I don't know. I didn't think that Super Mario Galaxy could be considered extremely "revolutionary" just because we like it. Yes, the whole gravity mechanism is really cool, but there's not a lot about it that doesn't seem to make it really ground-breaking.
Exactly. Super Mario Bros was revolutionary because it completely flew in the face of what hardcore gamers thought a real game was. Mario Galaxy doesn't do that. Even those who still don't consider Mario a real game don't care, because they just filter him out now, and Galaxy doesn't offer any big sweeping changes to the genre. It's easy to see it as just another Mario game. But Wii Sports demands attention.
Granted, Wii Sports wasn't the first game to have motion controls, but then Super Mario Bros wasn't the first game to have Mario jumping over bad guys while progressing through a story. Likewise, if you look hard enough, you can find control pad-type things before the NES, analog sticks before the N64, 3D platformers before SM64, and patents for motion-based controllers before the Wii, but in every case, Nintendo was the one to take the idea, look at the big picture, and bring it to the masses.
Super Mario Bros. is a classic, and you can't compare some game like Wii Sports to it just because it outsold it.
I think we're using different definitions here. When I say a game will be a classic, I mean it is going to be remembered twenty years from now as being an integral piece of gaming history, not that it fulfills the current definitions of what a game should be. Real classics are the games that make their own rules. Mario Galaxy's best quality is that it's like other Mario games. It's a great game, but it doesn't move the medium forward at all.
You can't compare Wii Sports and Super Mario Bros solely because they've both sold a lot of copies, but that's certainly part of it. The actual quality of the game isn't changed, but what I'm thinking about is their impact on the gaming medium at large. Would games today have stories with a beginning, middle, and end if Donkey Kong had flopped? Would genres like sidescrolling platformers and 2-D fighters even exist if Super Mario Bros had only sold 5,000 copies?
I'm not saying I like where this is all going, but I do trust that Nintendo knows what they're doing. History shows that when Miyamoto does something completely insane because he thinks it's fun, not only does it actually end up being fun, it becomes the new definition of fun. And after having played Wii Music for over ten hours in the last five days, I think he's onto something again.
