’ll explore the top 400 best-selling video games created between 1977 and 2020. We’ll compare a dataset on game sales with critic and user reviews to determine whether video games have improved as the gaming market has grown.

Our database contains two tables. We’ve limited each table to 400 rows for this project, but you can find the complete dataset with over 13,000 games on Kaggle.

Let’s begin by looking at some of the top selling video games of all time!

%%sql
postgresql:///games
SELECT *
FROM game_sales
ORDER BY games_sold DESC
LIMIT 10;

Missing review scores

Wow, the best-selling video games were released between 1985 and 2017! That’s quite a range; we’ll have to use data from the reviews table to gain more insight on the best years for video games.

First, it’s important to explore the limitations of our database. One big shortcoming is that there is not any reviews data for some of the games on the game_sales table.

%%sql 
SELECT COUNT(game)
FROM game_sales
LEFT JOIN reviews
USING(game)
WHERE critic_score IS NULL
    AND user_score IS NULL
LIMIT 10;

Years that video game critics loved

It looks like a little less than ten percent of the games on the game_sales table don't have any reviews data. That's a small enough percentage that we can continue our exploration, but the missing reviews data is a good thing to keep in mind as we move on to evaluating results from more sophisticated queries.

There are lots of ways to measure the best years for video games! Let’s start with what the critics think.

%%sql
SELECT
    G.year,
    ROUND(AVG(R.critic_score), 2) AS avg_critic_score
FROM game_sales AS G
LEFT JOIN reviews AS R
USING(game)
GROUP BY G.year
ORDER BY avg_critic_score DESC
LIMIT 10;

Was 1982 really that great?

The range of great years according to critic reviews goes from 1982 until 2020: we are no closer to finding the golden age of video games!

Hang on, though. Some of those avg_critic_score values look like suspiciously round numbers for averages. The value for 1982 looks especially fishy. Maybe there weren't a lot of video games in our dataset that were released in certain years.

Let’s update our query and find out whether 1982 really was such a great year for video games.

%%sql 
SELECT
    G.year,
    ROUND(AVG(R.critic_score), 2) AS avg_critic_score,
    COUNT(G.game) AS num_games
FROM game_sales AS G
INNER JOIN reviews AS R
ON G.game = R.game
GROUP BY G.year
HAVING COUNT(G.game) > 4
ORDER BY avg_critic_score DESC
LIMIT 10;

Years that dropped off the critics’ favorites list

That looks better! The num_games column convinces us that our new list of the critics' top games reflects years that had quite a few well-reviewed games rather than just one or two hits. But which years dropped off the list due to having four or fewer reviewed games? Let's identify them so that someday we can track down more game reviews for those years and determine whether they might rightfully be considered as excellent years for video game releases!

It’s time to brush off your set theory skills. To get started, we’ve created tables with the results of our previous two queries:

%%sql 
SELECT
    year,
    avg_critic_score
FROM top_critic_years
EXCEPT
SELECT
    year,
    avg_critic_score
FROM top_critic_years_more_than_four_games
ORDER BY 2 DESC

Years video game players loved

Based on our work in the task above, it looks like the early 1990s might merit consideration as the golden age of video games based on critic_score alone, but we'd need to gather more games and reviews data to do further analysis.

Let’s move on to looking at the opinions of another important group of people: players! To begin, let’s create a query very similar to the one we used in Task Four, except this one will look at user_score averages by year rather than critic_score averages.

%%sql
SELECT
    G.year,
    ROUND(AVG(R.user_score), 2) AS avg_user_score,
    COUNT(G.game) AS num_games
FROM game_sales AS G
INNER JOIN reviews AS R
ON G.game = R.game
GROUP BY G.year
HAVING COUNT(G.game) > 4
ORDER BY avg_user_score DESC
LIMIT 10;

Years that both players and critics loved

Alright, we’ve got a list of the top ten years according to both critic reviews and user reviews. Are there any years that showed up on both tables? If so, those years would certainly be excellent ones!

Recall that we have access to the top_critic_years_more_than_four_games table, which stores the results of our top critic years query from Task 4:

We’ve also saved the results of our top user years query from the previous task into a table:

%%sql 
SELECT
    year
FROM top_critic_years_more_than_four_games
INTERSECT
SELECT
    year
FROM top_user_years_more_than_four_games

Sales in the best video game years

Looks like we’ve got three years that both users and critics agreed were in the top ten! There are many other ways of measuring what the best years for video games are, but let’s stick with these years for now. We know that critics and players liked these years, but what about video game makers? Were sales good? Let’s find out.

This time, we haven’t saved the results from the previous task in a table for you. Instead, we’ll use the query from the previous task as a subquery in this one! This is a great skill to have, as we don’t have always write permissions on the database we are querying.

%%sql
SELECT
    year, 
    SUM(games_sold) AS total_games_sold
FROM game_sales
WHERE year IN (
    SELECT
        year
    FROM top_critic_years_more_than_four_games
    INTERSECT
    SELECT
        year
    FROM top_user_years_more_than_four_games
)
GROUP BY year
ORDER BY total_games_sold DESC;

Conclusions

In conclusion, our exploration of video game data from 1977 to 2020 aimed to discover the golden age of video games. We started by examining the top-selling video games, recognizing the significant growth of the gaming industry. However, this led to the realization that some games lacked review data, highlighting a limitation in our database. Despite this limitation, we continued our analysis by evaluating the years that video game critics favored. While we found years with high average critic scores, we also considered the number of games released in those years to avoid misleading conclusions.

Furthermore, we compared the opinions of both critics and players to identify potential golden years. Interestingly, the early 1990s appeared promising based on critic scores, but further analysis would be necessary. Finally, we discovered that there were three years where both players and critics agreed on their top choices. To complete our investigation, we examined sales data for these years to determine if they were also successful in the market.

Overall, our analysis sheds light on the complex question of when the golden age of video games occurred, showing that it requires a multidimensional perspective, including critic and player opinions as well as sales figures, to reach a comprehensive conclusion.