Which gamer generation had it the best?

If you were gaming the entirety of the 90s through the early 2000s, you had it good.

I enjoyed a lot of mid to late 80s stuff as well, made the early 90s jumps just that much more exciting.

Edit: Oh yeah, voted 70s/80s. If you were born in the 90s, missed a lot of the exciting developments unfolding. And definitely too young to have really enjoyed booming arcades.

80s, when arcades were in their prime.

I grew up with gaming in the 70’s and 80’s and I’m going to go with that generation. I got to see how things kind of started and evolved from then until now. I feel that it gives me a real appreciation for the overall scope of gaming.

Today's kids have it the best. They can play all the old games with emulators and backward compatibility on PC as well as enjoying modern games and all the tech advancements. They also have things like Game Pass that allows them to play a lot of different games for a small fee. That is amazing. I would have loved that as a kid.

70’s and 80’s, the birth of gaming.

@BassMan:

Yeah you're not wrong. Easy access to countless games, new and old. Can have the entirety of the 80s/90s catalogue just sitting in a folder lol. In general gaming is more affordable.

Can argue that arcades are something they'll never experience, but on the flip side they have online gaming offering convenience and experiences that would otherwise be impossible.

Still, think there's something to be said of growing up alongside gaming. Seeing the major leaps, birth of genres, wild experimentation, experiencing the refinement. Gaming in a time when greed wasn't nearly as pervasive. The biggest releases were also some of the best releases.

Having access to all the classics is great, but doesn't really hit the same without the context.

Hell yeah. Arcades ruled. Double Dragon, Outrun, Elevator Action, and many more amazing games.

Also, I am forever grateful that I grew up with a Commodore 64.

Growing up in 90s means your dope.

If you grew up after that you're not dope.

A man after my heart.

@ConanTheStoner: did you have a mullet at the time when you were hanging out in the arcades?

Two of them actually. With a rat tail down the middle. Nike swoosh buzzed into the side.

lol **** no man

🤣 I can imagine the mullet, smoking, and wearing a red robe to imitate Ken haha.

90's and 2000's and it's not even close although the 2010's had some really great games mostly in the early to mid part of that decade. But the 90's and 2000's had so many ground breaking games we will never have anything like that again.

Omg, my journey began at the launch of the atari 2600. My uncle had some of those magnetic over the screen football games but I rarely touched it. Atari 2600 was the beginning of gaming to me. I wouldn't trade it with ANYone else's perspective. I got to see and be invested in the entirety of the medium for the most part! I know what it felt like to go from Yars Revenge to Super Mario... Or the active conversation about which bushes we could burn in Zelda to get more rupees. The first final famtasy.... Metal gear. Castelvania.... The first time Nintendo power showed 16 bit Mario and the super Famicom. The connections and moments, fads... Amazing games. Yeah, if you were there at the earliest days you have been blessed.

The only time I really wasn't paying super close attention to gaming was during my undergrad, I'd say 99 to 02, when I transferred. It was only as started my career I got it all rolling again.

@SolidGame_basic:

Now that you mention it, I did have some embarrassing 90s haircuts. Not a mullet, but at one point hair was long enough to pull back in a man bun. And then, even worse, went through a bowl cut phase. And my final 90s sin, wearing JNCOs my freshman year.

Otherwise dapper, just took some dark times to get there.

I started gaming in 1993 when my parents bought me my first console gaming aka SNES+Mario World and yep, the 90s-20s were the very best gaming years for sure.

@TheEroica:

Yeah 2600 was my start too. Didn't even like it tbh, was more of a "I'm bored and stuck inside" pastime. Enjoyed Jungle Hunt and some Combat with my older bro, about it.

Think my main appreciation for the 2600 was the perspective on upcoming stuff. The NES and arcades were soooo much more exciting by comparison, that's the shit that really got me into gaming.

damn, 99-02 was a pivotal year in gaming, no wonder your gaming tastes suck lol jk 🤣

😆

90's kids.

A lot of good memories, a lot of great games. Literally got to see gaming evolved from 2D to 3D; from offline to online; from floppy disc to optical disc to digital. Wolfenstein to Half-Life 2, Dune 2 to Company of Heroes, Planescape to Divinity Original Sin 2.

Just such an incredible journey.

I've seen a lot of things happen over the past 30 or so years when I started gaming. Most of it good. Some of it bad.

Only bad thing about being a 90's kid is seeing AAA development devolve into the cesspool it is now. Thank god for small and independent developers and publishers. I still maintain that gaming is better now than it ever has been but at times it really seems close to just becoming pretty terrible with that is going on with exclusivity, GaaS, subscriptions, and overall business direction game development has been going in.

@ConanTheStoner: @SolidGame_basic: Even back when I did own SNES, my Dad at the time also got me an Atari 2600 and the only game I had for it was E.T. Sadly I was never around during the golden years of Atari 2600 as I only play E.T and for me, I found the game to be tedious and boring. But that's probably because I never watch the movie at the time so my interest in the game was mostly meh. For better or worse, glad I didn't actually start with Atari 2600 and went straight to SNES was the best thing in my gaming life😅

growing up in the mid to late 80s.

i discovered gaming at that sweet mid 80s spot when the simple pixel titles like pong and centipede were making way for games like mario, paperboy and outrun and arcade culture was blossoming. the rest is history. it's been a wild ride.

yeah i think there's a lot to be said tbh, for exactly the reasons you say, plus experiencing it all with your mates. access is great but if you weren't there at the time they're not going to land the same, more so the further back you go. seminal titles in my gaming hall of fame from the 80s and 90s likely just be another name on a list of 1000s of titles in an emulator for today's kids. not to say there's not an argument to be made for today's kids having it better, but personally dont think access to old games is a big part of that argument

@davillain: we seem to have similar timelines except I started gaming playing at other kids house first. and then my parents felt bad for me and offered me the choice of SNES or Sega Genesis. I wanted to be a rebel and got Sega.. but I do remember having the Atari for a very brief moment and found it boring lol.

I bet it felt great to watch it all get going in the 70's, and the 80's definitely were magical with the arcades and consoles, but I have to go with the 90's-2000's. I'm sure a lot of that is because I got to experience all of it, instead of only part of the 80's (born '83). But I had so much fun with the popularization of fps (Wolfenstein, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, etc), the fighting game boom (SF2, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, etc), rpg awesomeness (FF, Chrono trigger, Diablo, etc) RTS (Warcraft, StarCraft, C&C, etc) 3D gaming, PC and console LAN parties, easy PC building/modding, etc. Loads of great stuff.

@ConanTheStoner: remember how big SF2 was in the arcade? Games like Afterburner, the Terminator Game, ninja turtles and xmen. Yeah the arcade cannot go Unmentioned in the history of this awesome perspective we have from those early days.

True. It's there and it's great, but like you said, just this massive list of roms. Have to research to know what's what. Even with that, you lose the discovery, those lesser known gems of the era. Easy to find a filtered list of the known greats, but even easier to miss out on those good but forgotten titles. And even if some diligent kid does his homework, still won't land the same. No way to really communicate just how amazing SMB1 was for example. Or Sonic. Or Double Dragon, etc. etc.

And of course the reality, most kids won't bother lol. Even on this forum, have guys who started gen 5, clueless about gen 4. Started gen 4, clueless about gen 3.

Just had to be there for it.

Watching the movie wouldn't make E.T the game any better, trust me lol.

SNES is more than a fine start. That and the Genesis, great times. Tons of timeless games. Was also when we started getting respectable arcade ports of some of the biggest hits. Fighting games, beat em ups, and shmups at home were no longer straight up poverty versions lol

Man I'll never forget the first time I saw SF2 and later Mortal Kombat as well. Mind blown. Attract mode just blasting through the arcade, they always maxed out the volume on those haha. Yeah man, fond memories of all those.

And not just the arcades, but the excitement of getting respectable enough arcade ports at home. When TMNT arcade landed on the NES. SF2 Champions Edition on Genesis, then later Super SF2 on SNES. Hard to explain to people, but it almost felt like cheating lol. I can play as much as I want? No quarters!?

90s and 00s. We Millenials and Gen X enjoyed the golden era of gaming.

From the 90's to early 2000's. Quality control started taking a dive after that point with companies releasing half finished games from a performance standpoint as well as holding content to sell as DLC...

@SolidGame_basic: I still had a friend in the dorm who lent me his ps1 so I could play all of MGS (was totally blown away...) and I worked at best buy in 2000. I was actually working when Ps2 launched and I remember the random trucks coming in with a few consoles on them. People were crazy. Anyway, the employee discount on n64 was really good, so I picked up the pink console for 25 bucks and played all the hits from Nintendo.

I missed goldeneye... Some of the deeper cuts from ps1, but I played just about everything else. Didn't talk games much with people though. Busy working!

There's an inherent biasness for the generation you grew up in. It's like growing up in Boston, you're automatically a fan of the Red Sox for some odd reason. Though I don't ascribe to that, I will say that the 90's generation of gaming was a lot more enjoyable, simply because it's where my enjoyment for video games started. Pokémon Silver, Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, etc. If any of those games aren't the 90's, I played them in that era.

People born late 80's.

Your friend saved you! Working at any gaming/electronics store in 2000 must’ve been a very interesting experience LOL. Back when people actually had to go to a store to buy stuff lol.

I'd say all of them had a great time. '70s and '80s for the arcade era, the development and growth of games. '90s to 2010s for the passion project games and more growth of the industry, and this generation for the ease of access and massive library that everyone can play.

4th/5th/6th were my favourites.

@SolidGame_basic: definitely... The "media" department was the biggest department in the store... Now it's almost entirely pointless for a big retailer to waste the square footage on it.

The 80s during the nes era, of course. Even the jump to 3d wasn't as epic as being a kid with anes on the 80s. It was a godly time for gaming.

80s/90s hard to choose between one and the other. 80s for the days of the video arcade, you have to have been there as a kid to understand how awesome it was. 90s for the tail end of the Arcade scene and the 16bit consoles/Amiga finally having games that were comparable to the arcade games. Both these eras were great, a time when games werent trying to be anything other than games and developers were always willing to try something new.

The 90s, in my opinion. It was before the video game industry had micro-transactions. *sigh* I feel like an old fart, talking about the good 'ol days.

The 90s and 2000s for me.

90's and 2000's by thousands of miles and anyone saying otherwise is kidding themselves or just missed out.

First things first is each platform had a unique identity through this period and put actual effort into maintaining that identity through their game lineups. Nintendo, SEGA, Sony, and Microsoft all had their own angles to play, core franchises, distinct looks, and all that. You could look at something and tell what platform it was on. Hell back in the days of the SNES and Genesis you could tell just by the sound effects!

Online play was also still a novelty which meant games weren't built from the ground up for it and those that were made sure to deliver a complete experience which justified the online requirement. When I fired up Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast I wasn't greeted with a message about buying digital currency or visiting the real cash shop or buying cosmetics or loot boxes or any of that shit.

Games launched feature complete and everything was right there on the cartridge or disk. You weren't paying to access content already there or seeing massive chunks of the game cobbled out to sell back to you as DLC.

Expansion packs were actual worthwhile purchases that felt like a mini sequel giving you a taste of what was to come next with a proper follow up. These were also priced accordingly and often saw the base game getting a price reduction with a bundled pack coming a year or so after launch.

Game cases themselves felt so much better back then too having personality to them and also having fucking manuals in there. These days you look at the back of the box and it's one fucking quote in three different languages and its the vaguest shit possible like "So much fun in 3D!" or some crap.

Games had couch co-op always built in too. There wasn't promises that split screen will return or not realizing how much audiences want to play with their friends on the same fucking couch.

Developers were also free to get real fucking weird with games and just do whatever the hell came to mind. And this was during a time with far fewer avenues to sell games, much smaller install bases, and the requirement of physically releasing games. You think something like Mr. Mosquito, Katamari, Jet Set Radio, Seaman, or anything like that gets made today? **** no. It's all safe bets and established IP.

Each generation also brought massive leaps over the prior and you didn't get this horse shit of multi-gen support for years making your new purchase feel like a half measure cause the same damn games are playable on the system that's been in your home for nearly 10 years and isn't getting any newer.

Timed exclusives were bullshit, third party exclusives mattered to the point where certain franchises like Final Fantasy and Grand Theft Auto were synonymous with platforms like Playstation.

I'm not sure who looks at all that and then looks at the state of things today and thinks to themselves "we got it so much better now" as they boot up their system for another multi-gig update and find out servers are down so they can't play whatever game they were getting on to check out.

The 90s for me. And the 5th gen was the last gen I was truly excited from beginning to end.

The pre-crash years when the Atari 2600 was called the VCS to the early 1990s.

I’ve been gaming since the beginning of the 80’s,if not a hair earlier and I’ve played hundreds or thousands of games over that span and my favourite decade for gaming was the Xbox 360 years. Hands down ground breaking for gaming. Even though I hated the PS3 controller with a passion,Sony had some of their best times in the gaming industry.

The jump to 3D was huge . Then games got much better on PS2/Xbox/GC.

Lots of lame shit happened in the gens since.

The current generation clearly has it the best, thanks to absolute bangers like Roblox and Fortnite.

Kids today.. they don’t know what they missed. They don’t know what innovation really is!

Got my first system in 99-2000, so i have missed everything prior to the N64. Loved the 7th gen the most.

I would say 90s to 2000s for pure gaming, later on generations I believe online gaming/competing is half of the gaming going on.

@BassMan: I agree with you, I would have loved Xbox Game Pass back when I was a kid. The idea of playing dozens of games for a small fee my parents can easily afford would be nothing short of brilliant.