NiceHotCupOfBro

"Religion Classics"

I always got the feeling it was something like, say, The Dog Island for PS2/Wii, where no adult in the ensuing decade admitted to having or enjoying the game, and no one put it on "best Wii game" lists in that decade either, but then you have these people crawling out of the woodwork a decade later whenever the game is mentioned and saying "Oh I had that game as a kid, I loved it!" So sort of a thing where the sales figures aren't too hot but the people who DID buy it will do that gushing a decade later. That's kind of how obscure 8-bit/16-bit stuff worked, wasn't it? With the rise of emulation, people finally got to play games that they hadn't seen good (or any) reviews for or didn't want to take a chance on at the time, and then the people who DID play it finally get to gush about it without seeming weird. There were those fans all that time, but the Internet getting its hands on it via wider availability made people look at the existing fan response to the games/films; kind of "lifted up the rock" and revealed all the bugs underneath.

I think a similar phenomenon happened for Cave Story +'s release in 2011. While I wasn't really around in 2004, it's hard to find stuff from before 2011 calling Cave Story an "indie darling" instead of just, like "this game is cool!" or other freeware developers citing it (such as EverEternal WinterWorld or The Underside.) I think the rerelease got the same boost of attention for Cave Story that those emulated games did, and you had the people who had already been fans for all this time getting cited in articles and posting on forums about "oh, I loved that game!" and people suddenly realized there had been a cult underneath the surface of the water all that time.