I don’t have much of an opinion, but the one that sways me the most (of those listed) is Goldeneye 007.
Goldeneye 007 was a megaton nuke in the FPS genre. It not only took the genre out of the basement and into the living room, but drastically improved it. Prior to GE007, FPS games were at best, like Doom, Hexen, and Quake; good for fans of the genre, but not good enough for the mainstream. GE007 changed all that, it was like a nuclear submarine, blowing those old franchises out of the water. GE007 marked the beginning of the modern FPS genre.
But it took a while. When GE007 launched, it wasn’t that big. It came out quite a while after the film, and a genre that most at the time found uninteresting. It wasn’t selling very well at first, but months later, once people had a chance to play it (particularly the multiplayer), it soared in popularity. In this way, it became one of the biggest sleeper hits of the 1990s (perhaps only topped by Pokémon in that regard).
It was also one of the most critically successful games of the 1990s, scoring high in reviews, and even defeating the juggernaut RPG FF7 at the AIAS awards (which were like the Academy Awards for video games).
So yeah, Goldeneye 007. I don’t think many games in history can match what that game did. While it didn’t age as well as DKC, it arguably topped DKC in terms of popularity, influence, and importance… and DKC was no slouch, it was the highest selling unbundled game of the 16-bit generation, and arguably the turning point of Nintendo vs Sega, as Sega never really recovered - at least, the headliner of that turning point. And in terms of influence, DKC’s influence transcended the genre as it influenced companies like Square to experiment and use pre-rendered graphics. GE007’s influences have echoed down through the FPS genre to this very day, and even into other genres (granted, Rare probably introduced an lot of those things, such as the sniper zoom to platformers, but GE007 introduced it to gaming).
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.
