Rock Band 4's Tuesday release marks the series' return to the spotlight. Through its history, the franchise has been known not only for making players feel like a real band, but also for boasting a dynamic, varied soundtrack.

After spending time with Rock Band 4, we wanted to know why this iteration's soundtrack didn't grab us as much as previous games. Our hypothesis: The game had fewer Billboard charting hits than other Rock Band entries. To test it, we went through all the songs included on the retail discs for each major, numbered release in the Rock Band series.

Surprise: After analyzing the lists, we found that when you include all charts — including Alternative and Modern Rock singles — a full 63% of Rock Band 4's tunes charted. By that metric, its song list is second only to that of the original Rock Band. What does make 4 stand out, though is that a majority of the game's songs were released during the last five years — a stark contrast to the older-skewing song lists in previous Rock Band titles.

But that's not all the data show. Rock Band 4 has a high number of songs that made the Billboard charts, but the lowest number of no.-1 hits: only two. Rock Band 3, on the other hand, has 10 no. 1 songs, and another 10 that cracked the top 10. Rock Band 2 has five no. 1 hits, and 14 additional songs that cracked the top 10. (For more details, you can take a look at our full spreadsheet here.)

Billboard hits aren't the only thing that determine a song's merit by any stretch of the imagination; The Ramones' classic "Blitzkrieg Bop," for example, never made it to the Billboard charts. But analyzing Billboard performance was the best way we could come up with to empirically determine a song's cultural impact.

Additional reporting by Proma Khosla, Kimberly Truong and Kendal McAlpin.