Nintendo Life dug up the US top 20 best-selling GameCube games ranked by unit sales, and I devoured the whole list twice. The GameCube is my favorite conversation starter in retro circles, because it's the console everyone owned fewer games for but loved harder. The list tells the story you'd expect: Nintendo games everywhere, with only a couple of third-party titles cracking the top ten.

No suspense on the winner. Super Smash Bros. Melee sits at the top, and it's not close. Nintendo never broke out a clean US-only number for it, so I won't pretend one exists, but the fact that it's still chart-topping decades later tells you plenty. People were still buying Melee years after the Cube itself was dead in stores. My theory, and it's just a theory, is that the competitive scene had a lot to do with that longevity. My copy came home with the console in 2001 and I want to say I put more hours into it than anything else on the system except maybe FFX on PS2 that same season.

The rest of the top tier is the usual suspects: Super Mario Sunshine, Mario Kart: Double Dash, The Wind Waker. The middle of the list is where it gets interesting, the stretch where a few titles surprise you and a few absences sting. Go read the actual ranking before you let me color your take on any of it.

The third-party picture is the time capsule part. Only two of the top ten were third-party games, which is very on-brand for the Cube. Licensed games and kid-friendly picks doing numbers nobody would predict looking back, while the cult favorites of the era presumably didn't come anywhere near the chart. That last part is my read of the era, not something the list itself spells out.

What gets me is the absence of RPGs, and that's me editorializing, not reporting. The Cube was a drought for the genre if you didn't import, and the sales list backs up my suspicion that the market wasn't exactly begging Square for ports. I imported a shelf's worth of RPGs in those years precisely because the domestic pickings were that thin.

Go read the full ranking over at Nintendo Life, then come argue with me about where Double Dash should land. It's the best kart racer Nintendo has made, and I've got four decades of receipts.