Nintendo Wii: Sold like gangbusters.
64bit Processors: The computing standard.
Battlestar Galactica: Considered one of the greatest sci-fi series of all time.
Facebook: Continues to be the world’s leading social media platform by literally BILLIONS of users.
High Definition: HD only got even more HD.
iPhone: Set the standard for mobile smartphone form factor and function to this day 16 years later.
To be fair, Spore was overhyped - it was fun enough, but not the total gamechanger that it was forecast to be. Will Wright had two amazing strikes with Sim City and then the Sims, and then a whole pile of very middle-of-the-road simulation games, so it wasn’t that hard to foresee.
And EEE PCs occupied the uncomfortable niche where they didn’t do a lot that your phone couldn’t, while being extremely limited compared to a £300 ‘proper’ cheapo laptop. That’s not really a business model.
So yeah, that’s two things that anyone could have seen coming, versus eight where they’re so massively completely wrong they couldn’t have failed harder if they tried. Would have been better to call this list ‘things which are not massively overhyped’, they’d have done better.
Yeah, when they talked about procedural generation I was imagining like, photorealistic details or custom textures on the fly, something way more advanced than what was available at the time. I didn’t really understand it but it sounded fancy! But all it really meant was like a random map and random species being chosen. It didn’t quite live up to the marketing, sadly.