How many copies did the first Pokémon games sell?

The cleanest single number belongs to Yellow: 14.64 million copies worldwide, the figure carried by Nintendo's investor data as compiled in the standard best-seller lists. For a third edition of a two-year-old game, released as the anime peaked, it is an extraordinary tail.

Red, Green and Blue are tallied together at 31.38 million copies in the standard series sales tables, a figure also reported from Nintendo's own financial disclosures. Yellow's 14.64 million stands alongside it in the same tables. Some lists slice the versions and later re-releases differently, which is why other combined figures circulate, but the headline the industry uses is this one: the first generation, Yellow included, sold in the region of 46 million cartridges.

What no source disputes is the shape of the success. Red and Green launched in Japan on February 27, 1996 to a slow start, then grew through the CoroCoro Mew contest and playground word of mouth into the defining Game Boy phenomenon, carrying the handheld's final years almost single-handedly.

For the shelf, the figures explain the surviving stock: these are among the most common Game Boy games ever made, and their value lives in condition, completeness and the Japanese boxes, not in scarcity of cartridges.