Thanks to the excellent Game Data Library I’ve managed to pull together Japanese sales data for as many wrestling games as I could think of.

According to GDL, “for games released before 1996 shipment data is used when available, otherwise sales are estimated from the Famitsu points released at the time and may not be accurate“.

Notable absences include 1985’s Kinnikuman: Muscle Tag Match (Famicom) which is reported to have shifted over a million units.

It sounds like these figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt (GDL also mention that digital copies are excluded), but it’s still interesting to see the rankings.

Sales Rankings: Winners and Losers

With total sales exceeding 1.4m, Pro Wrestling (1986) on the Famicom stands head and shoulders above the rest. 

In reality, the figure will have been inflated due to the fact that the Famicom Disk System allowed users to write the game to a floppy disk for the budget price of only 500 yen.  Still, it’s a hugely impressive total.

Pro Wrestling creator Masato Masuda has a chokehold on the top three places on the chart: Super Fire Pro Wrestling (1991) and Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special (1994), both for the Super Famicom, coming in 2nd and 3rd respectively.  However, there’s a huge gulf in sales between Pro Wrestling and the two Super Famicom titles (which sold 297,579 and 290,159 copies respectively).

The first three entries in the New Japan Pro Wrestling: Toukon Retsuden (1995, 1996, 1998) series feature in the Top 10, an incredible feat for Yuke’s (the first Toukon Retsuden game was their debut).  This speaks volumes about the popularity of both the Sony PlayStation and New Japan Pro Wrestling in the mid-1990’s.  By contrast, Toukon Retsuden 4 (1999) on the Sega Dreamcast sold relatively poorly in comparison.

Curiously, Square Enix’s All Star Pro Wrestling (2000) on the PlayStation 2 features at Number 6 on the chart.  By far the poorest of the ASPW trilogy, a hugely creditable 185,000 units were sold.

Lastly, spare a thought for AKI’s Virtual Pro Wrestling 2 (2000): this author’s favourite wrestling video game limps into 42nd place on the chart with only 38,800 units sold…