I would say Atari but that’s just low-hanging fruit because it’s a generation I never really got to play as it was before my time.

Is there a word for imagined nostalgia? You could play them today, but I think you’d discover that not many Atari 2600 games were actually good.

PS3 era, though that's pretty much on the edge of what retro gaming would be.

My PS3 mostly became a Rock Band machine, so I didn't play most of the other big games of the generation. I also associate the console with the poorest reliability of any console I'd ever had, the longest loading times, and the longest startup times. (Needing to download updates before you could play your game)

I had tons of great gaming memories with the console, even outside of Rock Band, but I just don't have nostalgia for the era (outside of the golden era of Western-developed Rhythm games).

The 1994-2006 era, roughly the time between the release of Transport Tycoon and Civilization IV

7th Generation of consoles (PS3, X360, Wii) was pretty meh. The Wii was cool for a time, but it soon became flooded with shovelware and finding a good game was a chore. The PS3 was lackluster at launch and only got its footing at the tail end of the generation. The X360 had very few exclusives because most of their stuff was available on Windows.

This was also a time when apparently every dev, publisher and their mom operated under the presumption that "brown filter = rEaLiSm". That, and bloom. Lots and lots of bloom. Good riddance.

Everything that came before the Gameboy and most consoles. My parents had an weird arbitrary rule about my sister and me not being allowed to have consoles but Gameboy or later Nintendo DS were fine. And as a kid I wasn't really aware of the existence of PS Vita or PSP so those I'm also not really nostalgic for.

Controversial take perhaps, but most of the N64 generation.

There are a few standout games that I think of fondly, but that was the generation where most developers were still trying to figure out 3D gameplay. Most games were clunky, where playing felt more like fighting against the mechanics rather than working within them. And they aren't that pretty to look at.

I also don't feel any nostalgia when looking at modern games that use that sort of visual aesthetic either. I am fine with pixel art games which emulate earlier generations, because the developers are (mostly) still taking that visual medium and elevating it above what technology was capable at the time, and the end result feels artistic and cool to look at. But games that emulate the early 3D art style are emulating the weird aliasing, melty and inconsistent textures, chunky models, etc. which is just taking the current medium and reducing it down to its worst state.

Weirdly enough, Sega Genesis games for some reason. Except for Sonic. They weren't as good as SNES games, I find.

They just feel like they were trying too hard to be 'cool'. Often the graphics and music also didn't appear as refined as the SNES. And the controller layout sucked. I hated the D-pad and 3 buttons wasn't enough. Additionally, there was no standard for which button was for jumping attacking and third function. Whereas in the SNES it was pretty standard.

Honestly, I don't get nostalgic for gaming of any era. I do miss some games, and I get nostalgic over playing with people at the age I was then, but gaming as a pastime, or as an era with similar design styles or whatever, I don't really feel that.

When it comes to the games in general, and gaming as a hobby, I've always enjoyed each generation's improvements in graphics and overall improved hardware.

For me, the NES era as an example, it has nothing to do with the games or the console, it's feeling that sense of longing for being young and in my cousin's room with the group of us kids having fun together. There's also that sense of wonder at this new kind of play at home, instead of at an arcade. But I don't particularly feel anything about duck hunt, even though we played that a lot.

It's not about the systems, it's about the shared experiences.

Even when MMOs got big and I was playing alone, my nostalgia is about the online people I played with (some of whom I still talk to), having that magic experience of playing a game in a team with a guy from Scotland, some German guy that couldn't speak English worth a damn except cursing, a lady and her husband from Nebraska, and a kid from California. It was so fucking cool that you could end up playing with Russians, Koreans, damn near anyone in the world, and have a real human connection.

But the games? They were meh at best, and can't match the immersive graphics of stuff that came just a few years later.

Mind you, I'd still play those games if I had people to play with and the games were live, but it isn't the same as nostalgia, of missing the era in that longing way.

N64 adventure games (except Mario). They were just janky messes with horrible frame rage camera issues, target hitting issues and weird looking environments. Looking at you Castlevania, but I can't think of any others that I would want to play again either.

Everything post ps2

Anything pre-NES era and PlayStation. I had a ZX Spectrum, which was a British console that was around in the 80s. It had lots of fun games which were plentiful and cheap, they’d only be a couple of quid each. But most of them were just really basic versions of what we have now and I have no intention of getting my old machine out to play them.

I’m not nostalgic for the PlayStation because I always felt like the only audiences it catered for were the Japanese and people who liked all that money-grabbing type of stuff, like FIFA. Neither of those were for me.

Atari 2600

The generation where I did not have adult responsibilities to prioritize

Early always-online consoles and their multiplayer-as-main-mode bullshit.

The 70s, 80s and 90s as I wasn't born yet

Late 80's 8 bit. Sure it was great back then playing on Atari 65 or C64, but those games in retrospect simply fucking suck, nearly all shooters and platformers.

The ps3/xbox360 era - despite it being during my most "formative" gaming years, I feel like there was a lot of "samey" game design. Theres a similar issue at the moment, to be honest, at least in the AAA space, but indie titles might make me look back with nostalgia on this era when its old enough to be nostalgic.

I stopped caring about games once they went 3D.

NES is a good one, it was juuust about part of my time in that a couple of people I rarely saw had one and I loved playing it with them when I did seem them, but really that's because I didn't at the time have a games machine or a computer so anything would have been good. I've played a few of the games and they were alright, pretty good. I got an original NES console with several games as an adult and was super excited because it's so classic and retro and I found that much as I love owning it, I really couldn't stand playing it for more than a few minutes. The games are just, kinda boring and they feel very, incomplete. They suffy some of the same problems as the Atari games I played just to see what the time period was like, those Atari ones in particular feel very unfinished, like someone thought it'd be interesting to try making a game, had one attempt, made something like a sort of prototype and then got bored and just shoved it on the market and moved on to a different hobby. The NES games weren't as bad as that, but there was a similar feel of lack of consideration for the actual player. To me, it the NES kind of represents when games were starting to get good, which I think would annoy a lot of people that were gamers for a long time before that, because it's always annoying when younger people make these proclamations totally ignorant of the time they're speaking about, but in my head at least that's what the NES generation represents. It's the starting point of what was to come, with some flashes of brilliance and a lot of meh and even the really good bits aren't as good as their later more refined iterations.

The early 2000s.

I was a Genesis kid. Loved the 16 bit era, and also had plenty of 8 bit. Much love all around.

Got into PC gaming in the 1990s. Loved strategy especially, and it's something you can't do well on 16 bit.

But the early 2000s were relatively dark. 3d graphics were around and pretty shitty by today's standards. There was a lot of straight garbage in the gaming market that I don't want to experience again. There was good stuff, like HL2, but on the whole things were bad.

unpopular opinion: Bruce Lee on Commodore64 is a masterpiece. weird how nobody mentions it.

im not nostalgic for the turbographix/genesis era that straddled the 8bit cpu with 16 bit graphics and struggled. home computers were way more amazing at the time.

Honestly, all of it. Not a video game fan even having been raised through its development. I have zero nostalgia for any of it.