Game · 1997 onward
Sony spent a marketing budget on a Japanese role-playing game that nobody in the West believed had an audience, and established both the genre and the PlayStation in a single release.
Final Fantasy VII was released in January 1997 in Japan and later that year in North America and Europe, and went on to sell over 13 million copies in its original form — a figure since extended considerably by re-releases across three decades of platforms. The commercial context is what makes the number significant. Japanese role-playing games had, to that point, been a minority interest in the West: text-heavy, turn-based, slow to start, and widely regarded by Western publishers as unexportable. Square's own earlier entries had reached North America inconsistently, which is why the series' Western numbering did not match the Japanese numbering at all. Sony Computer Entertainment America backed the game with a marketing campaign of a size the genre had never received, treating it not as a niche import but as a system-selling event. It worked in both directions. Final Fantasy VII sold the PlayStation to people who bought the console specifically to play it, and it established that a Japanese RPG could be a mainstream Western product — after which the genre arrived in the West in volume for the remainder of the generation. The decision that made it possible was Square's move from Nintendo to Sony: the game's pre-rendered backgrounds and full-motion video required optical media, and the Nintendo 64's cartridges could not hold them.