By that metric there were maybe two AAA PC games in all of 1998.
There were a lot fewer, certainly. FF7 was the heavyweight. Zelda: Ocarina, MGS, and StarCraft were in the running. Shenmu (produced a year later) had a budget north of $47M (the high fluctuation in Yen value making this a hard calculation).
But you wouldn’t see truly big budget gaming until GTA4 crested the nine digit mark.
Bordering on eight digits in 2000 was not a small game at all.
The difference between $7M and $47M is a buncha lotta money.
MGS only made it to Windows in 2000. OoT obviously never did, officially.
Where I was, the games running in demo PCs and net cafés in 98/99 were Quake 3, Unreal and, believe it or not, yeah, Baldur’s Gate. Because BG1 already had pretty much the same MP as BG3 and people would pay per seat to play co-op runs of the original.
For the PC crowd BG1 and Starcraft were on a pretty even playing field in terms of scope perception.
The thing is, at the time counting budgets wasn’t much of a consideration. For one thing, most of them weren’t publicly known at all, beyond the extreme outliers you mention. People took notice when 50 mill were broken because that was such a high water mark for so long, but if AAA was a concept at all (it wasn’t), it certainly had more to do with branding and promotional materials. Having ads on good old normie broadcast TV did more to sell the size of FF7 than how big it was.
Ultimately BG was a major release. It came from a familiar publisher, it had a recognizable license, it had the same gaming magazine coverage as other major releases of the year, and it got a ton of critical praise and buzz across the industry. It didn’t come across as scope-constrained at all. FF7 was on another level entirely, but that was true of pretty much every other game release.
Also, FWIW, OoT wasn’t that big of a deal where I am, and neither was the N64 in general. GoldenEye and Turok drove more attention than OoT, and neither of those were particularly relevant, either. You would have definitely had much more luck getting people to recognize Baldur’s Gate than OoT over here in 1999.
There were a lot fewer, certainly. FF7 was the heavyweight. Zelda: Ocarina, MGS, and StarCraft were in the running. Shenmu (produced a year later) had a budget north of $47M (the high fluctuation in Yen value making this a hard calculation).
But you wouldn’t see truly big budget gaming until GTA4 crested the nine digit mark.
The difference between $7M and $47M is a buncha lotta money.
MGS only made it to Windows in 2000. OoT obviously never did, officially.
Where I was, the games running in demo PCs and net cafés in 98/99 were Quake 3, Unreal and, believe it or not, yeah, Baldur’s Gate. Because BG1 already had pretty much the same MP as BG3 and people would pay per seat to play co-op runs of the original.
For the PC crowd BG1 and Starcraft were on a pretty even playing field in terms of scope perception.
The thing is, at the time counting budgets wasn’t much of a consideration. For one thing, most of them weren’t publicly known at all, beyond the extreme outliers you mention. People took notice when 50 mill were broken because that was such a high water mark for so long, but if AAA was a concept at all (it wasn’t), it certainly had more to do with branding and promotional materials. Having ads on good old normie broadcast TV did more to sell the size of FF7 than how big it was.
Ultimately BG was a major release. It came from a familiar publisher, it had a recognizable license, it had the same gaming magazine coverage as other major releases of the year, and it got a ton of critical praise and buzz across the industry. It didn’t come across as scope-constrained at all. FF7 was on another level entirely, but that was true of pretty much every other game release.
Also, FWIW, OoT wasn’t that big of a deal where I am, and neither was the N64 in general. GoldenEye and Turok drove more attention than OoT, and neither of those were particularly relevant, either. You would have definitely had much more luck getting people to recognize Baldur’s Gate than OoT over here in 1999.