Bottom line Goldeneye was #3 selling all time N64 after Mario.
Sure, but if that's how it works, how well-selling a game is, we should note that #3 on N64 is like #300 of "all games" if that - it might be much further back given we fairly often see indie games sell several million copies.
I mean, if we look at the list of "best selling videogames" on Wikipedia, we see it basically cuts off at 28m copies, which is almost more than the number of N64s that were ever in existence. Goldeneye sold 8m copies. Extremely high for N64, I agree. But like Crash Bandicoot 2 sold nearly that many copies on PS1.
So I feel like that's kind of countering your own argument.
What the cultural significance here is that Goldeneye showed for the first time a FPS can be wildly successful to the point of being worth doing instead of leaving to PC.
I personally don't think that was something that needed to be proved! If it was, I don't understand why people were churning out so many FPS for consoles since long before Goldeneye, and why there wasn't really any increase after it did? And there weren't Goldeneye imitators - which I actually think is surprising and significant. It's rare a game that successful doesn't spawn imitators. If anything it's kind of noteworthy that Goldeneye didn't catch o with game designers.
Whereas Halo's success (and it didn't even initially sell as many copies as Goldeneye) absolutely did have very rapid impacts on the industry as people started trying to make their own Halos.
I do agree that this idea that Goldeneye "cleared the way" for later console FPSes was something a lot of Millennial game journos claimed in the 2010s though. It's not an uncommon or weird idea. I just don't think it's one that can be supported by the facts, if we look at what released and when. I think rather it was early, successful, and cool, but like, it's a Dimetrodon of games, an evolutionary dead end.
I guess Dimetrodon is in museums not because it was successful or genuinely important but because it was cool-looking and memorable, so maybe on that ground Goldeneye should be in lol? Maybe I've argued myself around?
EDIT: Don't read all this and then complain you were bored, just skip it if it's going to bore you lol!
I think facts matter a huge amount, and I just don't think it's okay to ignore facts when making arguments about history (or the present day). I feel pretty depressed by how much we disregard facts today in favour of vibes, and I have to say, me carefully attempting to marshal the facts being called a "fact tsunami" as if it was a disaster and you saying I'm only doing it to "win" not because I care about the facts is sad to me. Makes me want wonder if I should just join the zeitgeist and go full vibes, screw what actually is true. It would certainly be hugely easier lol.
The reason I care about this, specifically, is that history of videogames has been massively rewritten in very inaccurate ways (and further, ones that are easily shown to be inaccurate) by a lot of Millennial and younger games journalists and writers, specifically American ones, who have a produced warped and deeply Nintendo-centric vision of the history of games, which tends to disregard PC games almost entirely from the mid-1980s until the late '90s at earliest, and completely disregards everything that happened in Europe or the rest of the world, with the exception of Japan, but Japan is only remembered when it's convenient, and when it mattered to Americans. Sony consoles sell insane numbers, have huge impact worldwide, the games on those are far more widely played, but the same journalists continue to act like only Nintendo, or later Xbox (the original and 360) and PC matter.
It's a bit like the "great man" theory of history too, because the journos and writers I'm referring to tend to act like every change in the industry has to be down to one pivotal game, completely ignoring the fact in most cases, big changes had been happening across the industry for years
before one game exemplified them, rather than being causative of those changes. That's not to say single-point causation doesn't happen - it absolutely does. But the way history is being written, everything is single-point causation, there's a never a pre-existing trend, and that's very obviously untrue, but because it makes a better story, it's what people say.
And because this is a museum of games, it peeves me a bit that they're not prioritizing history/fact, they're seemingly prioritizing stories.
(Now I will note that there is a post-modern and post-colonial take on historiography which is that all history and for that matter archaeology is just stories, essentially nothing is true, there are no facts, that science itself is basically a story/lie, and so on. But despite this theory emerging from from post-modern progressives anti-colonialists, it's actually most popular with the extremist far-right, for what I think are probably obvious reasons. The far-right British philosopher Roger Scruton was particularly fond of the idea that the facts of history should be disregarded in favour of good stories.)
Sorry for all the waffle, no-one has to read it all lol but you got me thinking!
