Yo, pull up a chair. It's 2026, and we're still out here grinding Cayo Perico heists while waiting for GTA VI's fourth delay. But sometimes, I like to dust off the history books and remind myself how we got here. Rockstar's magnum opus didn't just drop and disappear – it clung to the charts like a limpet with a rocket launcher. Let me take you back to a random week in 2015 when the UK games retail chart looked like a greatest hits album nobody was ready to retire.

You can almost hear the collective sigh of every other publisher. Grand Theft Auto V, a game originally released in 2013 on the PS3 and Xbox 360, was bench-pressing the competition two years later without breaking a sweat. It's the digital equivalent of that one friend who refuses to leave the party, and honestly, we love him for it. Rockstar kept the fire stoked with GTA Online drip-feeding content, but even back then, the base game's single-player lore was enough to make a grown gamer weep into their controller.

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Just beneath the throne, FIFA 15 pulled off a slick nutmeg on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. Now, I adore a good spandex exosuit as much as the next operative, but football is basically a religion in the UK. Seeing EA's football titan snatch second place felt like watching your uncle beat a ninja robot in a penalty shootout. It didn't make sense, yet it made total sense. The beautiful game doesn't ask permission.

The rest of the chart reads like a Ubisoft shareholder meeting. Far Cry 4 was camping at number 4, still flaunting its Himalayan vistas and that iconic Pagan Min intro. The Crew was holding steady, proving people genuinely enjoyed driving across a shrunk-down America with their buddies even if the story was as flat as a week-old soda. Assassin's Creed Unity had stumbled out of the gate with those infamous faceless NPC glitches, but it was still clinging to sixth place, stubbornly refusing to be guillotined. And then, like a quiet pirate in the corner, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag sat at eleven – a reminder that sometimes the best assassin is an accidental sea shanty enthusiast.

Minecraft deserves its own paragraph, or maybe a whole museum wing. The blocky colossus appeared twice. The Xbox Edition sat at eighth, while the PlayStation family of versions claimed seventh. Even in 2015, we were already witnessing the birth of a cross-platform empire. Fast forward to 2026, and I'm pretty sure my toaster runs a Minecraft port. Back then, split listings meant double the presence, and let's be real – we all had that one world where we built a dirt mansion and called it art.

A few stragglers caught my eye and made me laugh out loud. Destiny at ninth was still early in its "we'll fix it later, trust us" phase, before The Taken King swooped in like a hero. LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham at thirteen – because even in a serious chart war, the brick-based Dark Knight provides wholesome family chaos. Dragon Age: Inquisition barely scraped in at nineteen, but ask any RPG lover from that era and they'll whisper "Game of the Year" with tears in their eyes. And Super Smash Bros. for Wii U/3DS at eighteen? That game was the sole reason so many Wii Us left the shelf. It was a chaotic family reunion where Pikachu could spike Solid Snake into the blast zone, and I miss it every day.

Then there's the "Did Not Chart" club. It's less a club and more a support group. Watch Dogs, which had burned so bright with its initial hype, vanished completely. Just Dance 2015 was probably too busy being played at birthday parties to register official sales. And Alien: Isolation? Missing from the top twenty – a crime against survival horror. That game made the Xenomorph smarter than most of my co-op partners in 2026. Truly a masterpiece that deserved better sales legs.

As I stare at my backlog of 847 untouched games in 2026, this 2015 chart reminds me: the heavy hitters never really die. GTA V eventually sold over 200 million copies, Minecraft breached 300 million, and FIFA kept churning out essentially the same game with shinier physics every year. We complain about remakes and remasters, yet here was a snapshot where the best-sellers were either brand new masterpieces or two-year-old open-world miracles refusing to fade. And honestly? That's the magic of gaming. A good world is a good world, whether it's 2015 or the year we finally get brain-implants.

What were you playing back then? I bet it was probably GTA V. Or Minecraft. Let's be real – it was definitely one of those two. See you in Los Santos. Same time, same chaos.