Old Gamers, What was the last truly magical gaming generation for you?

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I'd say PSX, peak machine for both experimental, magical, experiences and certified bangers. In retrospect I would've choosen PS2, but sadly I was to distracted by partying and girls to really appreciate the amazing catalogue at the time. Been working my way through interesting games since I got a retro machine, damn what a system.

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I love gaming, it's still magical for me to this day. I mean just the last decade or so I've been in awe of the depth and brilliance of Elden Ring, Pathfinder, Crusader Kings, Battletech, Disco Elysium, Unicorn Overlord, Remnant II, Rimworld, Outward, Darkest Dungeon, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Nier: Automata, Divinity Original Sin II and many more I can't remember from the top of my head.

I'm even discovering gems from generations ago to this day, just the other day I played Survival Kids on the GBC, wow talk about being ahead of it's time.

Fuck I love this hobby! ❤️
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Last time I was truly blown away was the first time I tried the glass-free stereoscopic 3D of the Nintendo 3DS, especially for games that used depth like Starfox 64 3D.
Truly magical.
 
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Generic said:
PS3/X360/Wii era still had an identity. Nowadays pretty much every game is multiplatform. Also digital stores are filled with shovelware.
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This. Also peak online MP - no party chat, all open lobbies, felt like everybody had a mic. Nowadays no one even talks in Destiny strikes
 
Probably PSX/PC/Saturn/N64, because I was in college for the PS2 years and did not play many games. However I do think that is when this industry was at its best. Over the years I have gone back and played many PS2 era games and they are just amazing still in a way that is lost. Like the switch 2 is getting F-Zero GX and that game could be released today and is a 10/10 in every sense of the word by today's standards, no nostalgia, but it's also 20 years old. Crazy!
 
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Probably ps1, as I was entering puberty around that time. But I experienced more of it in my later age. If the impact can be made later on, then I'm still feeling the power


Playing ff6 t edition, reaching valigarmanda on the back, thinking I'd have an OK fight to rush the moogle charm. I get greeted with a two phase boss fight while meridian dance plays. I'll tell you some of these romhackers know exactly how to capture the magic.

It was swift, but in that moment I felt flaming! The magic is still available. It is out there for you too.
 
I love every gen and I cant put one above the others.

Even this gen people seem to hate on foruns I think is better than the last. The real issue I see is the politization in games, to be precise, in western studios.
 
PS360. I know is fairly decent bud I feel nothing for games past 2013 and that generation was just so peak, as the youngsters say.
 
I was born in 1973, just a year after the gaming industry began. By the time I was old enough to understand what gaming was, the timing was perfect , I was lucky to be able to jump in right from the start. Here's my list of games by generation, not necessarily the ones I enjoyed the most from their respective generation, but each of them stood out as a banger.

1. Atari 2600 - Adventure (1980)
2. Atari 2600 - Yars' Revenge (1982)
3. NES - Mother / EarthBound Beginnings (1989)
4. SNES - EarthBound (1994 JP / 1995 US)
5. PS1 - Vagrant Story (2000)
6. Dreamcast - Jet Set Radio (2000)
7. PS2 - Killer7 (2005)
8. PS2 - Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (2003 JP / 2004 US)
9. Xbox - Psychonauts (2005)
10. PS3 - Demon's Souls (2009)
11. Xbox 360 - Deadly Premonition (2010)
12. PS3 - Catherine (2011)
13. PS4 - Nier: Automata (2017)
14. PC - Undertale (2015)
15. Switch - Hollow Knight (2018)
16. PS5 - Signalis (2022)
17. PC - Ultrakill (2020, early access)
18. Xbox Series X - Hi-Fi Rush (2023)

Edit: The following picks for 2024 and 2025 aren't set in stone yet, but here's how things are shaping up so far. Note: some of these games were released on multiple platforms, I'm just listing the platform I played them on.

19. PC - Pacific Drive (2024)
20. PC - Animal Well (2024)
21. PC - S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 (2025)
 
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On the PC side, the approx mid 1996 to mid 1998 time period starting with playing Daggerfall and realising the game was infinite and you could do crazy things, like climbing the walls of a store in the middle of the night to enter through the roof and stealing everything only to sell everything back to the store in the morning. And then playing Unreal with a 3dfx card. The huge landscapes were amazing but the close up/detail textures were also amazing.

For consoles probably the same time period, eg. approx mid 1996 to mid 1998 for the N64, playing Mario and Zelda for the first time on display units in department stores, and anticipating the release of the 64DD like it was some sort of holy event…
 
I don't know about the last generation per se, but the last time I had that 'Mario 64 running outside the castle' moment was the first time I put on the PSVR headset back in 2017 and played the Astrobot mini-game. My mind raced with all the possible mascot platformers that could be given the VR treatment; Mario, Ratchet, Donkey Kong, Crash, Rayman. We never got there unfortunately and seems that we never will...
 
I've been video gaming since 1982. The last time I was "wowed" by video game tech was the transition from 5th to 6th gen. So PS1 to PS2, for example. Since then it's been incremental, non-drastic improvements with diminishing returns.
 
I'm in my early 40s and while obviously nothing feels like the wonder of childhood, there's always something new that blows me away.

Returnal was one of those moments where it felt like someone scanned my brain and made exactly the game I didn't even know I wanted. It's just fucking sublime and the lack of load times and unabashed Arcade-iness of it all in such a modern and adult package blew my mind.

Hunt: Showdown as well. Death Stranding. A lot of stuff honestly. Still constantly get games that make me happy as fuck.
 
I should add VR to my previous answer. Moving into VR was more of a magical leap than anything happening in the rest of gaming tech over the past decade. Flat-to-VR is more awe inspiring than all the 4k/120fps/raytracing/whatever you could possibly create, makes all the innovations in flat space seem like a waste of resources.
 
Personally I loved the early 2000s PC games. GTA3, Max Payne, Soldier of Fortune, No One Lives forever, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, Mafia, Hitman, UT 2003, all the half life one engine games. I know some of those were on consoles too but for me they were all best on PC.
 
PS2, GCN, Xbox

My favorite era was the SNES/Genesis eta. It perfected 2D gaming. The move to 3D was really disappointing to me. It was ugly and performance dipped. The PS2, GCN, and Xbox era massively improved 3D. I had a ton of fun with all three consoles. My only complaint would be Mario Sunshine was a mediocre mess.
 
N64 for me as well. afterward a lot of games became shallower, even from developers I trusted (looking at you zelda WW.
of course a lot of great stuff came afterwards
 
PS2/Xbox/Gamecube era was incredible. When you think about the franchises that were either enhanced by or debuted on those consoles, it's mind boggling. They also introduced online connectivity.
 
The craziest times were:

1. When Quake hit. The leap for FPS was crazy to see full 3D (while it looks basic now) was a wow moment. Also the sound design and music by Reznor was wild.

2. Half Life changing how games move in a narrative way.

3. Starcraft and Diablo 2 being massive time sinks filling 24 hour internet cafes.

4. World of Warcraft launch was a phenomenom that has not been met. Everyone was talking about it and playing it.

So the span of 1996 to 2006 was just crazy. You legit felt excited and wondering what was coming next. There is a lot of the prolific IPs and gargantuan leaps in tech happening in that 10 year span.
 
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For me it was Dreamcast. But that's more about age than anything. I was 12 when the Dreamcast came out. It was literally my entire world lol.


By the time the next systems came out (PS2/Xbox/GameCube), I was becoming more interested in girls and music and being cool and all that other teenager shit. Videogames were still my jam but, but in that window from like 6 to 12 years old, gaming was truly magical.
 
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Mario 1, 2 and 3 were magical in their own ways. As were Donkey Kong Country, Spyro, Sly Cooper, Red Dead Redemption 2, Breath of the Wild. I don't really think much about generations anymore. I pick and choose amazing games from all time and enjoy the heck out of them. I've never finished Ocarina of Time and I'll be playing Tears of the Kingdom for the first time this year so I have many magical experiences coming my way.

I hope I can still have magical experiences far in the future when I'm old and gray.
 
For me it was definitely the Amiga, it was a MASSIVE upgrade from my Amstrad 8-bit computer.
- The games sounded and looked much, much better. You didn't have to use your imagination all the time, because the characters on screen, even if heavily pixelated, finally looked "real".
- You didn't have to wait 10-15 minutes for the game to load and the interface was very user friendly.
- The biggest change - you had an incredible variety of genres, with some of them not present or only in very primitive form on 8-bits. The games I played the most on all of my Amiga's pretty much shaped my taste for video games. Obviously that changed and evolved over the years, but there are still some genres I wouldn't be interested in if I didn't have my first contact with them on the Amiga.

PS1 & late 1990s PC gaming also deserve a mention. Switching to playing (early) 3D games was a big change and I discovered even more new genres, like stealth games or immersive sims. It was super fun, but was it magical? I probably wouldn't use that word.
 
Wii U is the last one. Loved Nintendoland. I had 2 kids to play that with lol. Wii Party U was great. NSMB was SMB but solid fun title.

Then they sent Splatoon to the plate. Next at bat was Mario Maker.

They couldn't help themselves and kept it going DK:TF, Warioware, Pikmin 3. And grand slam with MK8.

Offbeat use of the 2nd screen gimmick launch titles in ZombiU deserves a mention. As did them trying to do something with STar Fox along the same lines. I wouldn't say they were hits but tried to shake things up.

WE got the HD Zelda GC remakes.

And last but not least topped off with BotW or would have been had they not held it back and released it same day for Switch and got rid of the touchscreen inventory management. Never played it on Wii U it turned out.

Probably forgot some titles. Smash was a good smash. OH yeah SM World. Toad Treasure. ...

And the GAmepad itself...was Nintendo quirky at its best. And had useful features like tv volume on the controller. Streaming to the gamepad was high tech back then and worked perfect.

Switch obviously better hardware overall. Was mind blowing that just over 4 years later they fit the Wii U into the Switch form factor. And Switch OS so much better it isn't funny.

But overall Switch hooked up to the tv was another 7 years of Wii U with much of the initial magic already spent during the 4 years of Wii U. Switch was more like going from a clunky desktop to a sleek laptop of the same power with a hot new refined simplified streamlined sped up OS redesign. Amazing and yet nothing new software wise that (technically speaking) you couldn't have still been playing on your clunky desktop.

PS. I can't forget that amiibos were born on the Wii U. The craze made it fun to track them down for a few years.
 
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Easily, the 6th Gen. PS2 and Gamecube not only were awesome consoles. It was a time when machines were powerful enough to allow for more intrincated games, but with not enough power as to be limitless, forcing developers to use their ingenuity and imagination to crafting games.

That was lost since the 7th Gen onwards, when the worst aspects of this industry started really showing.
 
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Last ?

PlayStation VR without single doubt, this thing is pure MAGIC, being IN the games is truely something.
Astro Bot Hello GIF by PlayStationDE


Older ?

The NES, then the SNES.
 
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I generally don't think in these terms. I've been gaming since 1972 (I was 3 and we had a Magnavox Odyssey) and one of the things I love most about gaming has been watching it evolve over the years. I suppose it's technically objectively arguable that we are now in "the worst generation of gaming" for whatever specific metrics, but I don't dwell on shit like that. And I've never gotten stuck in the past. e.g. Indie 2D platformer games bore the shit out of me, regardless of how mind-blowingly innovative they are. I loved 2D platformers when they were the cutting edge. Technology moved on, game design moved on, and I moved on.

That said... I realized a long time ago that nothing is ever going to blow my mind the way the jump from 16-bit consoles to 32-bit consoles did. The example I always use is that one day I was playing Super Metroid and Sonic & Knuckles, and the next day I was playing Virtua Fighter and Panzer Dragoon and Jumping Flash and Wipeout. I have never experienced a quantum leap like that before or since, and at this point it's safe to say I never will.

Another thing that used to happen back then is some games were so new and inventive and fresh, sometimes I would buy them just to find out what in the hell they were. Resident Evil is a perfect example. I saw the big preview articles in Game Pro and EGM or whatever, and I had no idea what the hell I was looking at. Every screenshot was from a different perspective, the characters and enemies were always shown from a different angle and at a different scale. I didn't see how it would be possible to control an avatar character on screen in a situation like that, so I figured it must be like a point and click adventure, like Myst or D except it would be third person instead of first person. You'd click on an object in the room and Chris/Jill would walk over and interact with it. But the previews didn't mention any specifics of the game play, so it was a total mystery. One day around that time I felt like I needed a new game but I didn't know what, so I went to a shop and browsed. There wasn't really anything I wanted, and I almost left empty handed. At the last second I decided to buy Resident Evil, just to satisfy my curiosity and find out what it even was. I wasn't expecting much from it. After getting home and playing it for half an hour, I felt like I'd won the lottery. I still love RE and to this day RE1 is still my favorite in the entire series. But I haven't played it probably 20 years now. I actually just finally got around to playing RE4 remake last week and am hoping the rumors about RE1 finally getting a modern remake to bring it up to RE2/3/4 remake standards are true.
 
Psvr2 feels pretty magical. But I think playing PSO on the Dreamcast was last time I felt genuine magic where I played the game all night.
 
PSX era/pc 90s, golden age of gaming. All the great JRPGs on PSX, Ultima online and Everquest on PC. It was unbelievable
 
SNES/Genesis was definitely my golden age (ages 6-10), but I still feel like I felt some of that magic come back with DS/Wii. Probably largely because the new ways of playing.

DS with touch based games that really worked well like, Professor Layton, Trace Memory, and Hotel Dusk were like nothing I had ever played before.

I know Wii isn't remember as fondly by "hardcore gamers," but I was so hyped for it (admittedly, mostly for Twilight Princess at first). I know it was a cheap little $20 game to sell a peripheral, but Link's Crossbow training was so much fun, and I was happy to get some more more of the Twilight Princess world. Virtual Console and being able to gift games to your friends is something I really miss, but it was magic at the time. Smash Bros. Brawl was huge for me. Xenoblade was probably the last truly amazing Wii game I played. It's crazy that they almost didn't bring it to the U.S.
 
Magical is tough to say. There were a lot of big phases for me, when I was a little kid and arcade games were "the thing" (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong) just going out to a restaurant with machines/an arcade was mind blowing and so exciting. Playing a 2600, primitive as it seems in hindsight, was just so unimaginably incredible when it was a novelty. And of course as things cooled, they'd come back with renewed vigor (when NES launched, and then the 16-bit wars of course). I guess it's easy to say that during the 16-bit era was when I peaked. Then in the early 90s I was in college and my gaming dropped wayyyy off, basically to the point where I was out of the hobby by the time I was graduating. I hadn't picked up a 32-bit machine at all, PlayStation/Saturn/N64 were all basically not to my taste compared to what I had come from.

As I started in the working world, emulation started becoming kind of a big thing. It really brought me back into the fold in a big way - all these crazy games I'd never been able to play which we never got from Japan, plus plenty of domestic ones that were always curiosities. And then of course with MAME we could finally play actual arcade games, this was basically just bliss. Tuning into davesclassics.com to see the regular "MAME WIP coming soon" pics was just such a big deal for awhile.

I should mention that at this point (late 1990s) I was working in the games industry, although my love/attention for games had shifted more to a concentration on making art for them. I started picking up modern consoles again, here and there, out of necessity more so than for pure enjoyment. I mean I still picked up plenty of games for fun, but it was almost always for reference/etc or lots of retro-centric stuff.

UNTIL...

VR really brought me back in a big way. 2012 or 13, I forget, I saw an Oculus Rift devkit at the office for the first time running an early demo. No good controls, and the presentation was pretty rough, but it was still neat enough - nothing to really grab met yet. Maybe another year later, the VR scene started picking up and I saw some demos that really hipped me to what the format brought to the table and now I had an idea of how transformative this would be. And then the Vive suddenly just appeared and my damn reality was turned on its side, I had no idea I could feel this excited about games again. I bought a PSVR in late 2016, must have been, and though the tech was noticeably weaker than the PCVR stuff, it was evident "Sony knows what to do with this thing" (in that launch period, they certainly did) and even with all those floppy wires and tech limitations, I was all in with it. I don't pull out the
headset that often, but for a time I was running to Toys R Us to grab PSVR games like I was 12 years old again. Even now I am still struggling not to pull the trigger on a PS5 just to get my hands on the latest Gran Turismo VR game..
 
SNES was the most magical.

After that, 3dfx/Quake era PCs where quite magical.

Dark Souls 1 was a magical moment, though I can't really attribute that to the shitty PS3 console.
 
1996-2006 peak gaming.

Last magical gen was 360/PS3 generation due to the advancement of HD visuals, cool things you could do with real-time physics, and large worlds still being new. Also, the 360 generation ushered in easy online play, digital distribution, so if you never touched PC it would feel even more transformative.

Only generation that will feel like this again will be when we get some huge advancement in VR or AR that opens up new experiences that are accessible to a wide audience without making them sick.
 
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ReBurn said:
The jaw drop for me was the shift to HD. I bought a 360 to play DOA4 before I had an HD tv. When I hooked it up to the LCD and booted into clean 720p I was amazed at the difference from SD the day before. Then the experience of the first Uncharted game was equally amazing.

That's also the generation that games stopped evolving. The last magical generation is also the generation where the magic died.
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This. Right. Here.
 
Nothing will ever exceed seeing an N64 in Toys R Us showing Mario 64. Looking back on it now, we were exactly as awestruck as people seeing TV for the first time.

Obviously technology has advanced a lot since then, but it's been more linear. First time playing VR was delightful, but hampered by being clunky. I don't think anything will be that big of a leap until we get like a Holodeck or Black Mirror style full immersion games.

All that said, I still love games and new amazing stuff comes out all the time. I mean, Owlcat is making a full blown WH40k CRPG where you get to be an inquisitor and it will almost certainly be 100+ hours long and epic. What more could anyone want.
 
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