The best moment is now, we’re in a Indie Game Renaissance, indie games that start at nothing and become worldwide household names, pretty much one after another.

Yeah, Triple A is fucked, but the old ways need to die so that the new path can be forged

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.

1991 to 2007

Prove me wrong people … prove me wrong.

Whatever you were playing when you were 12.

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.

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.

Now. All those games still exist, and are easier than ever to emulate if you wish. Good new games are coming out, and there’s simply no chance that you’ve exhausted all of the possible good games to play.

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

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.

Early 2010s you could get a 9999999999 in 1

As others have said, I too think the golden era of video games is now. Games are getting better and better and there has never been a bigger selection of games to play than right now. There have never been as many people enjoying video games than right now. That being said, I don’t play as much as I used to, but that’s mostly because I’ve been getting older and working in video games for almost 20 years I’ve been a bit overexposed to the medium.

I dont know where youre looking for games but I have so many games with absolutely unique gameplay or artstyle on my wishlist that I could probably fill a lifetime and it keeps growing.

SNES went through a period where it just felt like every game I played was a classic - FF6, Crono Trigger, A Link to The Past, Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, Star Fox, Earthbound, etc.

I’ve no doubt a lot of it is nostalgia, but I remember sprinting home from the bus stop after elementary school to rush home and play these games with my brothers. Formative years of my childhood.

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.

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.