| G2ThaUNiT said: Late 90s/early 2000s was a great time. |
This does seem like the correct answer, although I've never played a ton of shooters, so I'm hardly one to judge too well. For a bit of variety, I'd like to add Operation Flashpoint, even though I'm not exactly very familiar with it.
It's pretty funny how most of the posts here so far favour the time(s) when console shooters weren't really a huge thing yet. The pre-analog stick era seems to be the most popular so far, then it's the early analog stick era. I wonder if it's just the small sample size we have here or if consoles did something detrimental to shooters. I'm guessing it's a bit of both. Another potential factor is online play, which can be fun but probably doesn't contribute well to creating classics: games with a heavy multiplayer focus seem to be less likely to become classics, but shooters are a genre that works particularly well in multiplayer.
