SultanOfSuave: I was wondering if this question would come up. Did you get it from the "Age Range of GOGers" thread, as well?
I considereif if this this would be a possible metric to narrow a guess for a persons age, as people can often have difficulty citing something as a "golden age" without first-hand experience.
davies92: Ha, I did actually! You may be right, but I've seen people of different ages give similar periods to me for their "golden age". Although it would of course be difficult for younger folk to give periods before they were even born.
Some amazing games have been released before and since... but I'd probably end up agreeing with your assessment.
Before then, the medium was too new, and its developers was still finding their footing. Since that period, the industry has almost become so well-established that it has suffered for it, with the customer the one being exploited. If you ever had the missfortune of seeing the rubbish in the Wii catalogue and Wii Shop Channel, it was clear that the writing was on the wall, and that the rot and decline was inevitable - it was shown to be profitable and easy to execute. The barrier to entry continually reduced from the beginning, but somewhere around here with the dawn of digital distribution it became almost too low for its own good.
Your goldilocks period seems like a pretty good guess... the developers active at the time would have honed their skills with heightened innovation and problem solving, having been accustomed to drawing out as much as possible from consoles that left them working with very little. If they could not, they would have been successful.These developers had sudden access to tools that were a great leap above what was available only a few years before; cd quality audio, etc, with which to apply themselves - producing fine games. If I picked up any well known IP around this period, I was almost certain to have a good time. Not today... I have to second guess every title released by every studio; other matters take precedence over making a good game. And not before - the information with which to make a decision was so lacking that at times it was just like a lucky dip, like picking a CD based upon how nice the picture on the front is.
In a word, during this period it was natural for a game to be good, with exceptions. Now it is natural for it to be bad, with exceptions - it has to be compelled to be good.
The one problem with this age is the availability which has decreased immensely today. There were many great games in this era that were not available to me: never in any local shops, and without the internet, I could never even know that they existed. We were still at the mercy of distribution until the latter half when internet became more commonplace.Thankfully, I was still spoilt because everything on the shelf was worth picking up.
