neurological dryer lint

so SMB3 lost to half-life in the title fight. dave had a blog post about how it's just, and how he wonders how you can't think HL is the game of the century... which i do not. HL is a great FPS and a fun game, but that's it. it wasn't revolutionary. it had some technological enhancements above other FPS's, but they weren't mindblowing. honestly, though, you can argue this one back and forth for days. i think it's a matter of perspective.

when SMB3 came out, the reason it was revolutionary was not because no one had ever done a platformer before, although it was clearly the best platformer ever created. it wasn't just due to the fact that it was nonlinear - zelda and metroid had done that before. it wasn't just because graphically it was far superior to any NES game to date. but you combine all those and you've got something magical. it was like exploring the mario universe. it was like a cartoon you could play. it was so creative and expansive. it wasn't just a technological marvel, it was an imaginitive marvel.

and it was the first game that ever got that much hype, that people (not just gaming geeks) were really anticipating. the marketing engine that pushed that game was unprecedented - and in that, it started the foundation of gaming as SERIOUS, broad-based home entertainment. shigeru miyamoto got average, everyday people to care about games. it was so cool, everyone had it, everyone could play it and learn it easy and get good at it (a fantastic example of easy to learn, difficult to master - perhaps the perfect balance of it). and if you didn't have it you REALLY wanted it. some of you were young at the time, so it might not be very vivid that it became the new killer app - and got people into gaming in a way never before seen. if you were around in '90 - remember the commercial? the mario chant, the zoomout to show earth and the huge mario head? remember the chills the first time you saw it in the movie The Wizard? was that just me? :)

now, eventually, the industry may have grown in the way it did without SMB3 - but it probably would have taken a lot longer. (blasphemy coming) i wonder if half-life would have come around when it did - or if at all - without SMB3. because would wolfenstein 3d have been around, if the gaming audience wasn't where it was at the time? if 75% less people cared about games? would doom have been created? would quake? take the significant audience out of the equation, and publishers start thinking twice about financing games like that.

half-life may have encouraged a significant community of modders and developers - but it didn't create the community. people had been modding wolf3d and doom and quake for six or seven years. HL took it to the next level with creative game conversions - but it didn't invent the modding community. and other than that, unfortunately, HL was just a really cool FPS, the next step in an evolution of a genre. a BIG step, a cool step, but a step. SMB3 laid a lot of groundwork for our generation of the gaming industry. and the impact of a game (and its status in a contest of this sort) is more than the graphics or the sound or the control, it's how it affected the world.

the HL win is about what i expected, though. i don't think the majority of voters appreciate how crucial SMB3 was to creating an environment about gaming in our culture - because they were my brother's age, born the year SMB3 came out. i used to hate on the beatles, and thought everyone was on crack for thinking they were this amazingly talented band. but they weren't important because they were phenominal musicians, because i can learn a good portion of the beatles' hits in about five minutes and play them perfectly. i learned that the beatles were important because they did EVERYTHING FIRST. everything. and what they didn't do, zeppelin did, and 95% of all rock music has gotten to be creative ripoffs of their style (there's more flamebait for ya). if the beatles hadn't created verse-chorus-verse rock, where would we be now in music? someone would have done it eventually - but how long, and what would things look like? the beatles of video games - SMB3.

all of that is simply my incredibly biased opinion. many will disagree. thoughts?