2003 saw many sequels and prequels in video games, such as Tony Hawk's Underground, Madden NFL 2004, NBA Live 2004, ESPN NBA Basketball, Saya no Uta: The Song of Saya, Final Fantasy X-2, Mario Kart: Double Dash, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Sonic Heroes, Postal 2, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, and WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain. New intellectual properties included Beyond Good & Evil, Boktai: The Sun is in Your Hand, Call of Duty, Disgaea, Drakengard, Manhunt, PlanetSide, TrackMania, True Crime: Streets of LA, and Viewtiful Joe. The year's best-selling video game worldwide was Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire, the fifth time a Pokémon games was the annual worldwide top-seller (since 1998).

Events

Business

Hardware

Discontinued

Trends

Computer games continue to lose ground to console video games with a US sales drop of 14% in 2003. Total 2003 entertainment software sales in the United States grew slightly to US$7 billion; console sales increased to $5.8 billion and computer games accounted for the remaining $1.2 billion.

Video game consoles

The dominant video game consoles in 2003 were:

Handheld game systems

The dominant handheld systems in 2003 were: Additionally, two new handheld consoles were introduced in 2003, the Game Boy Advance SP (an enhanced GBA) and Nokia's N-Gage.

Best-selling video games

Japan

United States

PAL regions

Games with notable critical reception

Metacritic (MC) and GameRankings (GR) are aggregators of video game journalism reviews.

Critically acclaimed games

Famitsu

The following video game releases in 2002 entered Famitsu magazine's "Platinum Hall of Fame" and received Famitsu scores of at least 36 out of 40.

Critically panned games

Notable releases