Okay, I had to get creative, but was able to get most of the production numbers out of IPDB. Here is a plot of overall production, expressed as the sum of all units produced that year.
Now, note that not all games have production numbers in IPDB, and I have no idea how accurate the numbers are. Also, ignore everything after 2000 because we only have data for LE and Premium models. So grain of salt and all that. Anyway, when looking at the data this way, the resurgence in the mid-80’s basically disappears. however, we get a nice peak in the mid 90’s.
Interesting things happen when we look at units produced per model across years. The data is expressed as a box plot here.
In terms of units produced per model, the bump in the mid 90s was very comparable to that of the mid 70s. They were producing about the some number of units per model, and there were several runaway hits. The biggest difference was just the number of models produced.