What Were Your Peak Gaming Years?

[The_Liquid_Laser]

Best time for gaming: 1987 - 1992.  I was in middle school and I remembered the whole video game crash and this feeling that home consoles would never be back.  Then I saw a commercial for the NES.  They even tried to keep it from looking like a console, but I was looking carefully and I could tell it was a console.  I had to have an NES!  After all was said and done I owned about 50 NES games and rented many, many more.  The games were such a huge leap from anything the Atari 2600 could do and they even had plenty of games that you couldn't really do in an arcade either.  There has never been a console even remotely this good since.  The NES really innovated gaming in so many ways, that it kind of made every console that came later look a little disappointing.  I also include a little bit of the SNES era in this, because I got the SNES at launch, but it was stolen after about a year of owning it.  However, that first year or so had some of its best games: Link to the Past, Final Fantasy 2 (4), Actraiser, Super Castlevania 4, Super Mario World,....

2nd best: 93 - early 2000s  This was my PC gaming era.  It started with Civilization.  That made me realize just how good PC gaming really was in the 90's.  Then I discovered many more great games: Heroes of Might and Magic 2, Warcraft, Diablo, Master of Magic, Baldur's Gate, Rollercoaster Tycoon, ....  At the end of this era I discovered Ultima Online and a string of other MMO's.  I ended up playing Final Fantasy XI for several years, but these MMO's may have ended the golden era of PC games for me, because I basically stopped playing most other games while I was playing the MMO's.


2nd worst era:  1983 - 1986, the video game crash.  I loved my Atari 2600, but it had no worthy successor and after the first year or so, they didn't even sell video games in stores any more except for computer games.  Computers were a lot more expensive, even the Commodore 64, so I never had one.  However, arcades were still going very strong in this era.  That is why this is only the second worst era, since I at least had the arcades to keep me going during the crash.


Worst era: 2011 - 2016.  Basically the 3DS/Wii U/PS4/XB1 era of gaming.  There were a few good games from this era, but mostly it was slim pickings.  This was the hardest time I've ever had finding games that I actually like.  Nintendo and Square-Enix are usually my favorite developers, but I found both to be disappointing in this era.  Just about every other developer was even worse.  And PC gaming is a shell of its former self.  At least during the video game crash, when consoles were gone I could go to the arcade.  During this era there were no good options.  It was just thoroughly disappointing all around.

Thankfully that era has ended.  I have been really liking the Switch since it came out.  And this year in particular, the games I want to play are coming out much faster than I can play them.  I expect software releases to only accelerate from this point.  Things are looking very good so far.  And who knows?  This may become my new #1 era for gaming.