Seattle Top Gaming City?
By Geoff Duncan
May 02, 2006
Microsoft and Sperling's BestPlaces say Seattle is the top video gaming city in the United States. Gosh: could it be all the coffee, or just the crap weather?
A new survey commissioned by Sperling's BestPlaces—and, of course, curiously assisted and promoted by Microsoft—names Seattle as the top video gaming city in the United States, beating out large metropolitan areas like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C.
Sperling's findings are based on the number of video game systems owned per household (including Xbox, Xbox 360, Playstation 2, Nintendo GameCube, and Windows-based PCs) as well as the number of games purchased and rented, combined with the frequency of online game play via Xbox Live and or Windows-based games.
"The large amount of games played on Xbox Live and the high number of video games owned put Seattle at the top of list, but clearly the survey confirms that games are sweeping the U.S.," said Bert Sperling, founder of Sperling's BestPlaces.
The top fifteen video gaming cities in the Sperling survey are as follows:
- Seattle
- Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN
- Atlanta
- Detroit
- Phoenix-Mesa, AZ
- Washington, D.C.
- St. Louis
- Boston
- San Diego
- Philadelphia
- Chicago
- Dallas
- Houston
- San Francisco
- New York
[Ahem. There are always exceptions to surveys like this. I live in Seattle, there are no Windows systems on the premises, and the only gaming console is an original Atari 2600. So...um, yeah.]