I see a lot of people here talking about the "golden age" of gaming...

i see a lot of people here talking about the "golden age" of gaming. what years do you think are considered the golden age?

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the golden age is people's childhood, regardless of their date of birth

1997-2007 is the very best with the final nail in the coffin in 2013

1998-2005?

Between 1998 and early 2000's. A lot of innovative games and gaming was not yet that normie friendly.
This is quite accurate.

1990 - 2001

Why wasn't gaming normie friendly? Is it just because it is considered cool now?

I'd say it lasted until the end of the PS2 and DS era. It really started with the PS1 era, since with technology boon happening everywhere, so many weird and experimental games were being greenlit, with most investors not really knowing what would be profitable. That's why there are so many weird Japan-only games for it. That then continued on with the PS2 for a little bit, before things started to settle down, and then it happened again with the DS, since games for it were cheaper to make comparatively and so many companies were eager to try out all the features the system had (two screens, touch screen for a widely-available device, microphone). It erred more towards mini games, but some really innovative stuff came out of it.

I was hoping so much that VR would be another case of that. You'd think that with the industry historically having the wildest games when there's technology shifts that don't just involve specs, that it'd be another great time to play games, but VR just didn't change things enough.

Fourth gen, with a renaissance in the sixth.

Consoles have been trash since then, and PC's unique games and online communities we're killed due to indieshit and matchmaking respectively.

This guy gets it. Everyone else is wrong.

Kind of. PC-Gaming back then was not that easy to set up. Games where often to non-conform and too hard to approach for the average person. Most normies back then played fifa and racing games on their playstation and that was it. It was definitely not that popular/cool and "Gamers" where often treated as "addicted nerds" etc..

1985-2001

I know what you mean. I remember being blown away by Shenmue because of the mo-cap and real-time-town-simulation. Or the use of physic in gameplay like HL2 did. I want to feel something like that again. Nowadays we have not enough weird B-Games and a lot of Indie-Games are without much substance. AAA is basically dead because they want to sell products and not experiences.

>Bronze Age:
The starters, the Pong and Atari boom until the crash


>Silver Age:
In between and after the crash, during the era of big arcade games and when Nintendo came out with the NES bringing back video games

>Golden Age:
Between the years 1996-2006 when advancement with new tech and generations bringing new graphics and looks

>Renaissance:
During the SNES and Genesis era along with 6 other competitors


Prove me wrong faggots.

>renaissance overlaps with golden age
Really gets my pickle tickled.

Yeah, honestly, I have to wonder if it was never going to happen, with so many big companies like Facebook trying to helm it, but I'm still hoping that some kind of weird stuff springs up from hobbyists. Another problem is just that indie development is mostly commercial nowadays. I do think developers should be compensated for their work, especially if they make a really good game, but you're crazy enough to spend a long time (years for people like Daisuke Amaya) making a game for free, the craziness tends to drive the quality up. You have to be driven by nothing but love, so the people who would half-ass things get weeded out eventually.

The golden age is pretty much the 16-bit era

it ended when sega left and microsoft entered the console market, prove me wrong.

It'd be the span between Half Life and whenever the last great PS2 game release.

Before DLC, before pay-to-win multiplayer, before games got easy to appease to a wider audience.

uhhh dreamcast had free dlc and xbox had paid dlc

I'm sorry, I meant on-disc DLC/cut content DLC

The end of 6th gen/ vry early 7th gen.

Devs more or less had figured out 2d games, and were now make great strides with innovative 3d games. Arcades were still a large influence and cinematic games weren't really a thing yet.

now is the only golden age
and that'll be the case so long as archival and emulation exist
this present moment is the best time to be a gamer

i mean, unless you're into playing new games, but then who the fuck does that?

metroid prime and samba de amigo had on disc dlc

Whatever years contain when you were personally between 8 and 16 years old.

Conveniently forgetting games during that timeframe that were shitty come as a bonus.

1986-2004

>Conveniently forgetting games during that timeframe that were shitty
Shitty games don't matter. Only the good ones do.
Nowadays we have shitty games, but not many good ones.

Sixth generation

Call me crazy but I really hope Valve will eventually get their shit together and set a new bar with HL3. One can at least dream I guess. At least Steam-Greenlight is getting closed down.

Part of what made that era is the weird innovations technically and creatively that creators had to explore due to limitations of the hardware. Pokemon's code is batshit, for example. I think because of this, developers had to think outside the box. Also, 3D was new. N64's GPU company went bankrupt two years after it launched and the Saturn didn't even use Polygons. Absolutely nothing was standard, so there was a lot of creativity and exploration from a technical standpoint.

>Whatever years contain when you were personally between 8 and 16 years old.
That's where this part applies.

1996 - 2007

I'd have to say it's PC games around the turn of the millennium. It was a time where the PC market was creating incredibly creative and intuitive games that still remain unparalleled in the market, a time where games were pushing the limits of what was possible with the medium instead of creating cinematic experiences, a time where graphics in video games were used to supplement the gameplay and level design instead of limiting them. People often consider the death of PC gaming around the time when STALKER and Crysis were released, and technology wise, that may be true, but gameplay wise, that ended at least 5 years before, when PC gaming turned into nothing more than console ports, FPS, and RTS.

>Thief games
>SS2
>AoE2
>Starcraft
>warcraft 3
>total annihilation
>morrowind
>gothic
>sacrifice
>messiah
>max payne
>outcast
>half life
>deus ex

And many more.

I'd say '93 to about '04 or so

pc gaming was insane until 2005-2006.
now normies invaded it with their shitty esports and survival games.

What do you expect, shit's backwards. Unless you wanna call it the enlightenment era.

I think PC gaming is still fun.

t. 29 year old guy.

>t. shit taste

I'd add System Shock 2 and Freespace 1 & 2 to that list.

Those two, and the others you listed, are still excellent games and are far better than the overwhelming majority of current releases, despite years of exponential technological advancement and videogame budgets that are tens of millions more.

Limitations definitely helped. Gameplay, sound and graphics had to be in balance. No room for flash cinematic experiences.

Golden Age is Post-Crash till the death of it being first party and rebirth as third party of Sega

16bit era

It was the only that the players benefited more from the games than the developers, since Sega and Nintendo literally had to win players over to survive.

2004 was the best year of gaming.

Y'all are dumb-ass motherfuckers.

We're STILL in a goddamn golden age.

When you look at a "Golden age" of any particular art form, you're looking at DECADES at least. The renaissance, what many consider to be a golden age of art and philosophical discovery, lasted TWO GODDAMN CENTURIES. A gaming golden age isn't going to stop just because there weren't quite as many good games for one or two years.

So long as we're in a period of growth and prosperity, so long as the means of self-expression and actuation keep increasing in number, we will be in a golden age of video gaming.

It's not strictly about the quality of games coming out, it's also about expanding the definition of "game". It's about making the tools necessary for creating games more accessible, and making games made by more people, more visible to general audiences. And in that way, we haven't stopped progressing and improving since the mid 1980s.

The games of any given year may or may not be better than any previous year or decade, but it has never been a better time to be a video game player or creator than right now, right this moment. The second that fact stops being true is the second the golden age is over.

>HL2
>Vampires Bloodlines
>Riddick: Escape from Butcher bay
>Doom 3

It was a good year.

...

Dont forget GTA SA

>it has never been a better time to be a video game player or creator than right now

its true though, you never had more games to play than right now
As for creators, it has never been easier to make games

more shovelware shit I'll never play being available isn't a positive thing

>numedia

What did they mean by this?

I don't even understand how you can argue against this point. There exist more and better emulators than ever and if there is even one game released in the last decade that you enjoy it literally is a better time to play videogames than 15 years ago

>if there is even one game released in the last decade that you enjoy it literally is a better time to play videogames than 15 years ago
ah so you're underage and trying to claim the x360 was the beginning of the golden age lol
2/10 nice bait lad

Sup Forums werent the first people to use nu as a prefix

>what years do you think are considered the golden age?

it hasn't even came yet.

Vidya is still too young of a medium to have Ages. Come back in a couple hundred years, when every single facet and possibility has been explored, then we'll talk.

>ah so you're underage and trying to claim the x360 was the beginning of the golden age lol
no I'm not, how do you even come to that conclusion?
You currently have a selection spanning from the seventies until now, 40+ years of videogames. Back whenever you consider to be the golden age you had smaller selection.
You can play every single game from your favorite period and every single other game ever released. How is this not good?

so many frustrated gen z babbies crying because they didn't experience the SNES/Genesis - PS2/GC era lol

Anything before the Wii. Never had to worry about game droughts and the shelves weren't being spammed with FPS.

You are dumb as shit, you know that?

>nuGame
>1996

That's amazing

Now is the best time to play games, but I feel like 6th gen was the best balance between how expensive it was to make a game and how creative they could get with it.

What I really miss is 5th gen's video game magazines, and really gaming journalism in general. Comparing magazines like EGM then to the trash we get now is night and day.

Only correct answer. Any faggot saying 98 has never played the snes and all those classics

Easily first superman despite looking like shit is considered golden age of comics

1990 - 2004
When HL2 and Doom 3 came out and got massive praise for their graphics while having downgraded gameplay, that's when it all started to go downhill.

>My childhood was better than YOUR childhood!

Oh fuck off.

1987 - 2007 if you a nice 20 year period. 1991 - 2007 is probably more realistic.

Pretty much this.

>Things sucked when EVERYONE ELSE got involved!

The rallying cry of the ignorant and the stupid.

Historically speaking, literally every time information became more readily accessible to the masses, society improved.
Seeing more "degeneracy" is the price we as a society pay for being able to see more of everything, good and bad.

i cant put a date on it but the golden age ended when developers learned just how little credit the audience actually deserved

gamers back then were just as retarded as they are now, it just wasn't known yet

6th gen > 4th gen > 5th gen > 3rd gen = 7th gen > shit > 8th gen

1st & 2nd gen are too archaic to matter anymore

You wouldn't be posting in this safespace if it benefited you.

1998-2004

This is when the internet went to shit.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Fucking AOL discs.

1990-2008

>t. salty teenager with too much free time.

me personally, 2000-2004. Higher end PS1 games and PS2 coming out onto the market, gamecube coming out with a whole mess of blockbuster titles, paper mario 1 AND 2 came out in that span, ff9 and 10, sms, a lot of good titles for xbox like the NG reboot, halo 1 and 2.

It's an interesting time in gaming when a lot of titles that are still heavily referenced, and a lot of games being made nowadays are now referencing elements of THAT era in their design, past the SNES/megadrive era.

It was a period of dozens of really really good games, and the beginning of realistic online multiplayer, paving the way to xbox 360 and PS3 and even the wii's much simplified internet connection systems.

You can say the SNES was the golden age (and it was really good don't get me wrong, but how many people honestly played a lot of the good SNES titles out there? It was a total crapshoot for me, was I gonna get something good or something total fucking garbage? It was almost random, and it was a lot of money spent.)

I just think with the rise of the internet, information on games was more readily available, things like E3 were more publicly shown (even though they cut it off from the public in regards to attendance in that period as well) and more.

Definitely my favorite time period. RIP EDGE mag though, lost of cool guys I knew that worked there, and lots of cool guys I knew that made art for the covers occasionally. This one was done by the fat cunt larry bundy jr.

to clarify, easier, more simplified console online gaming solutions. Obviously PC gaming online was a thing and had been for a while by that point.

Honestly, right this second is pretty goddamn great.
I don't know how anyone can look at P5, Nier, Zelda, Horizon, Nioh, Yakuza 0, Hollow Knight, Thumper, or many of the other games that have come out the past couple months and not say that shit is fantastic, and thought provoking and made by creators who are truly passionate about their craft.

I can tell you it ended with the release of the 360 which was when things sharply became worse and shitty business practices starting emerging but beyond that it's debateable

1993-1998

anyone who says any period in the 2000s has a worthless opinion and is just stating the time when they were adolescent. I have played games since the mid 80s though, and if there's a "golden age" it is 93 to 98 without any doubt. I picked a specific narrow 5 year period to be as narrow as possible

>realistic online multiplayer
Honestly, this is a bad thing. It's created a generation of socially-inept losers. LAN parties and co-op were as far as multiplayer needed to stretch. Multiplayer's become a gimmick and having games constantly connected to the Internet means publishers forcing DRM shit on you.
>rise of the internet, information on games
People bought games via word of mouth when I was young. They'd actually played the game and had no personal/financial investment in telling you whether it was good or bad.

In the '90s you had games which were complete packages and properly tested. It was a simpler time and it was a better time.

1985-2005
3rd gen to mid/late 6th gen

>In the '90s you had games which were complete packages and properly tested. It was a simpler time and it was a better time.

what
a
fucking
laugh

there are quite a few examples of games that shipped broken and weren't able to be patched; in several cases this led to games that couldn't be completed etc.

games were a thousand times buggier in the past than today. patching matters literally a million times more than testing.

keep having nostalgia for an era you didn't live through though

You had all of that in the 2000s too. Simply having the option to play online with PS2 meant that you could have fun on socom or MGS3 without being subjected to 12 year olds who couldn't figure out how to hook it up..
As for people having a stake in games, they always did. Magazines back in the day were even worse for outright lying about the best games out there. Do you not remember nintendo power blatantly advertising the awful TMNT NES game as one of the "best games on the NES"? I mean even back in the day it was considered total shit by pretty much every kid that played it, but those that didn't bought it because TMNT was rad, and got scalped out of their cash.

Also there were just as many incomplete buggy fucking messes in the 90s as today, even. The thing about today is they deliberately leave them buggy because they can patch it out, instead of doing a rushjob to try and throw a coat of paint over an abomination like pit fighter, a deliberate attempt at a cash grab based on the arcade title, or shaq fu, which everyone knows about by now.

>few examples
I bet there are a few obscure examples in the thousands of games that were fine. Name one acclaimed SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, N64 or Dreamcast game that was buggy.

late 90s early 2000s pc gaming

the burden of proof isn't on me, i lived through the era. you didn't

oh heres a hint though: not every game is critically acclaimed and before the internet it was much harder to know which games were good for the average person

you seem to have this idea that people didnt constantly buy abysmally shitty games in the 90s which we did

Lufia II. It's still my favorite game on SNES but there was a menu bug where you completely crashed and it sometimes corrupted your savegame. Also, divine sword shrine.

too bad SC and WC made RTS a shitshow and made everyone play safe if they wanted their game to come out and do well

and all the other shit that was cool on PC became forgotten really or turned to hard shit

max payne
half life
deus ex
elder scrolls
thief

all good shit, praised massively when they were on PC. later games in the series just failed

1992-2002, If I were to give a ten year window.

Jurassic Park on the SNES was pretty well liked and is a decent game but version 1.0 has a bug where you can get stuck in the ship by going through a doorway, forcing you to reset the entire game.

not a AAA big time title, he meant 1st party, popular shit

that shit hit in 1996 man, no one gave 2 fucks about the SNES, the N64 was out that Sept!

This is the only accurate answer. 9/11 was the event that sealed the deal.

Most all time greats came out between 1993-2000
Silver age would be 2001-2006

around 96-05
Easily the majority of the best games of all time were released within that time.