Thanks for the suggestions. The Wikipedia article is good, but I'm looking for a bit more data - something similar to Kiwi's chart from CVG. Ideally the top 50 or so games across all platforms yearly or twice-yearly fromn the late 1970s to about 1990 (the 8-bit era). I'll check out these suggestions.
I'm thinking about using Mobygames which has a composite ranking for all games - this is useful but some sort of sales based ranking would be better.
In any case, thanks again!