The leap into 3D realm. Sheer brilliance and beauty. No contest.

Actually I'm closing in on 28, but my two main interests throughout life have been history and video games, so at some point when I was young they naturally compelled me to look into past systems that I only briefly played or missed out on entirely. When I was 9 I asked for a NES despite it being 1997 (already had a Genesis and N64), and a couple years later I finally stumbled into the Atari VCS I'd always heard about and was just so excited that something predated the NES lol

Since then I've been an on and off collector (either historically significant games or fun ones as opposed to just filling a library), focusing primarily on experiencing them in chronological order and hitting all the important historical mile marks (wireless VCS controller, the intellivoice etc). I've found its really rather easy to get into the mindset of people who experienced it first hand through that approach, and it's been a really fun experience as the games for my two consoles (VCS/Intellivision) are usually inexpensive.

By experiencing these games in said mindset many are actually still quite fun (if often only in short bursts), and while they may all seem simple to people today, when you've played some early atari black carts and thereafter experience the massive Pitfall II, tight controls of H.E.R.O., or see actual parallax scrolling in Jungle Hunt, you're pretty damn impressed and excited. I suggest to everyone, though, that the manual is a MUST, not just because they're often necessary to know what you're doing but because they're usually packed full of personality and humor as well. There's a kind of connection you feel with the developer, it usually being just one or a couple people, that you generally don't experience anymore... The personality of the coder really shines through, and they generally created their own manuals as well.

Also, I fully intend to dive into a new gen 2 consoles eventually, and would have a colecovision already if not for those games being compatible with the VCS. I'm curious as to what you might think... I was considering the gen 1 Odyssey just for its historical value, but I don't have a tv that would play it and it frankly is a bore anyway. I then thought it seems like I really ought to own SOME working pre-1977 pong console to represent the first gen, but it's remarkably difficult to find any reliable information about the crazy number of options. I'm thinking I'll probably just go with the Odyssey 2... the Fairchild Channel F would be cool just as the first cartrige loader, but it's expensive and the games are pretty underwhelming.

But yeah, there's nothing unreasonable about picking the transition from gen 4 to gen 5 (that was my first gut reaction before I thought it over), but the landslide is rather inevitable given not many people have seen firsthand just how drastically the video game was reinvented and improved upon in every conceivable way from gen 2 to gen 3.

Ah, close enough. I figured you had to be at least late-20s (or maybe early 20s and extremely well-versed in gaming history). Yeah, it's funny because a lot of gamers don't know how different Activision is now from their earlier days. I missed out on a lot of their games but I know they once had a reputation for being much more creative and adventurous than they are now.

I'm 31, so I'm just barely old enough to have seen the tail end of the second generation in arcades and with a couple of older cousins who had things like the really early Atari consoles, and seeing the difference between all those single-screen arcade games and Super Mario Bros. introducing the concept of scrolling games was pretty mindblowing.

In a lot of ways you could argue that was more influential than the jump from 4th to 5th gen, since while 5th gen really made heavy use of 3D, we'd had a lot of precursors to that; games like Super Mario Kart and F-Zero which used sprite-based graphics to simulate the idea of 3D.

Deamcast only

Great to hear that somebody recalls H.E.R.O. as fondly as I do. A genuine classic! Pitfall was another and I loved Centipede and Millipede in the 2600 days.

Ps2 to ps3 generation because of thgraphics and the cell