Of course, you could all just tattle tale on Craig, and he'd have my ass up for good. Anyways, on to the mail.

JANews! Monkey,
Matthew Arcilla

Everyone seems to be very concerned about the disturbing adventure game sales listing I released in October 21, 1998's Adventure Games Suck. I've gotten quite a bit of mail about it, but no, I doubt that list could be totally inaccurate.

[In response to Adventure Games Suck, October 21, 1998], There's no way that list can be right. Titanic is in the top ten sellers every month; no way Betrayal at Antara outsold it in July. And Titanic has been out for two years; it's certainly made more than half a million dollars.

Evan Dickens,
Just Adventure Staff

Gee Evan, I had some doubts myself, but then I realize that those topseller reports, which are also compiled by PC Data, are figures recorded by month. The reason why Titanic appears so low in this chart is its only been selling like pancakes recently (perhaps our post DiCaprio-Winslet society, I assume?), but total sales are actually less than the other titles.

Your chart shows that Myst sold 341,201 copies.  Is this total for July only?  I can't be an absolute total.  But you imply that it is by stating that most of the games on the list lost money.

Tom Stewart

Yes Tom, this implies that most games lost money. In fact, Smoking Car Production's Last Express, considered the crown jewel of last years adventure games, didn't even break even.

According to the issue of CGW I derived these figures from, these are totals as of July 1998. And in turn, these figures are derived from PC Data.

I assume it's an estimate since you can't count everything, and like most charts, these are derived from sales reported by retailers who participate in these. So when the chart is made, participating retailers
send in their sales reports.

Thus this does not count, bundled copies, pirated copies and most likely, foreign sales. But even then 341,201 copies is still a lot for computer games. Sid Meier's Civilization made "only" 850,000 copies. And that only is still a lot of money. And if these sales were by month then more than 100,000 copies a month would jsut be too many.

Do these numbers include non-US sales, too ? Do the numbers include European sales figures - at least here in Germany COMI was in the charts for several month.
 
Regards,
Peter Schoen

As for the chart listing you've indicated Peter, CMI has been included as tops in most lists, but those are based on public opinion, as most people who bought the game gave it thumbs up. PC Data takes statistical sales data instead because they make a Top Sellers list as opposed to Best Games list.

And you're right, I seem to be implying July only. I have corrected the article from "best-selling of July" to "as of July" to reflect this.