1997

Final Fantasy VII was the most expensive video game ever made at the time of its release, with a development and marketing budget estimated at $45 million — an extraordinary figure in 1997 when most AAA games were produced for under $5 million. Square spent the money on three things: the quality and quantity of pre-rendered CG cutscenes, the scope of the game world, and the scale of the North American marketing campaign. The cutscenes were unlike anything the PlayStation had previously displayed — cinematic sequences of polygonal characters in environments of genuine visual ambition, including the opening fly-through of Midgar that lasted over four minutes and cost more to produce than most contemporaries spent on entire games.

The narrative of Final Fantasy VII — a mercenary named Cloud joins an eco-terrorist cell fighting a megacorporation that is draining the planet's life energy, discovers a complicated and painful personal history, and confronts a villain whose nihilism is philosophically coherent rather than merely cartoonish — was the most sophisticated story a console RPG had attempted in the Western market. The death of Aerith Gainsborough in disc one remains one of the most discussed moments in gaming history: genuinely unexpected, structurally meaningful, and emotionally devastating to players who had spent thirty hours building attachment to the character. It demonstrated that video game characters could achieve the emotional resonance of characters in literature or film.

The commercial result was equally unprecedented. Final Fantasy VII sold 9.8 million copies lifetime on PlayStation and remains one of the best-selling JRPGs ever made. More importantly, it changed the Western perception of the genre. JRPGs had been niche products in North America before Final Fantasy VII — games for dedicated hobbyists, marketed modestly, reviewed in specialist publications. After Final Fantasy VII, the genre was mainstream. Square followed up with Final Fantasy VIII, IX, Chrono Cross, and Xenogears within three years, and every one of them found a large, pre-existing Western audience that Final Fantasy VII had created almost single-handedly.

The received wisdom in 1997 was that first-person shooters did not work on consoles. Doom had been ported to SNES and the result was widely considered a failure. The analogue sticks being pioneered on the PlayStation DualShock and N64 controller were promising but untested. Rare's decision to adapt the GoldenEye 007 license into a first-person shooter was considered a risk by Nintendo, which had approved the project primarily because the Bond license was commercially valuable and Rare's output was reliably high quality. The result proved the received wisdom completely wrong.

GoldenEye 007 succeeded for several interlocking reasons. The single-player campaign, based on the film's locations and missions, was designed with genuine intelligence: enemy AI that responded to alarms, objectives that could be completed in multiple sequences, difficulty settings that added mission objectives rather than merely increasing enemy health. The stealth option — using silenced weapons, avoiding alarms — gave the game a layer of tactical choice that pure corridor shooters lacked. And the multiplayer mode, in which up to four players competed in splitscreen deathmatch across maps designed for close-quarters combat, turned the N64 into a social gaming device at university dorms and teen bedrooms across North America.

The four-player GoldenEye session became one of the defining social experiences of late-1990s gaming. The game sold 8 million copies on a platform with a smaller install base than the PlayStation, making it one of the highest attach-rate games in N64 history. It also established that the analogue stick was the correct input method for console first-person shooters — the dual-stick control scheme that every console FPS has used since was developed from the conventions GoldenEye established. Halo, which would launch in 2001 and define the genre for the following decade, was directly influenced by GoldenEye in both its single-player campaign structure and its multiplayer ambitions.