The "Good For Its Time" Defense

[Koh]

@This post

But you yourself are also ignoring that there can be zero advertising and it still happens, good or bad.  For example, Flappy Bird and Goat Simulator.  These aren't the kind of things that were all on TV or something, it's literally just some shitty games that got insanely popular because of the sharing people did.  "Hey man, check out how bad this game is."  And then that person shares it with three more people, and so on, until everyone and their grandmother is talking about it.  The developers did absolutely nothing in regard to it spreading around the way it did.  It was just other people making something like that so popular, when it really isn't anything at all.  For this reason, you cannot trust popularity of something alone, because quite literally anything can go viral and take the world by storm, advertised or not, good or not.  

Hell, even the Mother 3 fans that exist, or fans of anything that was never officially advertised over here or released over here, should know this.  We never got the game, and still haven't; it was only a thing in Japan.  Fanslators got their hands on the rom, fanslated it, and suddenly it got a cult following.  I'm not saying the game is good or bad, but it's definitely not anything that was advertised over here, it just happened to build up from people spreading it around on their own.

Hydlide didn't have that happen to it because it was before the emulation era, and wasn't even a Western thing until it was ported on the NES, but it was a BIG deal in Japan.  So are we just to say it wasn't "good for its time," just because it wasn't popular HERE?  Then we'd start creating some double standards. But if we also say something was "good for its time" just because it happened to be popular, that's also a problem, since it doesn't take into consideration the actual content and mechanics of the game, and just goes by metrics.