I’d say cuein up the joystick from an atari 2600 and settle in for a day of Pitfall was fairly golden for me…

Well, it might help to identify some criteria first:

1. Economics. When was it easy to just… Buy and play games? No microtransactions or season passes or subscriptions. Games were mostly physical purchases that you could buy used or re-sell.

You could make an argument that anti-consumer games have always existed in some form. Arcade games designed to sucm quarters out of pockets, games with special codes or info in the box/manual needed to progress that would deter people from buying used. Pokemon selling 2 versions of the same game and locking content behind promotional events. But all that was less common and less egregious. For some games, DLC used to be a great value because it added a lot of content cheaper than the base game- Roller Coaster Tycoon was a great example.

I think everything through PS2/GameCube/Xbox is pretty safely within this range. PS3/Wii/360 is arguable.

2. Technology. This may be controversial, but I think there is a minimum level of fidelity and performance that needs to be considered here. There are definitely some great 8-bit and 16-bit games, but there’s also a lot of duds from those days. There’s also plenty of great 2D games that came later on systems that are ALSO capable of great 3D games. So I’m eliminating anything prior to the PS1/N64/Saturn.

Except… Even just comparing that generation to the next is still a huge difference. Storage space was quite restrictive. N64 games look like garbage, and particularly with multiplatform games you can really feel how limiting the cartridge was. The Saturn was a joke. PS1 games… The aren’t bad, but there’s still a wide gulf between them and the next generation. Compare Metal Gear Solid to Twin Snakes for example, or any of the multiplats that crossed generations.

I know a lot of answers here are “what you grew up with”, but this is the point where I have to admit that what I grew up with was immediately objectively surpassed by the next generation. PS1->PS2, N64->GameCube, and Saturn->Dreamcast/Xbox were all strictly better upgrades, and the only real downside was that Xbox started charging for online multiplayer.

3. Scope. AAA games got too big. They take too long to make and cost too much money. A lot of developers saw GTA and became obsessed with open-worlds with tons of silly collectibles. Assassin’s Creed is an example, and I think the PS3/360/Wii generation is where this started, though it certainly got worse afterwards. I remember Skyrim taking hours to install, and even then the load times were so bad that my wife and I would usually be playing Pokemon on our DS’s during the load screens.

The increased fidelity also seems to correlate with a decrease in creativity. This has gotten a lot better since, but the PS3 and 360 are remembered for mostly brown/green/grey games. Everything was “gritty” and realistic. I like realism, but it was overdone here. The Wii, on the other hand, mostly just looked like GameCube games. I could be misremembering, but I think this is when a lot of games moved to target 30FPS instead of 60FPS. Trying to be more “cinematic” and reducing the importance of gameplay, and thus reducing the importance of responsiveness.

4. Tutorialization. I’m not exactly sure when this started, but it seems like almost all modern games lie on opposite ends of the spectrum. Either they hold your hand and force you to read through tons of dumb text prompts poorly explaining every element of the game all at once, or they copy the FromSoft formula and give you nothing and make you look everything up online from a fan community. I suppose older games like the OG Zelda are also known for being hard to figure out, or other games made you look stuff up in the manual. I look at Portal as one of the best at this: the whole game is basically a tutorial that slowly, constantly introduced new wrinkles for you to learn without holding your hand about it.

So I would say the GameCube/PS2/Xbox era was the peak. That being said, there was plenty of garbage released during that era, and plenty of great games released before and after.

I think there are a lot of great games out now, they just tend not to be AAA titles. Those kinds of graphics require a huge amount of manpower, which means a huge amount of investment seeking profit, which means people in business suits calling the shots. Frankly, I think the answer is that games devs need to unionize, both to push back against crunch and to protect their creative freedom. I think that might result in AAA games worth playing.

Whenever you were 10-14

Peaked at Elite.

(Yes the first one)

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.

PS2

Are we currently in a rut, or is there a chance for fresh ideas to emerge again?

Yes, and the problem is low standards. AAA games have resources, but no creativity. Indie games have creativity but no resources.

Back in the PS2 era, AAA games had resources and creators were making decisions instead of the people who went to business school.

deleted by creator

Early 2010s you could get a 9999999999 in 1

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.

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

Whatever you were playing when you were 12.

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.

In recent times I’ve played Baby Steps, Cocoon, Inside, Slay The Princess, Thank Goodness You’re Here, Hyperbolica, Unpacking… Going further back, Unfinished Swan, Untitled Goose Game

I don’t think that originality has gone. Maybe it’s just easier to churn out shovelware, but there are still new ideas appearing.

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.