Popular Game OSTS by Year

I decided to go through my Impressive VGM by Year lists and rank game OSTs by popularity based on Youtube views. I went with YT since it's linked to Google and those two are by far the most popular in their respective fields.

A few things to note about YT uploads:

1. Various video uploads to YT have been removed over the years, some as recently as 2018-2021 and a bunch of them had been up for a long time and/or gathered a lot of views. I've tried to note this when I could, but sadly I can't recover the numbers on the removed videos and there are only a few cases where I had written down a number earlier (I started on a list over a year ago but then restarted a couple of months back) and noticed the video having been removed and the current number being lower now. Some OSTs that I'm pretty sure are popular will rank lower than they're supposed to. These numbers are from April, 2022.

2. Earlier games in long running series benefit a lot from later games' popularity

3. A game on a popular system or by a popular company will generally benefit from that and get more views. Similarly a popular game's OST will often benefit

4. A lot of NES uploads specifically have been remastered by fans with added reverb, stereo and more and these tend to be more popular. I went with the most popular upload while commenting on the changes and tried to also list the most popular authentic upload.

5. Early PC games seem to have their views divided due to there being different sound setups and some (such as MT-32) being more expensive. The former is sometimes the case with NES, MSX, X68K and SMS games as well

6. Numbers are based on the most viewed song in an OST if the full OST video isn't the most viewed

7. Some uploads become memes and gain much more views because of it

8. You don't get any info on popularity over time, just the total amount of views since the video was uploaded. These stats used to be a YT feature, but it was removed for some reason.

9. I've generally used a "(game) (system) music" format for seaching, or variants like ost or bgm instead of music if I don't come up with anything.

So with that said, this should give some idea of which game soundtracks are still held in high regard, as well as what can reasonably be considered a hidden gem (my own lists focus more on technical achievement as I've mentioned elsewhere). Oh and a 1990s page is something I'm working on, though it will be a WIP for quite a while. Enjoy!

One last note: The lists are based on original release dates, not any later, localized dates.