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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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.
Any era anyone grew up in and now wears their nostalgia glasses.
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 never just one. They’re localized. They tend to occur when the industry finds a groove and leans into it, so the focus is more on quality and iteration under criticism, and less about rough experimentation. The early PS1 era was a Cambrian explosion of weird 3D nonsense… and I don’t think anyone nowadays would put that above late SNES releases. The defining titles of the PSX didn’t come around until the very late 90s, and several of them sold like crap. Nobody wanted Symphony Of The Night until their friend would not shut up about it.
But over on PC, the 90s were a smooth ramp of increasing power and relevance. The 3D accelerator era laid the groundwork for the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race mindset, with visual quality and variety unmatched until the late PS2 era. (By which point Crysis had advanced PC graphics ten years into the future.)
And in 90s handheld gaming, there was the Game Boy, and nothing else mattered. Sega kept the Game Gear limping along until 1997, but nobody noticed, because everyone and their mother already chose the monochrome brick that sipped batteries. Several companies eventually gave up and released greyscale machines just in time for Nintendo to fuck them with the Game Boy Color. All the while, the platform went from twee single-sitting high-score fare, to bespoke long-form RPGs and major franchise sequels, to essentially-complete demakes of Super Nintendo games. Nothing changed except ROM size. It was the last 8-bit console, and it took developers a decade to recognize they could go hog wild on it.
Right after that, the Game Boy Advance’s brief lifespan was essentially all golden era. Doom was practically a launch title. Homebrew devs kept teasing Quake, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, etc., alongside whole-ass GTA3 clones. Commercial releases were awash in good-to-great RPGs and metroidvanias. But then - the PSP scared Nintendo into creating the DS, and that platform went through some awkward years struggling to use better hardware. That wasn’t the end of “the” golden era. For the PSP it was briefly fantastic, especially if you count its use for emulators. But it fell as the DS found its legs, while some completely unrelated trends happened to consoles and computers.
All we can say for certain is, nothing inside a video game should cost real money, and DRM is delayed theft.
But if you asked, gun to my head, ‘what was the best console?’ - it’s the PS2. It’s not even a contest. The video chip had such a disgusting fillrate that Xbox 360 remakes had to tone down the overdraw. Licensing remained dirt cheap, so weird shit could get on shelves at like two dollars per copy. The controllers were practically the platonic ideal. Just an incredible environment where innovation could look and feel complete.
What little was missing from that machine is abundant in its competitors. The Gamecube is a party toy with four controller ports and the wildest shader pipeline that’s not technically programmable. The Xbox showed the full potential of hard drives and online connectivity. PCs could increasingly take internet access for granted, where Flash games offered instant access with negligible oversight.
Through this period, cross-platform engines started abstracting away any hardware differences. “Ports” stopped being from-scratch recreations or high jank at low framerates. It was the inflection point for all hardware becoming a generic compiler target. The fact the PSP was supposed to get an Oblivion port, and it wasn’t just the PC game, already felt kinda weird.
I could call this a golden era for software - for developers making a game once-ish, and selling to nearly anyone with nearly any platform. Yet at the same time, the RTS genre was dying, EA killed a lot of important companies, and Bethesda had this silly little idea to sell you armor for your horse. It’s never just one thing.
When you were 12
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.Whatever you were playing when you were 12.
Do flash games count?
Same as the golden era for SNL. No you don’t understand when I was a teenager it was way better than now.
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 holy trinity for me is SNES, PSX, PS2. I know this is massively colored by when you grew up and what you had access to, but nothing since has outshined these in terms of actual fun for me.
For context the very first video game I ever played was in 1970s and it was Called pong.
For me video games were the best between 2000 and I’m not sure the end point maybe 2015. But starting in 2000 is when the hardware was good enough to give you really great graphics. Also, you started seeing widespread use of broadband so online games MMO’s really came into their own.
I mean, I was really fortunate. I had a great job so I would fuck around with Java games at work and then go home and play World of Warcraft and ever quest. It was just a great time to be a gamer in the early 2000s.
My golden era was PS2/Xbox 360. The games I have fond memories of playing are the first three Harry Potter games, Gunbound, Lineage 2, Battlefield 2, COD MW 1&2. Since then, I’ve only played Batman: Arkham Asylum, Tomb Raider (2013), Witcher 3 and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
1991 to 2007
Prove me wrong people … prove me wrong.
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.
Megadrive era for me.
Elite dangerous exists now, so it’s definitely now!
