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?
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And the lack of interaction of movies and comics is slowly making them outdated.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.