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Super Mario 1, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, were these AAA games? What was the first big AAA game as we know it today?

TheGhost

TheGhost

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Oct 25, 2017
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WERE*



As the thread title suggests

Were the original Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid or where they more AA games or even indies?

What were the budgets? What were the size of the teams?

If they are not AAA games what was our first AAA game as we know it today?
 
Tavernade

Tavernade

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I imagine the first would be an arcade game but I'm not knowledgeable enough on early arcade history to know of what the first, big, expensive arcade game was.

Those three Nintendo games were certainly as 'AAA' as the NES would have at the time, I imagine.
 

Jackano

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Oct 27, 2017
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I'm not sure we should look at Nintendo for big teams/budgets.
I remember Shenmue having some press about the magnitude of its development, IIRC. But probably PC has games way before that with a 100+ team.
 
apotema

apotema

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Oct 28, 2017
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As a great big game coming out soon, wait for it!!! I think Super Mario Bros. 3

As a gigantic production budget, maybe Final Fantasy VII or Metal Gear Solid 2
 
nsilvias

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Oct 25, 2017
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triple aaa games didnt become a thing until the ps2 era.
before that game dev was relativity affordable enough in comparison to how much profit they made for publishers to throw around money on all kinds of weird projects.
 
Psamtik

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Probably Shenmue, in terms of sheer cost and an at-the-time gigantic 300+-person development team.
 

Nuclear Muffin

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Oct 29, 2017
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FF7 was probably the first. Had an overall budget of $40 million IIRC, which was utterly unheard of in 1997. That would be considered within the realm of AAA, even in the PS360 era.
 
Dezzy

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They were just games. I never even heard the term AAA until the PS3/360 era. Games were just games. Teams were pretty small back in the day. Nothing like the 1000+ teams of today.
 
Fularu

Fularu

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Oct 25, 2017
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Quake and Tomb Raider where probably among the first one

Quake was one of the first games released I saw billboard printed adds in the streets for
 
LumberPanda

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apotema said:
As a great big game coming out soon, wait for it!!! I think Super Mario Bros. 3

As a gigantic production budget, maybe Final Fantasy VII or Metal Gear Solid 2
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I would consider SMB3 as well. The Wizard might as well have been part of the marketing budget (somebody correct me if I'm totally off the mark here).
 
ArmadilloGame

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Yuntu said:
imo FF7 was one of the first AAA games as we understand that term today
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Agree. AAA as a term is about a major studio using its big budget status as a/the selling point. It promises an experience not attainable if it were made more cheaply. FF7 leaned on the pure budget of CG cutscenes in a time when that was unheard of to become a phenomenon. If there is any actual answer to OP's question, this is it.
 
Moff

Moff

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Oct 26, 2017
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mario64, quake, diablo, resident evil and tomb raider in 1996 in my opinion.
the hype and the way these games were talked about in magazines was just different
 
NDA-Man

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Fularu said:
Quake and Tomb Raider where probably among the first one

Quake was one of the first games released I saw billboard printed adds in the streets for
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Eh... Lara Croft became a phenomenon... but the original Tomb Raider was made mostly by a team consisting of six people, from what I can recall. Teams grew in size over the coming installments, but it was still a small enough budget that they could safely turn it into an annualized franchise up until the wheels came off with Angel of Darkness .

Like... what's the measure of Triple A? Total budget? Marketing budget? Cultural impact? FFVII had an unheard-of budget.
 

itfiend

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Dec 31, 2019
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I would argue Sonic 2, Street Fighter II Turbo on the SNES would count. The launch for Sonic was enormous. SFII Turbo was hyped and very expensive at launch.
 
Stormkyleis

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Super Mario Bros. was developed by 5 people: Shigeru Miyamoto (designer, director, and producer), Takashi Tezuka (designer and assistant director), Koji Kondo (composer), Toshihiko Nakago (programmer), and Kazuaki Morita (programmer).

The team behind Super Mario Bros. 3 was only slightly larger: Hideki Konno, Katsuya Eguchi, Kensuke Tanabe, Hiroyuki Kimura, Toshio Iwawaki, and Shigehiro Kasamatsu joined the team. Most of them went on to become producers.

I wouldn't call them "indies" though. Nintendo of America had already been established. Nintendo itself had already been in business for almost 100 years. The development teams were small, but the marketing was relatively big compared to the other video game companies.
 
Arithmetician

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Donkey Kong Country could be a pre FF VII example. It was all about the cutting edge graphics and had a big marketing budget
 
deep_dish

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Apocalypse was a 90's action hero themed shooter on the PS1 starring Bruce Willis. it was released in the mid/late 90s. It was terrible.
 
Jegriva

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I dare to say Ultima VII was the first game to have TENS of developers working on it, maybe.
 
TheMoon

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TheGhost said:
WERE*



As the thread title suggests

Were the original Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid or where they more AA games or even indies?

What were the budgets? What were the size of the teams?

If they are not AAA games what was our first AAA game as we know it today?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The made-up nonsense that is the entirely undefined and essentially meaningless label "AAA" did not exist in the age you are talking about.
 
Mentalist

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If I were to guess, I'd say StarCraft.

Most of Black Isles' Infinity Engine games fall in that category as well.
 
MikeProtagonist

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AAA implies a huge budget and production values. Games like SMB3 and probably most games through the 16 bit era were made with less than 20 people. Plenty of commercial games back then were 1-2 people productions.

Journey lists 21 people in actual development but over 400 more in additional roles. Even if it took less time to make, it must have cost tons more just in terms of wages, and that's still a rather small, compact indie game.
 

The Angry Internet

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Oct 28, 2017
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This is pretty arbitrary, but then so is the idea of "AAA" in general, so: King's Quest V, Wing Commander, and Ultima VII were all claimed at different times to be the first games with development budgets exceeding $1 million. By 1994 things had escalated to the point that Wing Commander III came in at four times that figure, and by 1996 Wing Commander IV had gone up to $12 million. The Chris Crawford interview in Game Design: Theory and Practice pins the blame on Wing Commander for launching the "hit-driven" era where a single game could cost so much that it would have to be a chart-topper to have any hope of recovering the investment. That's just one man's perspective (and a man with undisguised contempt for how gaming in general has developed over the last few decades), but it's one answer to the question.
 
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SimonSimon

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TheMoon said:
The made-up nonsense that is the entirely undefined and essentially meaningless label "AAA" did not exist in the age you are talking about.
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Yeah, that's entirely anachronistic.

I'd actually be interested in when that term started getting used. I wonder what the first game was that got described as a "AAA game." Any ideas?
 
VGEsoterica

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I remember Super Mario 3 being HUGELY hyped when it came out. Like it was all over tv as commercials, in ads, etc etc. That's my first gaming memory of a "big, must have game"
 
TheMoon

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TheGhost said:
I know, I was there

i thought seeing those cut Scenes in ninja gaiden were some next level shit to me in 6th grade
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For sure, they were. But that has nothing to do with AAA as it is being used these days. Just some really good people cranking out some really good stuff in the early, fruitful, and wild days of the medium.
 

Deleted member 8468

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Based on the responses, we don't have a good definition of what 'AAA' means. To me it means funding and manpower at a very high level compared to the state of the industry. The 'best effort' the video-game industry has to offer at the time. It's not necessarily a statement of quality on the end product, just the comparative effort available at the time.

Under that definition I'd say stuff as early as the big arcade titles would be AAA games of their day. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, etc.

If AAA games didn't exist until 1997 then I don't know what we're talking about.
 
crimsonECHIDNA

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Going to go out on a limb and say Super Mario Bros. 3, what with debuting footage of the game in The Wizard.

And closely behind that Sonic the Hedgehog, since it was specifically designed to be Sega's killer app mascot.
 
Nessus

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I'd consider Super Mario Bros. the biggest AAA game of its time.

Like, it was such a huge leap beyond what anyone else had done at the time.
 
K Samedi

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Final Fantasy 7 had a comparable budget to AAA games these days. I would even guess that the budget of FF7 Remake is pretty comparable to the original Final Fantasy 7.
 
NinjaScooter

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AAA is relative.Super Mario Bros, Sonic, Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2 were AAA relative to the eras they came out in.
 
SimonSimon

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I found a fascinating resource, which is a glossary of game biz terms, that's been consistently updated since 2003. I found it when I was trying to research the history of the term AAA. I can't seem to find any references on Google pre-2003, though I am almost certainly missing stuff.

Anyway, the oldest version of the site has the term AAA, but the definition is weird. It says that a AAA game is any game in the top 10 sellers. That is not at all how the term is used these days. If you go through the archives, you'll see that the definition keeps changing. By 2006, budget is considered a thing. Again, this is only a single resource, but it's an interesting glimpse into the history of the term AAA.
 
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