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Which game had a greater impact on the medium?

  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

    Votes: 1,949 74.0%
  • Final Fantasy VII

    Votes: 685 26.0%

  • Total voters
    2,634

Deleted member 1238

User requested account closure
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Oct 25, 2017
3,070
Lol right, because "good cutscenes" is the only thing Metal Gear Solid brought to the table, right? And who said good cutscenes were the "most" influential thing in gaming, you? The stealth tactics introduced in MGS are equally if not moreso influential than its presentation.



Which was in Mega Man Legends prior to Zelda. Your point?
1) you were the one who was going on and on about MGS's cinematics in a thread about OoT v FFVII, not me.

2) we've already discussed MML's lock on targeting v OoT's Z-targeting. You're welcome to look back on the thread and see for yourself, but the long story short is that what MML did in '97 was not the Z-targeting that Zelda introduced which set the industry standard that is still used today and would ultimately go on to influence many many games including MML's sequel, MML2. But seeing as how this thread was initially about how influential OoT is compared to FFVII this again just feels like deflection since there wasn't much real debate on that topic.

you can downplay OoT's accomplishments, innovations, and overall influence on the medium as much as you want. At the end of the day most people in this thread think that OoT was the more influential game with the poll not being all that close and the gap only growing since I last checked the thread.
 

CenaToon

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,269
People that says "ocarina by a landslide" probably didnt "experienced" the market in the NES/SNES era and didnt know how hard was to find a copy of a JRPG for NES/SNES because so few copies available.

Thanks to FF7, we know the west JRPG Market as it is now.

FF7 started the JRPG boom in the west.
FF7 made JRPGs "cool" in the west.

It's not my favorite final fantasy at all, but the influence of FF7 in the whole genre is massive. So no, the difference in the influence of both games it's not "by a landslide"
 
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ghostcrew

The Shrouded Ghost
Administrator
Oct 27, 2017
30,334
That's an easy one.

Ocarina revolutionised the blueprint for 3D action RPGs.

Final Fantasy VII, while utterly amazing, was Final Fantasy IV/V/VI with CGI cutscenes and CD audio.
 

The Unsent

Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,416
That's an easy one.

Ocarina revolutionised the blueprint for 3D action RPGs.

Final Fantasy VII, while utterly amazing, was Final Fantasy IV/V/VI with CGI cutscenes and CD audio.
I was playing Assassin Creed Valhalla the other day, and it still felt a bit like Ocarina of Time with the puzzles, enemy targetting, first person arrows and of course, the horse.

I love those PSX Final Fantasys, but c'mon it's Ocarina.
 

werezompire

Zeboyd Games
Verified
Oct 26, 2017
11,299
Yup.

Prior to FF7, square was a niche publisher that sold few if any games outside of Japan. Their SNES output was a joke in the west.

FF6 and Chrono trigger get mentioned a lot for games that sold under 300k copies here.

Ogre battle released in the west with an absurdly low 10,000 (not a typo) copies. Anyone who tells you they played that on SNES in English almost certainly did it via emulator its the rarest game on the system. Tactics Ogre SNES never got localized.

FF6 sold about 450k. CT was under 300k.

I had Ogre Battle on the SNES. Traded it for store credit to buy Brain Lord which was probably the worst trade I ever did. Where are you getting the low print run info? Looking at second-hand prices, Ogre Battle doesn't have the prices that you'd expect from a very low print run game that's well respected. Enix has another SNES game that is much more valuable (E.V.O.) and clearly they felt that Ogre Battle did well enough to justify releasing more games in the series (Tactics Ogre on PS1, Ogre Battle 64, and the GBA Tactics Ogre spin-off).
 

DIE BART DIE

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,844
"Anyone who makes 3D games who says they've not borrowed something from Mario or Zelda is lying — from the games on Nintendo 64"

- Dan Houser, founder of Rockstar
 

Manmademan

Election Thread Watcher
Member
Aug 6, 2018
15,980
Final Fantasy VII, while utterly amazing, was Final Fantasy IV/V/VI with CGI cutscenes and CD audio.

Look at the state of the FF franchise before FF7 released to understand why it was important.

FF1- released, but not a success in the west.
FF2- not localized
FF3- not localized
FF4- released as "FF4 easy type." features removed. Not a success in the west.
FF5- not localized
FF: Mystic Quest- bombed
FF6: released, sold around 300k copies.
FF7: released, sold around 3 million.

Its not the mechanics of the game, but the marketing and exposure (it had an extremely expensive campaign backed mostly by Sony) that changed American perception of JRPGs and made FF a mainstream franchise.
 

Deleted member 54073

User requested account closure
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Feb 22, 2019
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I'm gonna say FF7 as it was the first AAA game. It also helped launch the Playstation brand and look at where that is now.

Ocarina will win the poll though cause Zelda.
 
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Cactuar

Banned
Nov 30, 2018
5,878
1) you were the one who was going on and on about MGS's cinematics in a thread about OoT v FFVII, not me.

Yes, because if you're going to bring up cinematics as a reason OoT is influential I have to point out that MGS did it first, and did it better. Surely you can comprehend this logic. I never said they were the "most influential thing in gaming." You did.

2) we've already discussed MML's lock on targeting v OoT's Z-targeting. You're welcome to look back on the thread and see for yourself, but the long story short is that what MML did in '97 was not the Z-targeting that Zelda introduced which set the industry standard that is still used today and would ultimately go on to influence many many games including MML's sequel, MML2. But seeing as how this thread was initially about how influential OoT is compared to FFVII this again just feels like deflection since there wasn't much real debate on that topic.

you can downplay OoT's accomplishments, innovations, and overall influence on the medium as much as you want. At the end of the day most people in this thread think that OoT was the more influential game with the poll not being all that close and the gap only growing since I last checked the thread.

I mean, bringing up the poll results means nothing to me and is actually pretty funny if you think it has any meaning at all. I have no way of knowing how many people voting in this pole were even alive when Final Fantasy VII released, including yourself. It means nothing. And yes, MM had lock-on targeting first. No one is saying OoT didn't make it better, just like games came along that made things from OoT better. We said who had it first.
 

werezompire

Zeboyd Games
Verified
Oct 26, 2017
11,299
That's an easy one.

Ocarina revolutionised the blueprint for 3D action RPGs.

Final Fantasy VII, while utterly amazing, was Final Fantasy IV/V/VI with CGI cutscenes and CD audio.

Alternatively, FF7 revolutionized the blueprint for making games, with its massive team size, astronomical marketing budget, and focus on story & non-interactive elements.
 

Aaron

I’m seeing double here!
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Oct 25, 2017
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Minneapolis
"Anyone who makes 3D games who says they've not borrowed something from Mario or Zelda is lying — from the games on Nintendo 64"

- Dan Houser, founder of Rockstar
That's the exact quote that went through my mind when I saw this thread.

FF7 Remake plays more like Ocarina than it does FF7.

I traded in Panzer Dragoon Saga for Bomberman 64 and it didn't quite cover the amount so I still had to pay some extra on top.

Beat that!
I just shed a tear.
 

julia crawford

Took the red AND the blue pills
Member
Oct 27, 2017
35,069
Wow that's a thoughie. You can kind of still feel how contemporary games diverge between these two.
 

ghostcrew

The Shrouded Ghost
Administrator
Oct 27, 2017
30,334
Look at the state of the FF franchise before FF7 released to understand why it was important.

FF1- released, but not a success in the west.
FF2- not localized
FF3- not localized
FF4- released as "FF4 easy type." features removed. Not a success in the west.
FF5- not localized
FF: Mystic Quest- bombed
FF6: released, sold around 300k copies.
FF7: released, sold around 3 million.

Its not the mechanics of the game, but the marketing and exposure (it had an extremely expensive campaign backed mostly by Sony) that changed American perception of JRPGs and made FF a mainstream franchise.

I can accept that FF7 had a massive impact on the Final Fantasy franchise going forward, sure.

But it's not like JRPGs, outside of FF, suddenly became massively mainstream in the west. FF7 was a moment.

I still feel like we're seeing Ocarina's game design influence today, 22 years later.
 

The Unsent

Member
Oct 25, 2017
19,416
This is a Nintendo biased forum so Ocarina will win, but I'm gonna say FF7 as it was the first AAA game.
Playstation is very popular here. God of War, Last of Us, Spider Man, Uncharted, Bloodborne, Sony's exclusives or series have been doing very well in GOTY awards. (Not that there's anything wrong with that..)
 

Tyaren

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Oct 25, 2017
24,695
For me personally Ocarina of Time, because I never even played the original FFVII.
 

CenaToon

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,269
Look at the state of the FF franchise before FF7 released to understand why it was important.

FF1- released, but not a success in the west.
FF2- not localized
FF3- not localized
FF4- released as "FF4 easy type." features removed. Not a success in the west.
FF5- not localized
FF: Mystic Quest- bombed
FF6: released, sold around 300k copies.
FF7: released, sold around 3 million.

Its not the mechanics of the game, but the marketing and exposure (it had an extremely expensive campaign backed mostly by Sony) that changed American perception of JRPGs and made FF a mainstream franchise.

Not counting that for example in europe, FF4 and 6 didnt even got a release in the SNES era. Yep, and thanks to the massive success of FF7 in japan and then the west, encouraged devs and publishers to bring a lot of other JRPGs that probably would never see the light of day in the west in the NES/SNES era like star ocean 2, Tales of Destiny, Dragon Warrior VII, SaGa Frontier, etc.

FFVII basically introduced the JRPG genre to the mainstream in the west.
 

Taco_Human

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Jan 6, 2018
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I like RPGs but I've never beaten a single FF game. Open worlds were a bigger thing in OoT. They expanded on that a lot. RPGs still rpgs.
 

rrost

Banned
Jul 20, 2018
480
Alternatively, FF7 revolutionized the blueprint for making games, with its massive team size, astronomical marketing budget, and focus on story & non-interactive elements.
Man, so all the things that wrong with modern "corporate" game development was its fault?

Talk about negative impact!

Jokes apart, oot developers solved a lot of 3d game design problems whose solution are still the backbone of modern game development.

Its like comparing citizen kane to Star wars.
 

Weltall Zero

Game Developer
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Oct 26, 2017
19,343
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Nobody's debating whether FFVII was a big thing, the question was whether it popularized the JRPG genre, and not just that it popularized FF and little else, or as I'm arguing, was an effect of the gaming market expanding because teenagers no longer grew out of games. The fact of the matter is FFVII could get so big in part because it was a decently popular genre and not just in Japan.

BookReaderImages.php


These are October 1993 sales. You can see Secret of Mana at number 2, 7th Saga at number 6, Final Fantasy Legend 3 at 7, Dragon Warrior 4 at number 8. JRPGs already had a Western market on Nintendo systems, and quite a bit of mindshare. You can talk about revisionism all you want, but open a Nintendo gaming mag of that time period and you can find at least 10% dedicated to JRPGs. Not on Sega systems though and that probably colored perception.

Sure you're mostly talking second half of the top 10, they didn't become number 1 like Final Fantasy VII, but then few other JRPGs not called Final Fantasy did afterwards either. I'm pretty sure Legend of Mana sold quite a bit less than Secret of Mana too, so it's not like JRPGs suddenly arrived.

Cherry picked example aside, comparing SNES RPGs sales to other SNES game sales is entirely missing the point, which is that FFVII popularized the JRPG genre far beyond the gamer crowd (which was the only market for SNES games to begin with). Being the biggest goldfish in the bowl (sorry, second biggest) doesn't make you the shark FFVII was.

More importantly, games like FFVII cannot continue to be made without the kind of market FFVII itself brought to the table. If FFVII had either never been made or been a flop, the gaming landscape would look very differently today. That is influence in its purest form.
 

melodiousmowl

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Jan 14, 2018
3,774
CT
OoT. set the standard for how to make a 3d action game. stuff like lock on and what not are still used today.

FF7 was huge , and introduced many people to RPGs, but that would've happened anyway in a year or two when pokemon came out.




basis of this? i feel like many female gamers love zelda. its not like FF primarily targets women.
Curious as well - my sister played OoT and loved it for the little bit she played, and seemed totally disinterested in FF7 (all anecdotal but there it is)
 

Cactuar

Banned
Nov 30, 2018
5,878
Holy shit, this right here encapsulates the discussion.

Quote of the thread.

Ocarina plays more like Brave Fencer Musashi than it does the Legend of Zelda, and Musashi came out first and is from Square, makers of Final Fantasy.

Final Fantasy VII is an old school, turn-based RPG. Nobody up in here denying that. The innovations it brought to the table have nothing to do with turn-based mechanics, it has everything to do with video game presentation and production. And that is felt every day across every AAA game that is released year, after year, after year.
 

Weltall Zero

Game Developer
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Oct 26, 2017
19,343
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Yup.

Prior to FF7, square was a niche publisher that sold few if any games outside of Japan. Their SNES output was a joke in the west.

FF6 and Chrono trigger get mentioned a lot for games that sold under 300k copies here.

A LOT of their output never got localized and stayed in Japan because of this.

Romancing Saga?
Final Fantasy V?
Romancing Saga 2 and 3?
Alcahest?
Live A Live?
Front Mission?
Seiken Densetsu 3?
Bahamut Lagoon?
Treasure of the Rudras?

All Japan only. Include Enix's output and this gets longer.

Dragon Quest V and VI, the company's flagship game never appeared in the states.

7th Saga showed up with a broken western localization. The sequel (Mystic Ark) never got localized.

Star Ocean? What's that? Never released in the west.

Ogre battle released in the west with an absurdly low 10,000 (not a typo) copies. Anyone who tells you they played that on SNES in English almost certainly did it via emulator its the rarest game on the system. Tactics Ogre SNES never got localized.

Terranigma confusingly got a EU/JP only release, leaving US gamers missing the final installment of the Quintet "trilogy" (Soul blazer/Illusion of Gaia/Terranigma)

It was the vocal opinion of Square/Enix that Western gamers didn't like grand narrative JRPGs because they were "too hard" or too complex.

This is how we got FFIV nerfed down to FF easy type, FF Mystic Quest, and Secret of Evermore. All were basically failures.

It was the partnering and marketing push of FF7 that changed that and made "final fantasy" something western gamers had heard of AND caused a flood of JRPG localizations after the thing sold millions more than any other title in the genre had before it.

Ocarina is a good game, but absolutely nowhere near as influential.

Exactly this, thank you.
 

werezompire

Zeboyd Games
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Oct 26, 2017
11,299
Man, so all the things that wrong with modern "corporate" game development was its fault?

Talk about negative impact!

Jokes apart, oot developers solved a lot of 3d game design problems whose solution are still the backbone of modern game development.

Its like comparing citizen kane to Star wars.

Well, the question wasn't "which had the most positive influence." I feel FF7 had the bigger influence, albeit a lot of that influence was bad.

The Citizen Kane to Star Wars comparison is an apt one, except I'd say that Mario 64 was the Citizen Kane and OoT was mostly a refinement of the techniques that were done in Mario 64. And Mario 64 is a far more influential game than either one.
 

Manmademan

Election Thread Watcher
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Aug 6, 2018
15,980
I can accept that FF7 had a massive impact on the Final Fantasy franchise going forward, sure.

But it's not like JRPGs, outside of FF, suddenly became massively mainstream in the west. FF7 was a moment.

This is exactly what happened. Enix's output was in the same condition Square's was before FF7 hit. Much of their product including their flagship games either were not sold here, were sold with vanishingly small print runs, or appeared with broken localizations.

You want to take this further, without the stratospheric success of FF7 and FF8, The Spirits Within doesn't get made and the Square/Enix merger likely turns out very differently, if it happens at all.
 

RustyNails

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Oct 26, 2017
24,586
I feel that Tomb Raider 1 that came out two years earlier than Oot had far more impact on action games.
 
Oct 25, 2017
3,526
The funny thing about the AAA point (while true at the time) is that when you play them now OoT feels more like a modern AAA production than FFVII in several ways. FFVII is abstraction on top of abstraction with more than half the game taking place on barely interactive 2d images with fake versions of your main character.
 

WestEgg

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 25, 2017
14,047
I guess FFVII really is responsible for bringing video games into the spotlight for mainstream adult gamers like nothing else before it. Anyway, here's a picture of Hillary Clinton as the First Lady playing Tetris on a Game Boy.

clinton_game_boy.0.0.jpg
 

ghostcrew

The Shrouded Ghost
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Oct 27, 2017
30,334
I feel that Tomb Raider 1 that came out two years earlier than Oot had far more impact on action games.

Tomb Raider is definitely my pick for 'was a big deal for getting gaming into the mainstream eyes' than FFVII but maybe that's just a UK thing.

FFVII was everywhere and the marketing was insane. But it felt like it was following in the footsteps of Tomb Raider that was already gracing the front covers of mainstream magazines and all of that. I feel like Tomb Raider gave gaming that truly mainstream bump in 1996 and then FFVII, GoldenEye, Ocarina etc were riding on the coat-tails of that. Gaming was more mature and 'cool' for the first time and we had a good few years where there was always another big game that was the new thing. Final Fantasy VII showed very well in screenshots in magazines where it basically looked like a CGI movie.
 

Ferrs

Avenger
Oct 26, 2017
18,829
Tomb Raider is definitely my pick for 'was a big deal for getting gaming into the mainstream eyes' than FFVII but maybe that's just a UK thing.

Not just UK thing. Tomb Raider got a shit ton of magazines, TV ads, theme songs, U2 concerts, and even 2 movies.

Mainstream wise Tomb Raider was bigger than FF7 and OoT (which doesn't mean bigger gaming-wise).
 

Aaron

I’m seeing double here!
Member
Oct 25, 2017
18,077
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Tomb Raider is definitely my pick for 'was a big deal for getting gaming into the mainstream eyes' than FFVII but maybe that's just a UK thing.

FFVII was everywhere and the marketing was insane. But it felt like it was following in the footsteps of Tomb Raider that was already gracing the front covers of mainstream magazines and all of that. I feel like Tomb Raider gave gaming that truly mainstream bump in 1996 and then FFVII, GoldenEye, Ocarina etc were riding on the coat-tails of that. Gaming was more mature and 'cool' for the first time and we had a good few years where there was always another big game that was the new thing. Final Fantasy VII showed very well in screenshots in magazines where it basically looked like a CGI movie.
Not just UK thing. Tomb Raider got a shit ton of magazines, TV ads, theme songs, U2 concerts, and even 2 movies.

Mainstream wise Tomb Raider was bigger than FF7 and OoT (which doesn't mean bigger gaming-wise).
Yeah, I was a kid so I was barely cognizant of much pop culture at the time but I remember Tomb Raider being huge in the late 90s.

I actually only heard of FF and Zelda when I started going on GameFAQs regularly and would see Link, Cloud and Sephiroth dominate the character battles.
 

Nisaba

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Oct 28, 2017
1,940
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This whole thread sounds like some school yard argument in the 90s lol.

But, it's Ocarina of Time by far for lots of the reasons already stated. It's a blueprint still being used today, withstanding the test of time from a gameplay design perspective in the medium.

FF7 selling more than its predecessors thanks to good marketing is not innovative or genre-changing (unless we wanna blame FF7's emphasis on big budget advertising/production for the eventual horrible state of Cyberpunk 2077 lol).
 

Cipherr

Member
Oct 26, 2017
13,416
Would have been developed in other games. The pedestal some nintendo games get put on here is wild.

Everything FF7 did would have been done elsewhere too 'eventually'. Saying it would have been done elsewhere at some point is a terrible criticism. And OOT was the and likely still is one of the highest rated games of all time. Websites like Metacritic had to separate the legacy consoles into a new category to keep OOT from being on top and its been over two decades. Thats not a Resetera pedestal you see, thats a pedestal that the entire industry put the game on unanimously and deservedly.
 

correojon

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
1,410
I think that most 3D games today are still built on the foundations established by SM64, OoT and Doom (Wolfenstein came first but it was really Doom that had the bigger impact). I don't feel FF7 is on the same league.
 

ProtomanNeo

Member
Oct 27, 2017
2,190
It's OoT.

While FFVII is a fantastic game. These arguments of it bringing RPG's to the masses I find a little odd. The marketing Sony Computer Entertainment of America brought it to the masses.
 

Jbone115

Member
Oct 25, 2017
2,734
I voted for OOT, but FF7 was also highly influential in gaming though for very different reasons. This thread has of course turned into putting down one of gaming's landmark titles to elevate another (depending on which game a poster is going to bat for).

Really, I wish "both" was a poll option.
 

FrakEarth

Member
Oct 25, 2017
3,271
Liverpool, UK
I'm glad to see Tomb Raider getting a mention. The big 'wow' moments for me in that generation were Mario 64, Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid and Ocarina of Time - but being obsessed with Link to the Past, Ocarina was a natural evolution of LTTP and I always preferred the latter's overworld and the memories it gave me. Mario 64 and Tomb Raider were a revelation in 3D traversal though, and where the former wowed on sight thanks to the slick framerate and acrobatics, the latter wowed through great puzzling, lovely swinging / clambering traversal, slick CG storytelling and instant mass-appeal. I don't consider narrative storytelling to be a legacy of FFVII - it perhaps contributed to the adoption of more cinematic games - but I think lots of games are to thank for that like Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil and others. The actual gameplay DNA had its legacy in earlier FF titles, and modern FF games have made the battles much more active and action-oriented... when I think of things like the traversal in Uncharted, or the stealth in any number of games, or like the OP mentions - Z-targeting from Zelda -- I would consider that some games have been much more influential, at least in gameplay terms.

Final Fantasy VII was the first Final Fantasy I played properly though, and I loved it. A family friend brought the game over one Christmas, passed me the controller and walked away and I was there for hours on the edge of my bed - I played through the entire Midgar sequence in one sitting. I sunk a lot of hours in to beating the game in a way I've possibly not really ever done since, and I loved talking to family and friends at the time about things like the Ultima Weapon battles and collecting all the summons. It made me go back and play SNES games I was maybe too young to appreciate; games like Terranigma, Chrono Trigger and FFVI.

Before FFVII my RPG experiences were probably more PC based - I'd played Ultima and similar on the PC. When the games went 'talkie' it was a massive turn-off for me and it coincided with me starting to have less and less time to devote to games too. I don't have the patience for grinding stats, and I have even less patience for melodramatic stories / acting. I'm not shitting on JRPGs but they're just not for me these days, I go to sleep at things like the game awards or Nintendo directs the moment an anime character appears. I tried to get in to Xenoblade, DQXI and a few others but I just can't do it anymore. So many seem to come out that I wish I could still get in to them sometimes.
 

Crumrin

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Feb 27, 2020
2,270
Both brought unique things to the table and helped to break new ground and move the industry forward. Poll should have a "Both" option, highlighting one at the expense of the other is a disservice to history.