I saw a list of Sony’s top-selling first-party games this week, which has sparked a fresh round of my least favorite way to criticize any kind of art: accusing it of not having any “cultural relevance”. The list, which is and may or may not have any basis in re♏ality, seems to reveal that Horizon Zero Dawn sold over 24 million copies, making it the highest-selling PlayStation exclusive of all time.
Some people think that’s strange, considering its competition. Uncharted, The Last Of Us, Spider-Man, and God of War all sold fewer copies than the original Horizon, despite 🍨the fact that those series are all seemingly more popular, more discussed, and more beloved than Horizon. How can it be the PlayStation’s most successful game and also one of its least talked about?
One factor is that Horizon Zero Dawn has been a frequent “pack-in” game for PS4 consoles over the years. If you got the game for free with the PS4, that should♒ still count towards the sell-through rate. Horizon was also given away for free during Sony’s Play At Home pandemic initiative in 2021, which could be inflating its sales numbers. That said, Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection is also a frequent pack-in with the PS4 - even more-so than Horizon - and was also given away for free as part 🥂of Play At Home, and it doesn’t even crack the top ten. The fact is that Horizon Zero Dawn was a wildly successful game that sold tons of copies, despite the fact that people don’t necessarily talk about it the way they talk about The Last of Us and God of War.
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called Horizon “The Avatar of the game industry”, saying that despite being the best-selling game, it has “no major cultural relevance amongst gamers.” This is one of the most common criticisms levied at Avatar, second only to “Blue Pocahontas”, and it’s interesting that we’re now talking about Horizon the same way. Cultural relevance is a metric everyone seems comfortable referencing and using as a way to distinguish important art from🧸 unimportant art, but we seem to take for granted what cultural relevance means, where it comes from, or why it even matters.
Avatar has no cultural relevance, according to every tweet I’ve ever read about it, despite banking billions at the box office (twice) and becoming a Disney World theme park. When the first Avatar came out in 2009, Post-Avatar Depression Syndrome - a lingering disappoint♋ment felt towards the real world after seeing Avatar - was widely reported by mainstream news. This is not cultural relevance though. Cultural relevance, as it seems to be defined by Avatar critics, is memes and quotes from Marvel movies. The Lord of the Rings is still relevant because of the way Boromir reminds us that one does not simply do something. Avatar is unmemable, it doesn’t come across your social media feed like a GIF of Thor winking, nor does it inspire endless banal debates about the comic book accuracy of Captain America: Civil War or why no one in the MCU has acknowledged that there’s a celestial in the middle of the ocean.
If there’s one thing Horizon Zero Dawn has in common with Avatar, other than their questionable reappropriation of Native American iconography and culture, it’s that both refuse memefication, and thus are deemed to be culturally irrelevant. Culture is when Krato෴s shouts “BOY!” and when people on the internet argue about whether or not Joel deserved to die. Culture is the Bodega Cat, culture is Nathan Drake toasting while fireworks explode behind him. Horizon simply cannot be mined for memes in the same way.
It will always be worth examining the impact any piece of art has had on the culture it was produced within and the those that came after, but the way we’ve reduced the definition of cultural relevance down to “GIFs that get the most likes on Twitter” has made it a largely useless metric. Horizon was a game that millions of people bought and enjoyed. It created a franchise that has a sequel, a spin-off, and a Netflix series. It was a techn꧋ical marvel of a game, and a thematically rich text, inviting us to think about our relationship with technology and the corporations that drive technology forward in new ways. All of these things contribute to the game’s overall cultural relevance, and defining the term to be more narrow than that doesn’t help us understand art better, and it shouldn’t be a measure of success.
