10 Most Profitable Arcade Games That Made BILLIONS
5. NBA Jam - Midway (1993)
Revenue To Date: $1.95 billion
These days, sports games are some of the most profitable on the market, but in the early '90s, the genre was in its infancy, especially where basketball games were concerned. In the early days of gaming, most basketball games featured a one-on-one or two-on-two aspect of play, and it wasn't exciting.
NBA Jam was an innovation, and it changed sports gaming forever. The game mirrored the previous attempts but included entire teams taken from the 1992-93 NBA season. Players were representations of actual people, and they came with stats and even catchphrases like "Boomshakalaka" and "He's on fire."
It wouldn't take long for the game to be ported to consoles, but the arcade version started it all. The cabinet sold relatively well, and while it only managed to sell around 20,000 units, those cabs sucked down quarters like never before.
The game was insanely popular, and because it could be played by four players at once, each time the game was played by a group of four, it received a quadruple-dose of quarters. All told, the game managed around $1.1 billion in sales amounting to $1.95 billion in 2019 dollars.