Final Fantasy IX.

Was close though because Paper Mario was in the same year.

Definitely. The Saturn may have flopped, but Sega remained king of the arcades throughout the '90s. The House of the Dead 1 and 2. Super GT. The Lost World. Wave Runner. Virtua Fighter 3. Those were just a few of the arcade games Sega released during the Saturn years. Easy to see why they dominated. The Lost World in particular quickly became my favorite arcade game. I remember journeying to the two-story, Sega-owned GameWorks arcade and bar at the Grapevine Mills mall for a couple of my birthdays back during this window of time, which I'd describe as about three hours' worth of heaven for the resources I was given.

Everybody had their natural strengths that helped them through a lot of their rough spots in the home console wars. Sega had the arcades. Nintendo had their handheld systems. Sony had...you know, I think home consoles actually kind of were their natural strength; they've not really had as many rough spots in that market. With Sega, you felt that arcade influence in a lot of their console games too (even beyond arcade ports, I mean).

I see similarities between the Dreamcast's launch-year library and that of the Switch in particular too. Just like how Nintendo seemed to have figured out early on that the Wii U was a flop and quickly shifted their focus of development to their next system, it seemed like it'd been similar for the Sega and the Saturn. When you're banking everything on your next system being a massive hit, you do everything possible to make it one: you make sure the launch-year library is spectacular and memorable, you promote it aggressively and in memorable ways, and you keep the price to consumers reasonable. I think the Dreamcast could've drop-kicked Nintendo and Microsoft's console offerings that gen too most likely had they been able to keep going.

Sony was always going to win though. I mean the PlayStation 2 came with a built-in DVD player and was also two game systems and they were charging $300 for it at launch. You simply couldn't beat that deal, period. DVD players, which few people owned at the time, by themselves were typically around $300 back then and Sony's was also an advanced game system that could play both new PS2 games and your whole, existing PS1 library on top of it for the same price. No other deal like that had ever existed before. You couldn't beat it. It was always going to win. The PlayStation 2 was my first DVD player. Alright it wasn't the best one on the market, but it was definitely the best value by a wide margin. That was the earliest big effort I can recall to reach the otherwise non-gaming market and it proved spectacularly successful. I think they kinda lost sight of the key value proposition component of that the next time around.

I remember The Sims being massive for a good while too. Reason I didn't mention it before though is that I bear the shame of having never actually played it myself. I kept meaning to, but never did get around to it. It did sound like fun!

Perfect Dark was like...ya know basically GoldenEye but without the Nintendo factor. It's an original story with a female lead instead of an existing property offshoot, it's rated M instead of T, it's got so much content that it requires an Expansion Pak to play...it's amazing what difference a little more freedom can make sometimes! (Not that GoldenEye was exactly a bad game or anything itself by any means.)

You know, they ran into conflicts in the course of development that caused most of the dev team to leave? You know how the execs are Rare resolved that problem? They tripled the team's development staff and allowed each of them to add pretty much whatever ideas they wanted to to the game. So many ideas resulted that the final product couldn't be played without an Expansion Pak. Those are the development stories I love to hear!

Low voter turnout so far. Usually over 70 votes by now for the 1990s polls. Nobody cares about 2000? :(

Don't know.  Maybe these threads lost a little momentum when we voted in Age of Empires II as Game of the Year.

This one ended up being a close race between three games, and it stayed close up until the end with the winner taking it by one vote.  The 2000 Game of the Year is Diablo II and the runner up is The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask.

Not enough! It was an underrated year in gaming, IMO.

We're now into the decade that I've of played a lot of games. Probably about 95% of games I've played for more than a half hour have released from 2000 onward.
With that being said, Paper Mario made its debut in Japan in late 2000. It's such a magical game that I'll probably replay soon in prep for the remake of TTYD.

FF9 for me, came out in 2001 in the UK, already had a PS2 by then but still worth it.