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Tetris still top-earning US mobile game

Nielsen's chart of 2008 shows retro popularity

Tetris still top-earning US mobile game
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If we hadn't given it away in the headline, you could still probably guess that Tetris (pictured) was the most popular mobile game in the US last year.

EA Mobile's puzzler tops a chart produced by The Nielsen Company to show the top ten mobile games of 2008 - although weirdly, it's based on third-quarter revenue shares.

There are actually two Tetris games in the top ten, plus two titles from Namco Bandai's Pac-Man family. The full chart is as follows:

1. Tetris (7.0 per cent share)
2. Bejeweled (4.0 per cent)
3. Guitar Hero III (3.6 per cent)
4. Wheel of Fortune (2.6 per cent)
5. Pac-Man (2.5 per cent)
6. The Oregon Trail (1.9 per cent)
7. Ms. Pac-Man (1.7 per cent)
8. Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? (1.6 per cent)
9. Tetris Mania (1.6 per cent)
10. Surviving High School (1.2 per cent)

You'll notice there are no iPhone games in there, despite the barnstorming success of Super Monkey Ball and Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D in the third quarter on the App Store.

Still, it's stats, eh? Hopefully the industry will hurry up and start producing some official charts in the US soon.

Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)