Sleeper Hit / Video Games

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Consoles and peripherals

• Nintendo has several examples that prove that great consoles don't need powerful hardware:
  • The Nintendo Entertainment System, and by proxy Super Mario Bros., had a lot of uncertainty around the time of their release. The Great Video Game Crash of 1983 made console gaming a joke in America, and as such, retailers were not real eager to stock their shelves with any consoles. This made it necessary to sell the NES with R.O.B. so that people would buy it for the toy robot but keep it for the video games. Mario had seen some moderate success with Donkey Kong and Mario Bros., but not on a scale that was terribly notable. But very impressive word-of-mouth for Super Mario Bros., coupled with the game being bundled with the NES, made both the console and the game into smash hits.
  • When Nintendo made the Wii, it was hoped to turn around the diminishing returns for each home console Nintendo released, just a little. The gaming press laughed it off, expecting Nintendo to finally go third party after the Wii flopped (and the system still has extreme Critical Dissonance). Instead, casual audiences ate up the idea that you could go bowling without a bowling ball, parents got it for their kids, and it became sold out for years and even outsold the NES. It's also the third home console to sell over 100 million units. As such, a whole generation of future gamers grew up with it and look back on the system's games with incredible fondness.
  • Similarly to the Wii, a large amount of critics and gamers initially laughed off the Nintendo Switch in the months between its announcement and release, due to it being on the heels of the massive commercial flop that was the Wii U. In addition, its controversial paid online system, return to cartridges instead of discs, continued use of motion controls long after they fell out of favor, and near-last-minute reveal (being announced mere months before launch) earned considerable skepticism from those outside of Nintendo's core fanbase. However, come March 2017, it ended up being a smash success for Nintendo, selling out within a day and repeatedly suffering from the same stock shortages that hit the Wii and NES due to its demand being that unexpectedly high. By the end of the fiscal year, the Switch had become the fastest-selling game console of all time, beating out even the PS2's year one sales. Since then, it has achieved over 100 million units sold at the end of December 2021, becoming Nintendo's best-selling home console of all time and their second best-selling console overall, only behind the DS.
• The PlayStation itself is one. Or, at least in North America. In early 1995, the system had proven to be a huge success in Japan. However, things seemed a bit less promising on the North American front. Sega was busily hyping its upcoming Sega Saturn, while Nintendo was silently creating some buzz for its upcoming Nintendo 64 (then known as the Ultra 64). How could Sony, then a newcomer to the video game industry, possibly compete? By taking note of and learning from the mistakes their competitors were making. Sega ultimately botched the Saturn's chances of success with a hastily-executed stealth launch, some questionable design choices and a $399 price tag.^note Which was unheard of for a gaming console at the time. Meanwhile, Nintendo's infamous bowdlerization practices, and their insistence on sticking with a cartridge format for the N64, led many gamers and third party developers, including Squaresoft, to abandon the company in favor of Sony. The PlayStation, despite little pre-release hype, eventually went on to become the most successful video game console of all time until its successor, the PlayStation 2, succeeded that throne in 2006.

Video games and development houses

• Among Us released on IOS in June 2018 and later on Steam in November, initially amassing a small but dedicated fanbase of a couple hundred players at best. It saw a surge on popularity in mid-2020 driven by South Korean and Brazilian content creators, but it wasn't until July, when Twitch streamer Sodapoppin got his hands on the game and spread the good word-of-mouth around other big-name streamers and content creators, that the game truly exploded worldwide. Also that it was on the time of the pandemic, and people are mandated to stay indoors, leaving some players to play the game for its co-op, and player interaction features.
• Angry Birds has proven itself to be the little iPhone app that could, having reached the top of the Apple App Store download rankings in over 60 countries.
• Edmund McMillen didn't hold a lot of hope in The Binding of Isaac, mostly because he thought it would be too difficult, disturbing, sacreligous, and/or weird for most people to get into it. It was quite a surprise for him when it managed to sell 500,000 copies, and in a relatively short time! He originally planned this game as a side project between Super Meat Boy and another game.
• Baldur's Gate III was planned by developer Larian Studios to be a moderate success. The core franchise was a series of well-respected RPG titles that had all grown in reputation over time, but ultimately were quite niche and not very well-known. However, good word-of-mouth about the game's size, scale, and development — including a promise that there would be no microtransactions or in-app purchases, which was a major issue in gaming circles at the time — caused the title to sell way beyond expectations. At its peak, the game had nearly one million concurrent players on Steam alone, with sales as of 2024 putting it somewhere between six and ten million copies sold, along with the Game of the Year honors at the 2023 Game Awards.
• Borderlands: Gearbox Software had some minor hits before this game to their name, such as the Opposing Force Expansion Pack for Half-Life and the Brothers in Arms series, but it wasn't until the release of this game that the company would have their Cash-Cow Franchise that's still rolling. Even then, it took several months and lots of word of mouth in order to make the series the huge success it became, and the series wasn't too heavily promoted, being an original franchise from a relatively unknown studio becoming universally acclaimed was unexpected, to say the least. As Randy Pitchford noted in one interview, the game actually sold better as time went on, compared to the usual pattern of a burst of sales at release, and it was all thanks to word of mouth advertising. This led to the sequel, Borderlands 2, getting a bigger budget and proper advertising, and the franchise finally exploding in popularity and becoming Gearbox's flagship series.
• Crackdown was not expected to do particularly well, so to ship copies Microsoft gave away the Halo 3 Beta to anyone who bought the game, with the expectation of a high refund rate. However, this didn't happen as it was very well-received by the Gaming public and press alike. It ended up spawning two sequels on 360 and Xbox One.
• Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars: Originally just Defense of the Ancients, a custom map for Warcraft 3, it's gone on to become not only a sleeper hit but actually start a genre of games.
• Demon's Souls quickly grew a reputation for its punishing difficulty, and proved to be a hit with both players and critics, garnering several "Game of the Year" awards in 2009 and possibly convincing Atlus and FromSoftware to extend the life of its online servers well beyond its planned six-month period (in fact, they finally shut the servers down at the start of 2018!).
• After the infamous flop that was Daikatana and the lackluster release of Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3, hardly anyone was excited about Ion Storm's Deus Ex. The game was a surprise hit that ended up being game of the year of 2000 and is widely considered to be one of the greatest games of all time.
• Disco Elysium, a modest indie Urban Fantasy Role-Playing Game from 2019 developed by the small Estonian game development collective ZA/UM, was not expected to stand out as its year of release was a year already stuffed with critically acclaimed titles from both the West and East. However, in spite of its unconventional design it became a critical and commercial darling and wound up not only being nominated in four categories for the 2019 Game Awards, including Best RPG and Best Narrative, but also sweeping the award in all four categories. Its success would continue in 2020, where it won three BAFTAs, and, thanks to a translation patch, became a surprise hit in China.
• Divinity: Original Sin II was the sixth game in an obscure Western RPG series from Belgium, and while the groundwork for its success on Kickstarter was laid by Larian Studios faithfully delivering on their promises for the previous installment, nobody — not even the devs — expected it to become the best-reviewed PC game of 2017, as well as in Larian's history, to sell a million copies within a couple months (despite little fanfare or marketing), and to win a Game of the Year (from PC Gamer) and numerous Best RPG awards.
• Epic Games managed to pull this twice:
  • Unreal was released to modest success after three years of development. While it was lauded for its gorgeous landscapes and an intriguing plot that managed to subvert A Space Marine Is You, it was launched in 1998, a year with plenty of notable releases in the First-Person Shooter genre (most notably Quake II, SiN, and especially that year's Game of the Year, Half-Life), plus its multiplayer mode was riddled with a lot of technical problems. So a multiplayer-based Expansion Pack began development, only for the devs to realize that it would be better if said pack were released instead as a standalone game. This game is known as Unreal Tournament, and gathered a lot of critical acclaim upon release, changing the landscape of the First-Person Shooter genre alongside id Software's Quake III: Arena, as well as becoming the Trope Codifier for Capture the Flag, Instagib matches and continuous, loud announcements over every action in the game.
  • Fortnite was announced in 2012, and got little attention. When it came to release in 2017, it wasn't an instant success. Then when Battle Royale came out, the game caught enough attention over time thanks to streamers that the audience ballooned to levels previously unheard of. Now, Fortnite is a legitimate cultural phenomenon to the surprise of everyone including its creators.
• Euro Truck Simulator, similar to many games of this page, started out as one more game in the borderline shovelware category of extremely niche vehicle simulators, with most of its initial players buying it ironically in order to make fun of it on social and streaming media. However, unlike many similar videogames, it had one big difference: it did try to be fun, and tried its best to appeal to people outside of the utilitary vehicle fandom. Unlike most vehicle simulators, which were all about recreating in minute detail every single little button, gage and internal mechanism first and foremost, Euro Truck Simulator did acknowledge that sometimes realism is at odds with fun and was not afraid of cutting short some things in the name of gameplay. Core aspects that vehicle fans like such as faithful, detailed models, realistic physics and highly detailed controls were maintained; aspects that people were more likely to find annoying were reduced or simplified such as compressing spacetime by 20-fold, keeping AI-controlled traffic light and giving it a reasonably smart AI, or simplifying some controls in order to not require an analog controller to play the game properly; and in addition to all that, elements that give the player a purpose beyond just driving trucks were added, such as aftermarket parts that cost in-game money, a level-up system, online-based jobs, six gameplay stages that require putting a good few hours to unlock with in-game money, or nods to hardcore achievers with elements that make the game more challenging such as heavy loads, time-constrained missions or eighteen wheeler trailers. These differences, coupled with a laidback, relaxing driving experience, a planar corporate structure that favored creativity over discipline and authority, and an always constant development that takes feedback from actual truckers who play the game, caused many ironic players to end up actually enjoying the game unironically, leading them to praise the game through word of mouth and positive Steam reviews. Six years after its release, Euro Truck Simulator has managed to make it more than once to Steam's weekly top selling charts, gained the coveted "Overwhelmingly Positive" user review score, spawned its hardcore-looking sibling game American Truck Simulator as well as eight major expansions with increasing degrees of artistic polish, created one of the most thriving modding communities on the entire Steam Workshop (going as far as creating entire countries such as Canada, Mexico or Brazil), and has even begun to increase its media presence through racing team sponsorships.
• The original Final Fantasy was so named because it was supposed to be Squaresoft's swan song title. The company was on the verge of going bankrupt, but the team decided to make one last game on their way out. Instead, the game became a hit, and managed to fish the dwindling developer out from near-bankruptcy and helped turned it into the fiend-slayingly popular franchise it is today.
• The Fire Emblem series hit a slump when the remake of the first game slumped on the Nintendo DS, which was enough for the (better) remake of the third game to not be exported. It's been mentioned in interviews that had Fire Emblem: Awakening not sold over the 250k mark (and the fanfare that North America has given it was a major bonus), Nintendo would've pulled the plug on the series. Instead, not only did Awakening save the franchise, but it was the first in the series to break a million sales. With the large amount of newcomers to the series, Fire Emblem has gone from being "that series with the swordsmen in Super Smash Bros.," to becoming popular on its own merits, leading to heavy worldwide promotion for the succeeding games.
• Five Nights at Freddy's started out as a failed kickstarter (it raised exactly $0) project intended to be the Swan Song of developer Scott Cawthon's career, but upon release, he felt it reignite. At last count, there have been six sequels released, alongside an RPG spin-off, two VR games, several novels, and a live-action film.
• GoldenEye. The game had little pre-release hype or fanfare, getting a listless reaction from critics at E3 1997 and suffering a rather Troubled Production cycle. In fact, Star Fox 64 was originally supposed to be Nintendo's big summer blockbuster that year. However, once GoldenEye was released, the game garnered overwhelming critical acclaim and quickly went on to become the N64's flagship title. It garnered numerous "Game of the Year" awards, and even today, stands as one of the most influential video games of all time, as well as possibly the greatest example of how to do a movie-based Licensed Game right, and was a major milestone in the First-Person Shooter genre, especially when it game to bringing the genre to consoles.
• Grasshopper Manufacture:
  • No More Heroes became this in 2007; even though it didn't sell very well (40,000 in Japan, 208,000 in North America), it has a rather sizable fanbase and a sequel, and is widely considered one of the best games on the Wii. One could chalk it up to the fact that it's one of the very few Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000 games on the Wii, and that its pedigree was a cult classic. The series went on hiatus for a while, but returned with the Gaiden Game Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes in 2019, ports of the first two games to the Nintendo Switch in 2020, and the official third installment planned for 2021.
  • Lollipop Chainsaw. Due to the mixed reception from critics, and the fact that previous SUDA51 games like Killer7 and No More Heroes weren't all that successful in sales (especially Killer7, which is one of the most sought-after GameCube titles, even to this very day), most SUDA51 fans were expecting this one to have low sales too, when actually, it ended up selling 700,000 copies worldwide as of August 2012, a mere two months after the game's release.
• Helix Jump had very little advertisement and had gotten almost no media attention. Despite that, the game has over 380 million downloads, granting it an Obscure Popularity status.
• Hi-Fi RUSH, a Rhythm-Action game developed by Tango Gameworks, a studio previously known only for horror games. The game was kept under wraps right up until its launch date, when it was revealed during January 2023 Xbox and Bethesda Developer Direct. Thanks to strong word-of-mouth, within a day of its release, it was the #4 top selling game on Steam and became known as a Killer App for Xbox Series X|S (finally giving it a console-exclusive title not also available on the Xbox One) with overwhelmingly positive reviews.
• Hitman Go, a mobile puzzle game based on Hitman series, was met with heavy skepticism at first and seen as a shameless attempt at milking the franchise. Despite negative expectations, it ended up being a well-received title with solid gameplay and complicated puzzles, and got popular enough to not only be ported on modern consoles as an Updated Re-release, but also spawn its own series of sequels, with installments based on Tomb Raider and Deus Ex.
• Homeworld by Sierra in 1999 did not have a heavy advertising campaign. The mood of the game also screams hard science fiction, which scares off a lot of casual fans. There is also the Chris Foss/Peter Elson inspiration behind much of the design that screams old-school Sci-Fi. Not a single human character is seen onscreen during the game and the voice acting is humorless, technical and stoic which gives it a detached, cold feeling. Word of mouth spread until it had become very popular as fans loved the fully realized 3D gameplay that was light years ahead of the RTS games of the time, the dark & engaging immersive plotline, the moody in-game music (such as the brilliant use of Samuel Barber's "Agnus Dei") and the Closing Credits song by Progressive Rock group Yes. It had several sequels as well as a remastering and remake for modern systems.
• Despite its novel premise (the Console Wars as an actual war for market share waged by goddess Console Patron Units), nobody expected Hyperdimension Neptunia to sell very well and it was developed for peanuts. Surprisingly, it not only got a Western release, but became far and away the best-selling release from Compile Heart, garnering two (properly-funded) sequels.
• KanColle was originally meant for the very niche market of military Otaku (something it shared with Arpeggio of Blue Steel, which has a very similar premise of Japanese warships personified as cute girls); but thanks to some Colbert Bumps from big names in the manga and anime industries (the most notable example being Kohta Hirano's epic meltdowns about the game on Twitter), it got a lot more popular than intended.
• The original Katamari Damacy initially had moderate, but still not-as-expected success in Japan. After numerous positive reviews, the sales of the game kept gradually increasing, especially when it came to North America.
• Lethal Company bears the distinction of being a small co-op horror roguelike made by a single developer with virtually no marketing that nevertheless managed to surpass Left 4 Dead 2 and Overwatch 2 in player count as well as outsell the latest Call Of Duty.
• Life Is Strange was quietly announced by Square Enix in August 2014. They didn't exactly ignore it as far as marketing went, but the first episode released to little fanfare and modest reviews in January 2015. The intriguing premise and two female leads also drew in a hefty queer audience, and word of mouth boosted the game's profile significantly as more and more episodes got released. The game ended up selling well over 5 million copies over the next few years and it started up a new flagship franchise for Square Enix Europe.
• Lunar: The Silver Star was released on the Sega CD and was one of the first Eastern RPGs to hit the States during the 16-bit era. It got so popular that Game Arts couldn't stop making remakes.
• Mad Max (2015) had been in development for years, until Mad Max: Fury Road entered production, whereupon it actually picked up the Mad Max license to become an official game just in time for both film and game to be finished around the same time. In a twist of fate, both the game and film became sleeper hits. After being released a few months after Grand Theft Auto V launched on PC, and on the same day as mega hit Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, it eventually found a niche in the open world genre, and fans began to realize it was far from the rushed licensed tie in game that many expected, and instead was a very solid action adventure game that fit incredibly well into the Mad Max aesthetic.
• The original Mega Man fell under the radar until positive word of mouth made into Capcom's flagship franchise.
• Though it would become one of the most iconic game in the Neo Geo library, Metal Slug had very little expectations from SNK. The game was purely a passion project for its developers, who made it in their spare time as Nazca was set up for porting SNK's games to the Saturn and PS1. The original "tank" version was poorly-received in location testing and the game was released in a slow quarter. Furthermore, it was a 2D sidescrolling game in a time where fighting games were dominating the arcades and 3D was king. This is one of the reason why the "home" Neo Geo version is surprisingly rare as SNK didn't produce many copies, expecting it to be a flop.
• Metroid was never exactly an obscure series, and received praise from its dedicated fanbase, but prior to Metroid Prime, it wasn't tremendously popular either, with Nintendo and the series creators leaving it dormant following 1994's acclaimed, but average-selling Super Metroid. Then came a newly-formed western subsidiary named Retro Studios, who — after several false starts in getting their first game off the ground — got the greenlight surrounding a scifi-themed shooter project that they were convinced by Shigeru Miyamoto himself to turn into a Metroid game, mostly under the pretense that Metroid was a fairly low-stakes IP that they could risk giving an experimental, foreign-made twist (it was even said by Retro developers that "Miyamoto didn't care if we killed it"). When the game — now titled Metroid Prime — was first announced at SpaceWorld 2000, it received a staggeringly positive reaction, so surprising that Nintendo drastically reevaluated the franchise and expedited a companion game: Metroid Fusion. Both were released in 2002 to rave reviews and high sales, with the success of Prime putting Retro Studios on the map, and while it's definitely more popular among western gamers than Nintendo's native Japan, Metroid has since been held in higher regard as one of Nintendo's flagship franchises, spawning an insular trilogy and several other mainline titles.
• Minecraft, initially a one-man project, gained a ton of press by word-of-mouth alone, and still regularly tops the sales charts on most of the platforms it's been released on. The Xbox 360 version ended up being one of the most popular games on the system. As of late 2024, 15 years after its very first release, 300 million copies have been sold across all platforms, making it the best selling single video game of all time.
• Mortal Kombat (1992) was made simply to fill a hole in Midway's arcade schedule. A four-man team was given 10 months to churn out a fighting game and pretty much gave them free reign to do what they wanted since it was a small project. The team turned it into one big Rule of Cool game that gave Midway its signature, money-making franchise and cut way more into Street Fighter II's marketshare than they could have imagined.
• NieR: Automata, a sequel to the Cult Classic yet niche NieR, was expected to be a modest hit at best because of its limited appeal on paper, and especially with the amount of competition it had on initial release.^note It was surrounded by Horizon Zero Dawn, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Mass Effect: Andromeda, to name a few. Despite this, a combination of the strong critical praise, popularity of the main character's design, dramatic plotline, well-written characterization, and just enough marketing by Square Enix without going overboard, led to the game not only becoming the best selling title in its whole franchise in a little more than a week, but also managing to break one million sales worldwide, becoming the third PlatinumGames title to do so and the very first for Yoko Taro.
• Octopath Traveler was largely overlooked when it was first announced, as not only were people much more hyped for other Nintendo Switch games shown off around the same time like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, but the game's Retraux "2D-HD" aesthetic got it pegged as an inherently niche title regardless. When the game came out, though, it managed to sell well enough to become one of the Switch's most popular original role-playing games, roughly on par with the bigger-budgeted and more heavily hyped Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The number of initial physical copies for the game were so low that it repeatedly sold out despite Square Enix restocking it multiple times.
• Paladins was first released as an open beta in 2016 and garnered little attention, other than for being like "a less polished Overwatch". Jump to 2017, where after numerous improvements to the graphics and gameplay, nearly double the amount of Champions, a slew of customization options, and Paladins has risen to being the only other Hero Shooter that could seriously be considered The Rival to Overwatch, with 11 million players announced soon after the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One version were released.
• Palworld was mostly derided as nothing more than a "Pokémon with guns and animal cruelty" Shallow Parody meme game ever since the first trailers back in 2021 were shown. It sold 5 million copies in three days after its release and has received mostly positive reception.
• When PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was released in 2017 as an early-access title, most pundits wrote it off as just another forgettable bland shooter. Yet it became the most played game on Steam with 3 million concurrent players as of December 2017, with its closest competitor Dota 2, a "triple-A" game made by Valve Corporation, only having 1.29 million peak players. Not only that, but it also sold 20 million copies in early access and managed to spawn the "Battle Royale" sub-genre of shooter.
• Like Star Wars, it's hard to believe that Pokémon was this. When it was first released over in Japan, the Game Boy was on its last legs. Despite this, Pokémon Red and Blue kept selling, spurred by rumors of a hidden 151st Pokémon. By the time it reached North America, the juggernaut was in full swing. It took a while to catch on in North America, however, as Western divisions of Nintendo had dismissed it until its popularity had exploded in Japan. Gamers used to complain that Pokémon Red and Blue weren't in color, unaware that they came out only one month ahead of the Game Boy Color in North America and years earlier in Japan.
• Portal was intended as a small bonus to The Orange Box compilation, but became an instant cult classic of The Orange Box. To put things in perspective, the other games on The Orange Box included Half-Life 2 and its episodes, including what was the much-anticipated at the time Episode 2, and the much-anticipated Team Fortress 2 (which would later go on to becoming Valve's most successful game of all time). That package sold altogether for $50 at launch. Portal 2 sold for the same price and was still a hit. A Gaiden Game developed by ten people as a follow on to the student project Narbacular Drop, was put on The Orange Box with little fanfare. Fans ate it up, the critics loved it, it sold quickly when released as a stand alone, and it has inspired a massive sequel.
• Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid had a massive uphill battle. A game created for the franchise's 25th anniversary, it was being created by a company that just previously released Power Rangers: Legacy Wars, a mobile game that initially promoted Power Rangers (2017) before it became a Box Office Bomb. Its release was not spectacular with the game being buggy and lackluster. However, the company, N-Way, refused to back down and worked on the game, improving its engine, adding a vast cast, adding in voice actors (going so far as to recruit some of the original actors, too) and making the game fun that it is now part of the fighting game community. One of the things that saved the game was its amazing rollback netcode, which was even better than what Dragon Ball Fighter Z and Street Fighter V had.
• As revealed in this interview, the original Raiden was a low-expectation project Seibu Kaihatsu only made because their previous game, Dynamite Duke, flopped and a Vertical Scrolling Shooter was all they could do with the alloted budget. The game initially sold poorly, but eventually ended up being very successful thanks to positive word-of-mouth. Seibu's U.S. distributor Fabtek boasted in a flyer promoting the sequel:
  The original Raiden has been on the charts since September 1990—38 consecutive months and counting — with 26 months in the top 10. Not even the most popular fighting game ever can make that claim.
• Ring Fit Adventure qualifies: while performing decently enough in its initial launch in 2019 amid competition from the likes of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and fellow Nintendo Switch title Pokémon Sword and Shield, it really took off in 2020 after many gyms were forced to close due to the COVID-19 Pandemic ; selling over 5 million copies worldwide. New copies can easily go for $300 at online resale, five times the $60 list price. Since then, it has sold over 13.5 million copies as of December 2021, becoming the 10th best selling Nintendo-published Switch title.
• Rocket League was a fairly small game with not a lot of press during development, made as a sequel to a game that was not particularly well received but became something of a Cult Classic. Then the beta happened, at which point the game's popularity and press shot through the roof to the point that when it came out, it was the #2 best seller on Steam and became a part of Sony's PlayStation Plus "Instant Game Collection" service.
• Scribblenauts. While developers 5th Cell were not unknown at the time, having already made the well-liked Drawn to Life and Lock's Quest, they weren't considered hugely big contenders in the game scene, and Scribblenauts premiered with little fanfare. The concept was enticing, but didn't make any waves until E3 2009, when the greater game journalism public got their hands on the game. Cue explosion.
• After the troubled launch and release of SimCity (2013), fans of city-building simulation games hoped to find a viable alternative. In came 2015's Cities: Skylines, which rapidly picked up positive buzz as the game those fans wished SimCity had been, with the capability for larger and more expansive cities, and none of the annoying online issues. Skylines became the fastest-selling and best-reviewed Paradox Interactive property in its debut week, selling a quarter of a million copies in just two days, and surpassing the half-million mark in six.
  • Notably, the failure of SimCity has been said by Paradox to be the primary reason they funded the development of Skylines, as there was now a niche that was open to competition.
• Splatoon garnered major attention during its reveal at E3 2014, being a major new IP from Nintendo and a particularly unique take on the Third-Person Shooter genre. However, considering that it was both on the floundering Wii U and was a genre that the company had never tackled before, many expected it to be dead on arrival. What happened instead was that the game sold one million copies worldwide in less than a month. More notably, despite shooters rarely selling well in Japan, it managed to completely sell out on release day (Nintendo had to apologize for a shortage of retail copies), consistently remained among the Top 5 on Japanese game sales charts for fourteen straight weeks, and went on to be the best-selling Wii U title in Japan. It later garnered two sequels on the Switch, the former having quickly outsold its predecessor and the latter achieving the highest launch sales of any video game in Japan, Splatoon references and the ability to race as an Inkling in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and have the Inklings be the first new characters announced for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• Stardew Valley is a Spiritual Successor to Harvest Moon. Despite being of the niche genre of farming Simulation Games, it managed to sell nearly a million copies within a few weeks through mostly word of mouth.
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • The original game started a side project by Masahiro Sakurai that Satoru Iwata allowed him to do on the weekends at HAL Laboratory. Eventually, Iwata became interested in this "King of the Hill"-like fighter, and the company asked Nintendo if they could use some of their characters. Nintendo was iffy on the entire thing: keeping the budget on the game incredibly small and planning on a Japan-only release. Despite little promotion, the game took off in Japan and was brought to North America and Europe later that year, becoming a Killer App for the Nintendo 64. Its sequels have followed the trend.
  • When the first sequel Super Smash Bros. Melee was released, two characters, Marth and Roy, were originally going to be Dummied Out for the international versions of the game, as at that point, both were part of a franchise that had been Japan-exclusive (and around since 1990, at that). The North American localization team loved the two characters, and their surprising popularity allowed Fire Emblem to be exported.
• The first Tokimeki Memorial game was this: a low-profile game, it became a surprise massive hit thanks to word of mouth. It soon became a long and successful Cash-Cow Franchise for Konami, and lots of companies tried to cash on the non-H Dating Sim genre it created with varied success.
• Touhou Project. One man making his own Shoot 'Em Up games has become one of the best known Bullet Hell series around.
• Vampire Survivors, like many small-time games put out on Steam, released with virtually no fanfare. It was cheap and it looked cheap, and it blended in with all the other obscure releases and shovelware on the platform. This suddenly changed about a month later, when the game was noticed by a number of Youtubers, mostly likely starting with this video by SplatterCat. Afterwards, the game gather huge amounts of steam, generating tens of thousands of players at a time and creating a trend of imitators to follow. In the end, Vampire Survivors proved to be one of the most fun you can have for just 3 American Dollars^note Which has increased to $5 since.
• Warframe started out on the backfoot as one of the most prominent examples of It Will Never Catch On in gaming history, with developer Digital Extremes actually unable to find any publisher willing to back it, forcing them to self-publish with their entire company on the line. After a slow start, with its eye-catching premise (space ninjas!) drawing people in and its grindy, repetitive nature turning them away, the game continued to evolve over the years gaining more and more positive word of mouth as DE reworked old systems and added new ones. Around about the time they released "The Second Dream" the game's popularity exploded as what was previously seen as a fun but shallow looter MMO began to be recognised as something close to art, as well as one of the best examples of free-to-play monetisation in a game done intelligently and with integrity. It has subsequently become one of the foremost F2P games in the world, with releases on all the consoles as well as PC and millions of registered losers logging in every day, making it also one of the foremost modern examples of And You Thought It Would Fail.
• WarioWare was not expected by its development team to do particularly well due to its unconventional gameplay, quirky style, and being a Spiritual Successor to a mode for a game released exclusively on the failed Nintendo 64DD. The game ended up doing well above Nintendo's internal expectation and spawned a long line of sequels.
• The Witcher:
  • The original game was a PC-only single player CRPG released in 2007 by a development studio largely unknown outside eastern Europe, based off a fantasy book series almost unheard of in the English-speaking world. It proceeded to sell over a million copies in its first year of release, with its sequel reaching that number in under six months. The success of the games also led to the original novels being promoted globally, followed by an Live-Action Adaptation by Netflix.
  • The first game's success was such a surprise that the studio more or less apologized for their shoestring-budget "Blind Idiot" Translation by using some of their windfall to produce a much more polished Enhanced Edition, which further boosted the game's popularity.
  • The third game's entrance into the open world genre turned into a massive smash hit mostly by word of mouth after release.
• The World Ends with You had little to no advertising for its North American release, but word of mouth made it the top selling Nintendo DS game its first week in North America. The only reason it didn't stay that way for the next few was because the stores literally ran out of copies to sell almost overnight and would be back-ordered for quite a while. Even today, it still gets rather high on Amazon's best selling DS games, coming after new releases and Nintendo's cash cow franchises in sort by best selling. It even gotten an iOS port, followed by a 2018 release on the Nintendo Switch, an anime adaptation, and eventually a sequel in 2022.
• World of Tanks got the -tanks part when a small Belorussian gaming studio making "yet another elves and orcs MMO" decided there are bit too many of those. Tank fans were expected to form small yet reliable niche. Notably enough, its popularity also accelerated another sleeper hit: Girls und Panzer. This is because just about every WoT player watches the Anime. The Reverse is proving true as the aforementioned anime series is practically the main marketing plan for the game's introduction in Japan.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 1 was outright snubbed for an North American release despite previous news that it would be released there. However, the game got itself a very vocal fanbase right from the start, since it was a new JRPG from the creators of the cult classics Xenogears and Xenosaga. An entire web campaign (Operation Rainfall) was started to get the game released in Western countries, but Nintendo of America didn't listen. Nintendo of Europe and Australia, however, brought it over to their respective continents. With little advertising and very limited units the game was a surprise hit, garnering positive reviews and rather good sales. Since then, the game was released in North America, along with The Last Story and Pandora's Tower (the other two games from the OpRainfall campaign) getting expanded advertising and international releases^noteXSEED Games published The Last Story in the North America in the late summer of 2012, and released Pandora's Tower there in the spring of 2013.. Following this, Following games in the series have garnered international releases from the get-go, becoming one of Nintendo's flagship franchises, especially in the realm of the JRPG genre, its main protagonist got to appear in Super Smash Bros. (followed later by the heroine of the sequel), and the original game was ported to the New Nintendo 3DS and received a remake on the Nintendo Switch.
• Yo-kai Watch took only one year to become a multimedia success in Japan comparable to Pokémon in late 1990s. The franchise's second game sold an incredible 1.3 million copies in its debut week, instantly outselling the first game. Its anime adaptation even gets better ratings than Pretty Cure and Pokémon staring from the first episode and shows no signs of stopping.

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