Forbes.com recently published their list of America’s All-Time Favorite Videogames, using data from NPD to tally the most popular games of, ostensibly, all-time. Here’s their tally:

GTA San Andreas (9.4 million copies sold in the US), Guitar Hero III (8.2 million), Madden 07 (7.7 million), GTA Vice City (7.3 million), Madden 06 (7.7 million, not sure why this ranks below Vice City), Halo 2 (6.61 million), Madden 08 (6.6 million), Call of Duty 4 (6.25 million), GTA III (6.2 million), Madden 05 (6.1 million)

Naturally, this led Forbes to a thinly disguised editorial about American gamers lusting over sports and guns, with plenty of unnecessary snipes about gore and violence. Makes a nice headline, I suppose.

According to their own selection criteria, they “asked NPD Group to provide a list of top-selling games across all platforms, including PCs, game consoles and handheld gaming gizmos through the end of April.” So am I the only one who finds the list suspect… where’s Mario, Pokemon and Nintendogs, among others? I did a little research on my own and here’s what I found…

Super Mario Bros 3 (1990, NES) sold 9.69 million in the US, as reported by VGChartz.com. Super Mario Land (1989, Game Boy) sold 10.99 million copies. But those are old games, you say. The Forbes article chooses to focus on “sales data over the last 15 years,” which is a pretty funny definition of “All-Time” if you ask me. VGChartz.com has always been a source of debate, especially for older titles, so maybe Forbes 15 year range purposefully avoids that potential problem.

But let’s play inside those 15 years. Pokemon Red/Blue (1998, Game Boy) sold 11.44 million copies. 2000’s sequel, Pokemon Gold/Silver sold 9.14 million. These are all US numbers, not worldwide. Does Pokemon not count because those millions are spread across multiple versions – Pokemon Red AND Pokemon Blue? Those of us in the know acknowledge that Red and Blue are pretty much the exact same game. Forbes had no trouble lumping every SKU of Guitar Hero III into one mammoth sales event… even though there are clear disparities between, say, the Wii version and the 360 version.

Still too old? How about Nintendogs (2005, DS). 7 million copies sold… and similar to Pokemon, that covers four (maybe more; I lost count) slightly different versions. So marketing gimmicks preclude a game with killer sales from being on Forbes’ list? Yet they’ll junk it up with four consecutive years of Madden?

Should we include bundled games, like Super Mario Bros (1985, NES, 29.52 million), Super Mario World (1991, SNES, 12.97 million) and Wii Sports (2006, Wii, 11.92 million)? I guess we are skipping those, but I don’t really know why. Does Wii Play (2006, Wii, 6.16 million) not count because it came with a Wii Remote?

When this topic cropped up on Kotaku, I tried to raise these questions but I was immediately drowned out in an avalanche of nonsense comments about gun control. Which only goes to show that too many commenters completely derail the original story.

So I’m asking you guys… what am I missing? Did Forbes purposefully spin the NPD numbers so as to support their secret thesis of American gamers being gun-happy, hard-rocking sports fans? Or does the author simply not understand the complexities of the gaming world, therefore overlooking dual-release games like Pokemon and Nintendogs?