I used to be a passionate gamer, and I often find myself nostalgic for the golden era of video games when there were new ideas popping left and right.
Now, it feels like we’re caught between long-delayed triple-A titles and a constant stream of indie platformers. Originality seems to have taken a backseat, with many games regurgitating the same concepts.
What do you think defined the golden era of gaming? Are we currently in a rut, or is there a chance for fresh ideas to emerge again?
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Whatever you were playing when you were 12.
Same as the golden era for SNL. No you don’t understand when I was a teenager it was way better than now.
Do flash games count?
Absolutely. Flash games count.
I was playing a lot of games from Kongregate and armorgames regularly till 2018 or sometime when end of Flash support was announced. I got the swf files for most of the games I played through flashpoint and flash museum. I am still searching for a game called Book of treasures though.
Whenever you were 10-14
This is the answer. Experience is subjective and what feels best to people is going to be heavily biased by where they were in their lives at the time.
“What was the best era to be aged 10-14 and into video games?” is a subtly different question.
When I was 14 I played Ladder.
So no, not my favourite era for games.
Right now, since we pretty much can still play any of the old games we would like. There are enough great games out there to last anyone multiple lifetimes.
The best moment is now, we’re in a Indie Game Renaissance, indie games that start at nothing and become worldwide household names, pretty much one after another.
Yeah, Triple A is fucked, but the old ways need to die so that the new path can be forged
1991 to 2007
Prove me wrong people … prove me wrong.
The golden age of video games was between when I was 13 and 21 years old. I was old enough to make spare cash to buy my own games and young enough to have spare time and energy to play them. Also my fast twitch reflexes were still good then so I could easily do a platformer or FPS. And this is true for everyone no matter when they were born.
PS2 generation because it was the last generation where your games were guaranteed to work without a web connection and they were generally shipped as finished products.
The PS3 generation started the current trend of still needing a web connection even for a physical copy and IIRC it also started the trend of shipping games unfinished and patching them later, and both trends went off the deep end with the PS4 generation where most of the games are broken at launch and patched later, and the ‘physical copies’ are little more than glorified license keys for games you gotta download anyways, or in more extreme cases, eg. GT7 on the PS5, need a web connection to even boot the game.
Like, you can dust off your PS2/GC/OG Xbox, stick a game disc in, and it’ll play just like it were new, but that’s not as guaranteed with the PS3/XB360 and good luck with the PS4/XB1 and newer.
That said, if you’re integrating a PS2-generation and older console into a modern AV stack, you’re going to want a hardware upscaler such as an OSSC, RetroTink, or Framemeister.
And we’re definitely in a rut and the only way out is a Second Video Game Crash.
Deep respect to Microsoft for the Xbox 360 Arcade. That SKU forced damn near every game to work without a hard drive. I think even GTA V could run off a USB stick.
But hoo boy did they fuck that up with the Xbox One launch. And Sony capitalized.
It’s right now. Indies everywhere, and we’ve successfully gotten past the worst of the always-online bullshit and PTW that plagued the early part of the millennium. More than half of my “all time favorite” games are still in active production today (sometimes continued by fans), and I’m not a young guy.
Now. All those games still exist, and are easier than ever to emulate if you wish. Good new games are coming out, and there’s simply no chance that you’ve exhausted all of the possible good games to play.
Very early 2000’s. In the console we had PS2 and XBOX, which were both game changers. PC games also hit a really great stride, where we were seeing technological advances met with creativity.
I love mid-to-late 1990’s gaming from a nostalgia perspective, but I still think 2000’s were the golden era.
The obvious answer is whatever generation you grew up during.
I think the most realistic answer I think would be from 1998 to 2001 as the golden years of gaming. Just so many classics games from basically every genre and system of the time. Half Life on PC, Spyro and Crash 3 on PlayStation. Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast. Pokemon on Nintendo. Halo on Xbox. And that’s just the beginning of the list.
There, of course, were plenty of shovelware titles. So it’s not like the era didn’t have its own problems like we have with excessive reboot/remasters/remakes and subscription and battle pass slop and everything else.
But the difference is that gamers have changed their standards. It’s easy to avoid Hello Kitty Island Adventure in the year 2000. Hard to purchase a game today without a live service model or battle pass
Of course if you focus on the highest-budget titles you will see buggy, overpriced delays. Shift your perspective to smaller titles by smaller studios. Bigger doesn’t mean better.
Removed by mod
We’re still living in it.
I would in fact state that the worst years were around 1997 with the release of GoldenEye 007 until 2006 with the release of the Nintendo Wii. All I remember of that era were shooters, shooters, shooters, space shooters, racing games, racing games with shooters and shooters. It was the era that went from decent 2D graphics to bland and ugly 3D graphics and all the creative effort went into realizing the 3D graphics.
The video game industry is not like the movie industry, comic book industry or the music industry that are slowly dying because people stopped buying physical copies of them.
And the lack of interaction of movies and comics is slowly making them outdated.
The music industry has become the concert industry, which has turned the small crowds of celebrity worshipers mixed in people wanting to do drugs, sex and/or rock’n’roll into pure crowds of the biggest celebrity worshiping fans.
And even that is probably dying due to AI.I am honestly pleasantly surprised at everything the industry came up with in that generation, in hindsight. Maybe those kinds of games were a little overrepresented, but you still had Super Mario 64, Pilot wings, Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Smash Bros (not fully 3D but that may be a good thing from a game play aspect), two Zelda masterpieces, Mario Party, some solid wrestling games, and a few Final Fantasy games (I never played them but I don’t think they’re shooters and definitely not racing games)
There were some flopped consoles just prior to the N64/PS1 like the Saturn and Atari Jaguar that probably helped the industry figure out what doesn’t work well in 3D gaming. Maybe they still had some stuff to figure out, but that was a pretty good era IMO.
PS2 or PS3.
Those systems are where most of today’s stagnant franchises started. The modern universal control scheme started with the PS2 (that is, actually utilising both sticks in the modern tradition), so there’s no issues with playability.
I’ve been replaying GTA V, which is a PS3 game in case we all forgot.
A good PS2 and PS3 off eBay will reawaken your love for gaming. The PS2 has so many smaller classics that don’t get much love now (Sly Cooper!), and we’re still being sold and resold PS3 games to this day.
