PS2 Turns 25: Top 20 US Best Sellers Revealed — GTA Still Reigns, Kingdom Hearts Tops Final Fantasy X

The PS2 just turned 25 in North America, and it celebrated by dropping a nugget of gaming history: a clean, definitive look at the console's 20 best-selling games in the US. It reads like a time capsule from that weird, glorious stretch of gaming before Call of Duty muscled into every chart, when GTA and Madden basically owned the country.

'The PS2 sold over 46.5M units in the US, with Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas its best-selling game in both units and dollars. Over 147M accessory units sold for PS2, with the PS2 8 Meg Memory Card moving 28.3M units with a 61% attach rate.'

- Mat Piscatella, sharing Circana Retail Tracking Service data on Bluesky (Oct 28, 2025)

Quick pause on that memory card stat. No, the other 39% of PS2 owners didn’t decide to live dangerously and never save. Sony and a small army of third-party companies sold a bunch of different cards, so the 8MB official one hitting 61% just means it was the most popular flavor, not the only one.

What the top 20 tells us (and what it says about that era)

• GTA ran the table: all three of Rockstar’s PS2-era juggernauts — GTA 3, Vice City, and San Andreas — sit at the top. San Andreas is the overall No. 1 by both units and dollars.
• Another Rockstar entry made the cut: Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition. The one that didn’t? Bully didn’t crack the top 20.
• The RPG curveball: Kingdom Hearts landed at No. 9 overall and was the top-selling RPG on the list. Final Fantasy X shows up way lower at No. 17. Whether that means Sora outplayed Tidus or Mickey Mouse simply sells, you decide.
• Sports and speed ruled: as you’d expect, multiple Madden games and a pile of racers crowded the rankings.
• Follow the money: on the revenue (dollar) chart, plastic instruments did work — Guitar Hero and Rock Band rank much higher there than in pure unit sales thanks to those pricey bundles.
• Context check: this is pre-Call of Duty dominance, so no CoD entries breaking up the GTA/Madden stronghold.
• Nuts-and-bolts totals: PS2 moved over 46.5 million consoles in the US and more than 147 million accessories overall, per Circana’s retail tracking.

There’s a fun split here between what people bought a ton of and what made the most money. The unit-based chart is basically a monument to open-world crime, football, and cars. The dollar-based chart quietly reminds you that bundling a game with $100-plus of gear was the closest thing to printing money in the mid-2000s.

If you grew up in that window, none of this will shock you. The PS2 is where GTA became a cultural event, sports games were yearly mandatory buys, and Square Enix found a massive US audience by tossing Final Fantasy DNA into a Disney blender. Seeing Kingdom Hearts outrank Final Fantasy X stateside is a neat little snapshot of what resonated here.

For the data nerds: this breakdown comes from Circana’s Retail Tracking Service, shared by analyst Mat Piscatella in a Bluesky post. The chart splits the top 20 by both copies sold and revenue, which is why some titles climb when peripherals enter the chat.

Happy 25th to the little black box that did it all. Still undefeated at swallowing memory cards and entire weekends.