I would say Atari but that’s just low-hanging fruit because it’s a generation I never really got to play as it was before my time. But I am starting to fall out of nostalgia for the NES which is held dearly in a lot of hearts of retro gamers and gamers that have enjoyed what that system had to offer for a few decades.
I know it had offered a lot of classics and gave so many games their start, most of which are still with us today like Final Fantasy for example.
The best guess I can give about why I don’t care as much about that generation is because it is very oversaturated when you start entering the world of retro gaming. For retro gaming I prefer SNES and Genesis, because I technically did start playing those when I was born and they were first released. So I have more favorability towards those than the NES and generations before and during it.
The early 2000s.
I was a Genesis kid. Loved the 16 bit era, and also had plenty of 8 bit. Much love all around.
Got into PC gaming in the 1990s. Loved strategy especially, and it’s something you can’t do well on 16 bit.
But the early 2000s were relatively dark. 3d graphics were around and pretty shitty by today’s standards. There was a lot of straight garbage in the gaming market that I don’t want to experience again. There was good stuff, like HL2, but on the whole things were bad.