Best decade of gaming

[The_Liquid_Laser]

I have to give it to the 1980's, although the 1990's is a c  lose second.

The 1980's had TWO Golden Ages: one for arcade gaming and one for console gaming.  Arcade gaming started the decade off with Pac Man, but the amazing thing about the arcades at this time is how they just kept releasing hit after hit in just the span of a few years.  Not only had arcades become extremely popular, but arcade machines were everywhere.  You could go to a pizza place, grocery store or convenience store and find a couple of arcade games there to play.  I have never since seen gaming so thoroughly infused into the mainstream culture to the extent that it was during the early 80's.

And then the other megaton bomb of the 80's was the NES.  This is the first time the biggest console games were actually made for play at home instead of simply being arcade ports.  Having continuous music was new.  Being able to save your progress was new.  And most importantly it created a crapton of the biggest gaming franchises that are still huge today: Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Tetris, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Metal Gear, Mega Man, Castlevania, etc....  What we think of as console gaming was essentially created by the NES, and it had the most innovative games of any console ever.

The 1980's also had some decent computer games, but I wouldn't really call it PC gaming, because Microsoft OS was not really important in the 80's.  Computer gaming is actually what makes the 90's competitive with the 80's.  Basically the invention of the mouse + Direct X from Microsoft is what made the 90's the golden era for computer gaming.  Really Direct X is what turned "computer gaming" into "PC gaming", and of course there were a crapload of great games to go with it.

Console gaming was also pretty good in the 90's, but arcades were dying out.  Revenues were high from fighting games, but there was very little variety between game genres in the arcade.

So in the end I have to give it to the 80's.  It had 2 Golden Eras: Arcade and Console, plus it had some decent computer games as an honorable mention.  The 90's had amazing PC gaming, where PC gaming finally came into its own, and the 90's also had really good console gaming, but console gaming was not as innovative as the 80's.  And the 90's kind of had arcades as an honorable mention, but they eventually died outside of Japan by the end of the 90's.