Was Super Mario 64 Miyamoto's Greatest Achievement?

[Soundwave]

RolStoppable said:
Super Mario 64 is hailed for laying the groundwork for modern 3D games (rightly so), but is an artist's greatest achievement a piece of work that makes the already converted build him a (bigger) shrine or is it a piece of work that makes more people interested in and appreciative of the medium?

Super Mario Bros. doesn't get enough credit. Many look at it as merely a sidescroller and even if it laid just as much groundwork for 2D games as Super Mario 64 did for 3D games, it's... well, it's a sidescroller, so 3D wins by default. What isn't talked about is that Super Mario Bros. popularized music in video games. Music is awesome. Music became a must-have in video games.

Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are the kind of titles that N64 kids would pick as greatest achievements, but they are quite bland in comparison with others. How about that game that made women stop saying that video games are stupid and at the same time encouraged them to look better? Or all those other games that made people care about video games? Or the games that kicked Sony's ass? Super Mario 64 didn't do that. Ocarina of Time didn't do it either.

"Hey Miyamoto, your greatest achievement marks a period of decline for your company."

A football player who won a World Cup wouldn't consider his greatest achievement the season when he was the top scorer of the league while at the same time his club got relegated.

But before I digress too much, the greatest achievement should be something that made lots of people enjoy someone's work, preferably beyond a single game. Super Mario 64 doesn't fit the bill. France deserves to lose. Austria for the win.

The only reason the N64 didn't outsell the NES and SNES was because Nintendo chose to use cartridges and forced consumers to make a choice between having variety in their library or a handful of Nintendo games per year.

N64 would've easily sold double at least if they had opted to use CDs + carts. The fact that still sold 33 million with minimal 3rd party support speaks to the strength of games like Mario 64 and Zelda: OoT and GoldenEye. 

If the Sega Master System had all the developer support exclusive like the NES had and the NES just had things like Super Mario Bros. exclusive it would have lost to the Sega Master System. 

People buy a game console to gain access to a wide ecosystem of software, not just a handful games.