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.

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.

Atari 2600

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

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).

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 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.

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.

I stopped caring about games once they went 3D.

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

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.

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