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.
PC gaming is kind of a continuum to me. I can draw hard lines at DOS > Windows and Win9x > NT-based Windows a la XP where compatibility mostly or partially breaks but you can play a lot of games made since the Steam era on modern hardware without much fuss.
Consoles really define the “generations,” and the only console generation I’m really nostalgic for is the SNES era. Mine was always a Nintendo household, and the SNES was my childhood. I had an N64, I’ve gone back to play it, I’m not sure even Ocarina of Time holds up anymore. The thing I still clutch to from the N64 era is the music. The SNES though, sometimes I want to go back and play those old games.
PS3 era, though that’s pretty much on the edge of what retro gaming would be.
My PS3 mostly became a Rock Band machine, so I didn’t play most of the other big games of the generation. I also associate the console with the poorest reliability of any console I’d ever had, the longest loading times, and the longest startup times. (Needing to download updates before you could play your game)
I had tons of great gaming memories with the console, even outside of Rock Band, but I just don’t have nostalgia for the era (outside of the golden era of Western-developed Rhythm games).
Games getting bigger and bigger in gigabytes, but still hampered by slow optical disks and slow hard drives. It was good tat the time, but I have more fondness for the cartridges which came before, whose immediacy felt like magic.
I have to admit that the anticipation of launching a PS1 game is nostalgic for me. I feel like that’s the last time that loading screens were bearable. At least until we got SSDs and indie games, lol
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.
The 70s, 80s and 90s as I wasn’t born yet
Late 80’s 8 bit. Sure it was great back then playing on Atari 65 or C64, but those games in retrospect simply fucking suck, nearly all shooters and platformers.
I stopped caring about games once they went 3D.
The 1994-2006 era, roughly the time between the release of Transport Tycoon and Civilization IV
Everything that came before the Gameboy and most consoles. My parents had an weird arbitrary rule about my sister and me not being allowed to have consoles but Gameboy or later Nintendo DS were fine. And as a kid I wasn’t really aware of the existence of PS Vita or PSP so those I’m also not really nostalgic for.
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.
Is there a word for imagined nostalgia? You could play them today, but I think you’d discover that not many Atari 2600 games were actually good.
Anemoia is the word for nostalgic longing for something you didn’t actually experience.
Thanks! This apparently is its origin, in 2012: https://www.thedictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/concept/anemoia
Pronounced “an-uh-moi-uh.”
Anything pre-NES era and PlayStation. I had a ZX Spectrum, which was a British console that was around in the 80s. It had lots of fun games which were plentiful and cheap, they’d only be a couple of quid each. But most of them were just really basic versions of what we have now and I have no intention of getting my old machine out to play them.
I’m not nostalgic for the PlayStation because I always felt like the only audiences it catered for were the Japanese and people who liked all that money-grabbing type of stuff, like FIFA. Neither of those were for me.
Everything post ps2
Early always-online consoles and their multiplayer-as-main-mode bullshit.
Early?
Xbone? Not sure if there was anything before that. Cause 360 could be played offline. Aswell as PS3.
N64 adventure games (except Mario). They were just janky messes with horrible frame rage camera issues, target hitting issues and weird looking environments. Looking at you Castlevania, but I can’t think of any others that I would want to play again either.
Atari 2600
Honestly, I don’t get nostalgic for gaming of any era. I do miss some games, and I get nostalgic over playing with people at the age I was then, but gaming as a pastime, or as an era with similar design styles or whatever, I don’t really feel that.
When it comes to the games in general, and gaming as a hobby, I’ve always enjoyed each generation’s improvements in graphics and overall improved hardware.
For me, the NES era as an example, it has nothing to do with the games or the console, it’s feeling that sense of longing for being young and in my cousin’s room with the group of us kids having fun together. There’s also that sense of wonder at this new kind of play at home, instead of at an arcade. But I don’t particularly feel anything about duck hunt, even though we played that a lot.
It’s not about the systems, it’s about the shared experiences.
Even when MMOs got big and I was playing alone, my nostalgia is about the online people I played with (some of whom I still talk to), having that magic experience of playing a game in a team with a guy from Scotland, some German guy that couldn’t speak English worth a damn except cursing, a lady and her husband from Nebraska, and a kid from California. It was so fucking cool that you could end up playing with Russians, Koreans, damn near anyone in the world, and have a real human connection.
But the games? They were meh at best, and can’t match the immersive graphics of stuff that came just a few years later.
Mind you, I’d still play those games if I had people to play with and the games were live, but it isn’t the same as nostalgia, of missing the era in that longing way.
