I think they meant videogame, ruling out soccer.

It looks like the Super Mario Bros series has a good showing, but it is the first one. I bet 3 falls into an unlucky valley where the game-playing population was not quite as large as it is now, but it isn’t early enough to get the extreme nostalgia of the first one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

Of course this assumes sales=popularity, but the latter is too hard to measure.