5 items
Key the truck, carve your name in the seats, take a Louisville Slugger to the headlights. Carrie Underwood's revenge anthem crossed over from country radio to everywhere in 2006–07, spent 64 straight weeks on the Hot 100, and became — for a time — the best-selling country song, period.
Three Texans with a fiddle, a banjo, and two diamond albums in two years. Wide Open Spaces and Fly made the Dixie Chicks the biggest group in country, "Goodbye Earl" made murder a sing-along, and then one sentence on a London stage in March 2003 got them pulled from country radio almost overnight.
The voice that floated out of every car radio in 1998 riding a nectarine through a CGI garden. Faith Hill went from "Wild One" to "This Kiss" to "Breathe," the biggest single of 2000, and took country to the pop charts, the Super Bowl, and the CoverGirl counter, with Tim McGraw beside her from 1996 on.
Masahiro Sakurai's Nintendo crossover brawler launched on the N64 with twelve iconic fighters smashing each other on floating stages in four-player chaos. Released April 1999, Super Smash Bros. sold 5.5 million copies and created the template for a franchise that would define competitive gaming and casual multiplayer for the next 25 years.
The son of a World Series pitcher who made every girl at the county fair cry at "Don't Take the Girl." Tim McGraw went from a flop debut to the best-selling country album of 1994, married Faith Hill on the road, and closed his decade with "Live Like You Were Dying," the song he cut the year his father died.