In all seriousness, are you afraid of losing your mod status or being fined or something if you just admit you were wrong? There's countless examples from Condemned to Amnesia to Outlast which came, at minimum, over a year before PT which were all popular.
lmao why would that be a thing? Do you seriously believe it's such a serious thing to be "wrong" over something like this? go back to my original post. I said that it wasn't the inventor, but we would be kidding ourselves in saying that PT was completely irrelevant, even if the reason is that it was Silent Hills.
Then I made a joke about people who shit on PT and some people, for some weird reason I can't point to anything else but just usual internet hyperbole, felt this was a huge insult to their families.
I honestly admit I'm probably being too snarky, But I feel like the point is pressing you on thinking a bit longer and harder on pondering "are you sure this was as big a deal outside your bubble than you think?" Like... this is hard. We all live in a bubble. I absolutely exist in a bubble on many things. I try to step out of that bubble to assess what the mainstream perspective is on things when needed. But even then, am I really succeeding?
I feel like your response is just to go "no, it was a pretty big deal. I remember." And it's honestly not clear to me how hard you are really trying to step outside of your own shoes to make that assessment. It's entirely possible that I'm being unfair. It's silly for me to try to be the arbitrator of what was and wasn't a big deal in 2014 video game hype. But I really feel like you are not considering the extent to which you may, just may have been influenced by the bubble within which you viewed the reception of gaming news as it impacted more mainstream sources.
Like if you linked a "here's TIME magazine describing PT as the biggest gaming event of the decade" article I might go "holy shit my 38 year old brain is completely failing me. PT WAS a gigantic deal!!!"
Lol ok mate, PT has been irrelevant since day one. You're completely right.
So when referring to it being a bubble thing, I'm talking less about the flash hype of "omfg! It was really Silent Hills! By Kojima! With Del Toro!!" and more the kinda talk that we're actually having as a topic of this thread where the implications of a longer term impact is being discussed.
I already acknowledge that there definitely was a lot of hype and coverage about PT turning out to be Silent Hills. But attributing the fact that many people got excited over what was effectively a teaser for a new entry into what actually is a truly influential classic horror IP isn't the same thing as that interactive teaser itself changing the future landscape of the genre much.
The bubble aspect is where members of a community such as this can often pay little to no attention to subgenres that are plenty healthy and thriving, until something comes along which places it on their radar for a different reason (Sony + Kojima + Del Toro, for example). So now, because this type of game is suddenly on their radar, anything that comes after it is attributed to having been influenced by the first thing they actually paid attention to the existence of, regardless of how many prior notable examples exist. OP already started implying the Resident Evil 7 adopted a first person viewpoint as a result of PT, despite interviews existing that prove this not to be the case at all. Someone who paid attention to the subgenre prior to PT's reveal, and saw titles like Amnesia, Condemned, Outlast, etc all finding success for themselves, would likely be a whole lot less likely to see Resident Evil 7 and attribute it's existence to PT specifically. And you know one of the main types of people that are likely to have actually paid attention to a subgenre and be well aware of prior examples within it? The people that create such games.
The bolded is the entire point of PT being important. It's not just an ERA (or GAF, or Reddit, or whatever) thing to not pay attention to other stuff. It's normal, it happens even in the mainstream. PT was important because it attratacted people from outside the fans of the subgeneres. It's not exclusive to videogames either, it happens with movies and music, that there are "ambassador" artists (or arts) that bring people into subgeneres and opens the gates into more stuff.
Yes, of course, I never cared for the "hallway defenseless horror", or whatever, subgenre. It was PT that made me pay a bit of attention to it. I'm not alone in that. Becoming
that game that "bursts the bubble" is the entire point. And that happened all over different communities at the time. I insist, the fact that people mistaken PT for an inventor or the first of its kind is not just "oh it's just that people were on a bubble before", it's the entire point of being an important (almost) game that helped bringing people, people that the other games failed to bring in for whatever reason.
I think that some people just don't realize that being popular among the "kids" is one thing, and being cross-generational is another thing. That was PT at the time. That's why we still talk about what could have been, etc.