What's your favourite era for video games?

Era can be defined as a console generation, a decade, one specific year, whatever you want. I’d encourage you to give a list of your favourite games from the generation of choice and why it was the best to you. Nostalgia is a totally viable reason too.

I’ll go first. For me, the 360 era is my GOAT. As someone in their 20s, I grew up with the 360 so nostalgia is definitely a big factor. But on top of that, I still feel like the games during that time were some of the best we’ve had. 2011 alone was a fantastic year, with Dark Souls, Skyrim, Portal 2 and many more great games. I was going to list out my favourite games from 2005-2013 but I love so many it would be far too long of a post.

I’d love to hear some of you talk about your favourite time period of games too, whether it’s agreeing with my choice or giving different opinions

mister_newbie ,

Early-mid 90s.

The latter years of the NES, the entirety of the 16-bit console era (SNES/Megadrive ["Genesis"]), the golden age of PC adventure games & the dawn of multimedia (CD-ROM based games & talkies).

Just before the release of Doom, where FPS took over; and the PSX/N64, where (bad) 3D was teh hotness; is where it's at for me – likely why I love my MiSTer FPGA so much.

captain_aggravated ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

for me there was a peak in the late 90s. Ocarina of Time and Half Life in 1998 alone.

CatZoomies , (edited )
@CatZoomies@lemmy.world avatar

My favorite is the 3DS Era. I was a young adult then, and sure I could say I loved 16 bit, 64 bit eras because I was younger and had much more time to play video games. But I had so much fun with my 3DS.

Specifically - 3-D integration into certain video games introduced a new way to play them, and I enjoyed the new layer in puzzles for games like Mario 3D Land and especially A Link Between Worlds.

But what I miss the most about 3DS was StreetPass. How fun it was taking my 3DS everywhere and getting visitors in both my games plus in StreetPass Plaza! I loved the hell out of those mini games and would drive all over the place to different hotspots and collect visitors! Carrying it work and making friends over StreetPass was also such a nice bonus.

Gaming was so much fun in this era and on this console. Probably still my favorite console due to all these memories tied up with it. I could get in so many gaming sessions, and if I needed to handle something quickly I could just fold it shut and go about my day. The OG suspend lol.

P.S - Street Pass is of course officially dead along with many other features of the 3DS era. However, there are archival projects so you can at least get visitors to your console. It requires custom firmware, but look into StreetPass 2 for more details.

cod OP Mod ,
@cod@lemmy.world avatar

I loved my 3DS. I mostly played Pokémon on it but played other games on it too. I never took advantage of street pass but agree it was a great concept

TalesOfTrees ,

I think most eras were decent. I'm especially keen on everything post 8-bit, but pre-"everything is a monetized DLC; fuck you pay me" era.

CatZoomies , (edited )
@CatZoomies@lemmy.world avatar

Totally agree with the modern gaming landscape. It’s exhausting dealing with all the predatory tracking, root kits, privacy invasion, heavy monetization, broken games with promises to “do better”, etc. Thankfully there are many games out there to enjoy that don’t do these things.

Personally I love the option of devs selling DLCs where the value is there: it has a reasonable price and it expands the game in a level that I’m comfortable paying for. I will happily buy DLC of games I love.

What I can’t stand, and absolutely am repulsed by, is games that have kill switches or can be taken away from me without my permission. If when I buy the game, if the button says “Buy”, then I should own it. If they’re going to have kill switches or activation server shutdowns that render my game unplayable, then they should change the button to “Temporarily pay to lease it for some time where we will later take this game from you without your permission”. I’d at least appreciate their honesty that way.

Ever since Ubisoft warned it would shut down activation servers for my Wii U copy of Splinter Cell Blacklist where I paid full price for all the DLC (since I loved that game so much), I discovered I wouldn’t be able to play my DLC. Thankfully due to significant complaints from gamers, Ubisoft backpedaled and decided not to… for now. But now that I’ve seen that, and continue to see this predatory behavior happening to this day (e.g., The Crew, Helldivers, etc.), I am much more hesitant when it comes to buying video games.

kratoz29 ,

I think the handheld era is my favorite, it basically ended with the 3DS, but it is the DS which I really can't put down, I am playing for the first time Chrono Trigger on it, and it is my Jump Ultimate Stars machine (Wimmfi), also have some other bangers as well, but I'll bore you if I citate them all.

But hey, don't get me wrong, the current handheld era is good too, we have the Switch, The Steam Deck and a plethora of good quality Chinese handhelds.

showmeyourkizinti ,

The Greatest Era of gaming was when I was between 12 and 22. And this is true for everyone no matter what their age is now.
Between 12 and 22 I had enough time and energy to game all night and still go to school and none of life’s problems were stopping me

FIST_FILLET ,

this has gotta be the correct answer

cod OP Mod ,
@cod@lemmy.world avatar

You know what, that’s a great answer. I think you probably hit the nail on the head

mindbleach ,

Late 90s PC, because anything was possible. 2D? Yeah, go wild, it'll be fast. 3D? Software rendering is the wild west! Voxels, polygons, texturing, raycasting, every game looks unique because they're all making it up as they go. Even consoles were on PC because emulation was faster and better than owning a PSX or N64.

These were not the best games of all time. Most sucked. You can get a taste of that in PC Gamer demo discs, or like half of Civvie11's videos. But it was an era where nothing was easy, so people reached for the fucking stars.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I'll break from the mould and say early 80s to early 90s, where we got:

  • Atari
  • Commodore 64
  • NES
  • DOS & Windows
  • Apple II (esp. Oregon Trail)
  • iconic

That era really defined what video games are, and built the framework for how we talk about games today.

kindenough ,
@kindenough@kbin.social avatar

I miss the Amiga 500 in that list. ;)

mindbleach ,

1980s 2D had the same "every machine sucks uniquely" vibe as 1990s 3D. If the same game on two platforms looked remotely similar then someone busted their hump getting it right. By default, you were getting a game that looked and sounded as good as this system could manage, rather than being a smoothed-over downgrade of some canonical example.

Ironically it wasn't always a great era for pick-up-and-play-ability. Late-70s games were so limited that arcade sensibilities were nearly the only thing possible, and even text-centric computer games lacked the memory to bore you with backstory. By the late 80s they could push the early inklings of an unskippable cutscene and a tutorial level. Dunno if that's better than ZX Spectrum games getting mercilessly sink-or-swim.

Coincidentally that arcade vibe also matches the late 90s: it's how most Dreamcast games feel.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

One of the things I really miss from that era was the game manual. Since they couldn't put all of the backstory and tutorial stuff into the game itself, you'd get a companion booklet to read (e.g. this one for The Legend of Zelda). Some games took that too far and you essentially had to buy a separate guide. A lot of people think games from the era were obtuse, but they're really just missing the documentation.

I honestly really liked that experience and would read the guides when I wasn't able to play.

Arcades obviously didn't have that luxury, so they had to be games you could quickly pick up without any introduction. So you got a natural divide between games for home and games for arcades (with some overlap of course).

And yeah, the gaming experience varied quite a bit by platform for the same game because things like audio and graphics drivers needed to be built into the game itself, and that varied by system. But that's also part of the charm. There wasn't really an expectation that a game would look the same on two platforms, so they were often judged separately (i.e. arguments about which version is better).

Mycatiskai ,

The era of SCUMM. Point and click adventures were awesome. Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Glory series, Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis.

lunarul , (edited )

How is Monkey Island missing from the list? Those games were the peak of SCUMM.

Mycatiskai ,

I know, I did try playing them with dosbox years later but I didn't know anyone that had them to borrow the discs so I hadn't played them back in the day like all the ones I named.

XTL ,

Scummvm is much better than the old native interpreter. And the Amiga versions are obviously better than dos though any one should work.

CheeryLBottom ,

The Scumm Bar®

Malix ,
@Malix@sopuli.xyz avatar

Hell yea, Indy Atlantis is absolute peak... then again so is most of lucasarts point&click adventure games.

Man I wish the teased sequel for atlantis was actually made :/

CleoTheWizard ,
@CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world avatar

I loved the PS2 era of gaming a lot. This may be a controversial take, but the PS2 era did not last long enough.

Everything about the aesthetics of the games that the PS2 produced were excellent. In my opinion, this is the point when low fidelity and high quality assets overlapped just enough to make games more comprehensible to their players. That enabled a lot of innovation that the PS3/360 era handled entirely differently. Forget an era, the PS2 is the last part of an entire age of gaming that delineates what I’m referring to.

The PS2 was a huge turning point in what games were and could be in 3D. Prior to this, many games were abstract and the characters were a lump of polygons. With the PS2, this began to change. So we began to get games that our minds had to do a lot of interpreting but could see reality through. Nowadays, I’d argue that your mind does less interpreting and so the resulting picture has glaring inaccuracies.

It also helped that ps2 was primarily played on CRTs or at least plasma which helped the picture look better in plenty of scenes than a PS3. Not to mention the color palette of games after the PS2 turned to muck.

steeznson ,

PS2 coincided with a lot of good handhelds too. Nintendo DS is a strong contender for best handheld ever, IMO.

CleoTheWizard ,
@CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world avatar

Oh absolutely, I was going to reference the Gameboy Advance that I grew up on as a part of this phase. Unfortunately, I don’t think those handhelds even got their time in the light that they could’ve had. It seems like they’ve had a long legacy but the DS and GameBoy came and went in but two generations of consoles.

I mean imagine what we could do with a gameboy today. Or imagine how we could easily transform a modern phone into a DS form factor. We’re talking now about running a modern resident evil game in the palm of your hand. Insane power really.

All this is largely due to the mobile play stores having no competition or curation. Our mobile games absolutely suck now. There are gems, sure, but otherwise I hate phone gaming despite my phone being my most used device.

I think you’re absolutely correct though, the DS is the best handheld. Slim, powerful enough, very interactive, and a great game library. I highly recommend buying one and modding it, you won’t regret it.

steeznson ,

My first console was an original GameBoy and I probably got the most hours of use out of it compared to any other console. Despite the horrific backlight (lack thereof) and small screen. I love handheld gaming in general. Still play my 3DS all the time.

graymess ,

I realize I'm biased having experienced this era at my most influential (as another user easily defined it as ages 12 - 22), but this was definitely it for me. I only had a Gameboy before I finally had a PS2. The big mascot character games of this console were formative for me. Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper. Kingdom Hearts and Shadow of the Colossus were everything to me. Tons of other huge titles made this generation.

But it's the weird little games that I think about fondly. Katamari became a franchise, but it was just a funny novel idea when it dropped on the PS2. Kya: Dark Lineage, an adventure/fighting game absolutely packed with fun ideas from a studio that just made racing games prior. Magic Pengel - basically DIY Pokemon - was pretty much everything I wanted in a game. Even Eye Toy, which completely sucked and barely worked, offered a new way to play games.

Things were just different then. I think it was maybe the last time we thought of games by their budgets. Most titles were what we would maybe call AA these days, something that almost doesn't exist anymore. Where indie games didn't exist yet, but small studios were prolific. For me, any game that let you run around as a fairly detailed 3D character in a cool setting was magic to me in a way the flat, pixelated worlds on my GBC never were. The worlds in my PS2 were believable.

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

'96 to 2014 or so fucking ruled.

Though it's much more heavily concentrated in the 1997-2003 range.

cod OP Mod ,
@cod@lemmy.world avatar

Any particular favourites in the 97-03 range?

Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Too many to name individually... I played pretty much everything at that time. Ultima Online, Quake 2, everything on the Build engine (Duke3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior, etc), GoldenEye, Ocarina of Time, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid... Shit, I think most of the franchises that continue to exist today started in that period or have some of the biggest hits from then, like FF7, 8 and 9.

refurbishedrefurbisher ,

The 90s era of gaming, extending to the early 2000s. SNES, Genesis, PC Engine, N64, PS1, PS2, GameCube.

It was the era before the Internet and video gaming became extremely linked. The sheer number of classics that still hold up today, even compared to modern games, are very numerous.

cod OP Mod ,
@cod@lemmy.world avatar

There’s lots of late 90’s-early 2000’s answers here. You’re definitely not alone in that thought

lunarul , (edited )

Add one more here. Some of the greatest games came out in that period.

I made before a list of the top 10 games that impacted me the most and a large part are from that period. In no particular order:

  • Worms (particularly Worms World Party)
  • The Settlers II
  • Master of Orion II
  • Heroes of Might and Magic (particularly the first 3)
  • Phantasmagoria
  • WWF WrestleMania
  • Little Big Adventure
  • Monkey Island (especially 1-3)
  • Dizzy (all games in the series)
  • Jet Set Willy
Jarix ,

Could not play master of orion II

Played birth of the federation before i even heard of master of orion and it ruined it lol

refurbishedrefurbisher ,

The best thing about this reply is that literally none of those games are on my list, since I haven't played any of them (except for a Flash clone of Worms as a kid). That just goes to show the sheer amount of quality gaming that there was.

My list is moreso comprised of console games. In no particular order, and includes some later indie games:

  • Chrono Trigger (GOAT, ranked number 1 above all the rest of these. Fantastic story, gameplay, music, pacing, etc. I haven't played any other game as polished as this one)
  • Terranigma (A surprisingly deep and philosophical game for the time, even compared to other great JRPGs of the same era, or of any era)
  • Yoshi's Island (just raw fun)
  • Super Mario 64 (also just raw fun)
  • Majora's Mask (Surprisingly deep and emotional for a Zelda game)
  • Silent Hill 1, 2, and 3 (2 in particular opened my eyes to actually being able to feel emotions for the first time)
  • Super Meat Boy (Addiction: the video game)
  • The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (Crack: the video game)
  • OMORI (another fantastic and emotional game, almost on the level of Silent Hill 2, but replay value isn't very high IMO)
  • A Link to the Past (Just raw fun, but in Zelda form)
  • Guitar Hero 1, 2, and 3 (I was especially involved in the customs scene back then)
  • Final Fantasy VI (A fantastic story in general)
  • Super Smash Bros (the series as a whole)
lunarul ,

I didn't have any consoles, so couldn't play a lot of those games. But on PC (and on 8-bit computer before that), I played hundreds of games. There were no copyright laws in my country when I was a kid and my dad got everything he could get his hands on. In the 8-bit era he collected over 40 cassette tapes (8-10 games on each). Then when we got the PC there were boxes and boxes of floppy disks (I remember Need for Speed was on over 30 disks). Then CDs came out and I remember one CD that had 200 games on it. And as my dad collected, I tried every single one of them.

That just goes to show the sheer amount of quality gaming that there was.

I made that top 10 list years ago from some silly Facebook game that was going around at the time. The hardest part was picking just 10. My initial list had about 70 games on it.

refurbishedrefurbisher ,

Emulation is magical. It's how I discovered most of these games.

lunarul ,

Yeah, I remember when I first got ZSNES and suddenly I had access hundreds of games I wasn't able to play before. Played through Super Mario RPG, spent so much time in Harvest Moon, and finally played the first Final Fantasy games and Legend of Zelda.

refurbishedrefurbisher ,

ZSNES was also how I got into emulation for the first time. Ended up using SNES9x more, though.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

I'm guessing a lot of people grew up in the late 90s to early 2000s, so it's largely nostalgia.

Ashtear ,
@Ashtear@lemm.ee avatar

It's not just that. 2023 was a very good year for gaming, right? A lot of the heavy hitters last year were from long-running series. Look and see how many of those series had either their genesis or consensus fan favorite entries in that time period.

Not only that, Steam, Unreal Engine, e-sports, the mainstreaming of game mods, and even AAA development itself all trace back to innovations from that time. Historically, it's a massively important time period for video games.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

As is the late 70s and early 80s with arcades, or the start of home consoles, or high fidelity 3d gaming in the 2010s (Xbox 360 and on, Nintendo Switch). Or my particular favorite, the rise of Linux gaming starting in 2013 (Steam for Linux launch) to the release of the Steam Deck.

So why is the late 90s and early 2000s so highly represented here vs those other eras? I think it's because of nostalgia, that's around the time when the likely demographic of Lemmy would be getting into games (i.e. they're old enough to remember the Internet before the last 10-ish years and be mad enough to leave Reddit, but not so old that they're interested in such things).

So that's my hypothesis as to why that era is so popular in this thread.

spyd3r ,
@spyd3r@sh.itjust.works avatar

For PC I'd say 1999-2010 was absolutely amazing time to be a gamer. PC parts were dirt cheap, you could overclock the hell out of your hardware, and micro-transactions and pay-to-win didn't exist.

cod OP Mod ,
@cod@lemmy.world avatar

Micro-transactions and pay-to-win are reason enough, those are some of the worst things to come to video games

Ashtear ,
@Ashtear@lemm.ee avatar

It's an overlap between the back end of the fourth gen (aka 16-bit) era for consoles and then a full pivot to PC gaming in the years after. I really didn't like the move to early 3D on consoles with their abysmal framerates and load times. I felt then (and still think today) it was a generation too early.

Marking the starting point is easy: 1994. An insane year for the SNES, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Mega Man X, and Super Metroid all came out in North America that year. That run continued on the SNES until Yoshi's Island in 1996. I did pick up a PlayStation but I wasn't thrilled with it. There are some personal favorites from this time, too, but they still had the sprite art I was desperately missing: games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden, Symphony of the Night, Xenogears.

I'd been a PC gamer for a while, but I started moving more towards the platform with Blizzard's ascendancy with Warcraft II in 1995 and Diablo in 1996. I'd finally get a dedicated GPU in 1998, and what a year for it: Half-Life, Thief: The Dark Project, Unreal, Tribes, Freespace. The less-demanding games of the year were no slouches either: Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 2. With a similarly impressive console lineup, it's no surprise many consider 1998 the best year ever for video games.

The endpoint is harder to pin down. Maybe the death of the space sim genre with Freespace 2 in late 1999, or Blizzard's last landmark game before the MMO era, Diablo II in mid-2000. At the very latest, a new era for me definitely began with the release of the Game Boy Advance in 2001, where I shifted mostly to PC + handheld platforms, where I'm still at today.

cod OP Mod ,
@cod@lemmy.world avatar

That was a great read. As someone born within that timeframe I didn’t really live through it much, so I don’t have much experience with it, but I like to get a glimpse at what it was like through comments like yours!

B0NK3RS ,
@B0NK3RS@lemmy.world avatar

Probably the period of '95 thought to '05. Mostly because they were the days of local multiplayer with friends and also the jump in technology made things even more interesting.

Combined we had all the 4 player games on the N64. So Goldeneye, SSB, F-Zero, Mario Kart, Snowboard Kids, DK Racing, Perfect Dark, WCW vs NWO and more.

cod OP Mod ,
@cod@lemmy.world avatar

That must’ve been a great time for sure. I’m jealous I didn’t get to be a teenager through it! That would’ve been a blast

Ashtear ,
@Ashtear@lemm.ee avatar

Local multiplayer--especially couch co-op--is a lost art. I definitely miss it.

B0NK3RS ,
@B0NK3RS@lemmy.world avatar

It's still there but with family instead friends now. My kids won't get the same experience though which is sad.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • kbinchat
  • All magazines
    •