1994, Game of the Year

[The_Liquid_Laser]

SvennoJ said:

The_Liquid_Laser said:

The voting period is now over.  This year was a close race between 3 SNES games, but in the end Super Metroid was the winner and the runner up was Final Fantasy VI.  

I gotta say that I was reluctant to put 4 SNES games into the poll.  That seemed like a lot of slots to devote to one platform, but after seeing the voting results that was obviously the right choice.  The four top rankings went to the four SNES games.  Even Earthbound, a distant 4th place, ended up above every other game and the "Other" category too.  The SNES really owned 1994, and without any Mario or Zelda game either.

EDIT:  As of me posting this, the 4 SNES games have 78% of the poll's votes.

Has the split between console and PC ever been this one sided before?
I see 84% went to console only games (at release) (not counting other) and it certainly wasn't a weak year for PC releases.
The SNES really hit top popularity in 1994, even though at that time I didn't even know a single person with a SNES. (Just wasn't popular where I lived in Europe)

Yeah, there have been several other years where computer/PC games didn't get a lot of votes.  It really has to do with how strong the console games are that year, although I think 1993 was a particularly strong year for PC games with both Doom and Myst.

One thing you have to realize is that a lot of forum users are younger than you or I.  That means the 90's was actually ahead of their time, but they might go back and try some games on the Virtual Console or SNES classic or whatever.  The games they are most likely to play are earlier versions of series they love, especially Mario and Zelda.  Final Fantasy 4 and 6 have also done fairly well in the polls, so Playstation fans may be throwing votes at these games which were actually before their time. 

PC games tend not to have long running series like these.  Adventure games aren't popular anymore, and really they don't make RTS games anymore either.  Maybe Diablo will get some votes, because it's still going.  Who knows?  Younger gamers don't go back and visit earlier PC games like they do for console games.  And once we get out of the 90's the popularity of PC games will start to wane.

History is written by the winners, and in gaming that means Nintendo and Playstation.  PC games did well in the polls against Genesis games, because Sega hasn't won in the long run.  But the PC has basically lost too.  It's best years were in the 90's.  It's not the platform that it used to be.  When I was going through the 80's some very popular Arcade and Atari games were overlooked for Nintendo games of that era.  The Arcade and Atari have lost.  That's why they didn't get votes.  Younger gamers view gaming history through the lens of Nintendo and Playstation instead of the other platforms.