Early 2010s you could get a 9999999999 in 1

In recent times I've played Baby Steps, Cocoon, Inside, Slay The Princess, Thank Goodness You're Here, Hyperbolica, Unpacking... Going further back, Unfinished Swan, Untitled Goose Game

I don't think that originality has gone. Maybe it's just easier to churn out shovelware, but there are still new ideas appearing.

The obvious answer is whatever generation you grew up during.

I think the most realistic answer I think would be from 1998 to 2001 as the golden years of gaming. Just so many classics games from basically every genre and system of the time. Half Life on PC, Spyro and Crash 3 on PlayStation. Sonic Adventure on Dreamcast. Pokemon on Nintendo. Halo on Xbox. And that’s just the beginning of the list.

There, of course, were plenty of shovelware titles. So it’s not like the era didn’t have its own problems like we have with excessive reboot/remasters/remakes and subscription and battle pass slop and everything else.

But the difference is that gamers have changed their standards. It’s easy to avoid Hello Kitty Island Adventure in the year 2000. Hard to purchase a game today without a live service model or battle pass

The golden age of video games was between when I was 13 and 21 years old. I was old enough to make spare cash to buy my own games and young enough to have spare time and energy to play them. Also my fast twitch reflexes were still good then so I could easily do a platformer or FPS. And this is true for everyone no matter when they were born.

I think the Valve era was pretty incredible.

Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Half Life + HL2, and Portal + 2 all pushed the genres forward or were utterly unique for their time.

I can't think of any other dev ATM that was doing what valve was doing in the 00s and early 10s.

Whatever you were playing when you were 12.

Right now, since we pretty much can still play any of the old games we would like. There are enough great games out there to last anyone multiple lifetimes.

PS2 generation because it was the last generation where your games were guaranteed to work without a web connection and they were generally shipped as finished products.

The PS3 generation started the current trend of still needing a web connection even for a physical copy and IIRC it also started the trend of shipping games unfinished and patching them later, and both trends went off the deep end with the PS4 generation where most of the games are broken at launch and patched later, and the 'physical copies' are little more than glorified license keys for games you gotta download anyways, or in more extreme cases, eg. GT7 on the PS5, need a web connection to even boot the game.

Like, you can dust off your PS2/GC/OG Xbox, stick a game disc in, and it'll play just like it were new, but that's not as guaranteed with the PS3/XB360 and good luck with the PS4/XB1 and newer.

That said, if you're integrating a PS2-generation and older console into a modern AV stack, you're going to want a hardware upscaler such as an OSSC, RetroTink, or Framemeister.

And we're definitely in a rut and the only way out is a Second Video Game Crash.

When you were 12

It's never just one. They're localized. They tend to occur when the industry finds a groove and leans into it, so the focus is more on quality and iteration under criticism, and less about rough experimentation. The early PS1 era was a Cambrian explosion of weird 3D nonsense... and I don't think anyone nowadays would put that above late SNES releases. The defining titles of the PSX didn't come around until the very late 90s, and several of them sold like crap. Nobody wanted Symphony Of The Night until their friend would not shut up about it.

But over on PC, the 90s were a smooth ramp of increasing power and relevance. The 3D accelerator era laid the groundwork for the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race mindset, with visual quality and variety unmatched until the late PS2 era. (By which point Crysis had advanced PC graphics ten years into the future.)

And in 90s handheld gaming, there was the Game Boy, and nothing else mattered. Sega kept the Game Gear limping along until 1997, but nobody noticed, because everyone and their mother already chose the monochrome brick that sipped batteries. Several companies eventually gave up and released greyscale machines just in time for Nintendo to fuck them with the Game Boy Color. All the while, the platform went from twee single-sitting high-score fare, to bespoke long-form RPGs and major franchise sequels, to essentially-complete demakes of Super Nintendo games. Nothing changed except ROM size. It was the last 8-bit console, and it took developers a decade to recognize they could go hog wild on it.

Right after that, the Game Boy Advance's brief lifespan was essentially all golden era. Doom was practically a launch title. Homebrew devs kept teasing Quake, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 2, etc., alongside whole-ass GTA3 clones. Commercial releases were awash in good-to-great RPGs and metroidvanias. But then - the PSP scared Nintendo into creating the DS, and that platform went through some awkward years struggling to use better hardware. That wasn't the end of "the" golden era. For the PSP it was briefly fantastic, especially if you count its use for emulators. But it fell as the DS found its legs, while some completely unrelated trends happened to consoles and computers.

All we can say for certain is, nothing inside a video game should cost real money, and DRM is delayed theft.

1991 to 2007

Prove me wrong people ... prove me wrong.

Any era anyone grew up in and now wears their nostalgia glasses.

The holy trinity for me is SNES, PSX, PS2. I know this is massively colored by when you grew up and what you had access to, but nothing since has outshined these in terms of actual fun for me.

For context the very first video game I ever played was in 1970s and it was Called pong.

For me video games were the best between 2000 and I’m not sure the end point maybe 2015. But starting in 2000 is when the hardware was good enough to give you really great graphics. Also, you started seeing widespread use of broadband so online games MMO’s really came into their own.

I mean, I was really fortunate. I had a great job so I would fuck around with Java games at work and then go home and play World of Warcraft and ever quest. It was just a great time to be a gamer in the early 2000s.

We're still living in it.

I would in fact state that the worst years were around 1997 with the release of GoldenEye 007 until 2006 with the release of the Nintendo Wii. All I remember of that era were shooters, shooters, shooters, space shooters, racing games, racing games with shooters and shooters. It was the era that went from decent 2D graphics to bland and ugly 3D graphics and all the creative effort went into realizing the 3D graphics.

The video game industry is not like the movie industry, comic book industry or the music industry that are slowly dying because people stopped buying physical copies of them.
And the lack of interaction of movies and comics is slowly making them outdated.
The music industry has become the concert industry, which has turned the small crowds of celebrity worshipers mixed in people wanting to do drugs, sex and/or rock'n'roll into pure crowds of the biggest celebrity worshiping fans.
And even that is probably dying due to AI.

Very early 2000's. In the console we had PS2 and XBOX, which were both game changers. PC games also hit a really great stride, where we were seeing technological advances met with creativity.

I love mid-to-late 1990's gaming from a nostalgia perspective, but I still think 2000's were the golden era.

It's right now. Indies everywhere, and we've successfully gotten past the worst of the always-online bullshit and PTW that plagued the early part of the millennium. More than half of my "all time favorite" games are still in active production today (sometimes continued by fans), and I'm not a young guy.

My golden era was PS2/Xbox 360. The games I have fond memories of playing are the first three Harry Potter games, Gunbound, Lineage 2, Battlefield 2, COD MW 1&2. Since then, I've only played Batman: Arkham Asylum, Tomb Raider (2013), Witcher 3 and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Money Island 1 times...

Each game seemed to pushing the boundaries of technology and game design.

Alone on the dark Doom3d

Each new installment of Lucas Arts...

Great times.

Yes I am old.

Megadrive era for me.

Elite dangerous exists now, so it's definitely now!

For me the golden age of gaming was 16 bit, late 80s early 90s. The Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, SNES, Sega Genesis. There were some great games released for these machines.