CRAP Poll: Favorite Era of Gaming

Have we done a CRAP poll this month? I don't think we have! I've been
remiss in my duties (don't tell the boss!). Well, it's not quite yet
September (unless you're a freaky Australian) so I still have time.

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This month it's a fun one: Video games have been around for a long
time, and have gone through various phases. Of them all, which was the
era in which you had the most fun playing video games? Not which you
feel was necessarily the BEST era with the best games, but the one you
had the most fun with. (And feel free to bitch about how I arbitrarily
divided up gaming history too! ;-)




[[ Those First Games (1970-75) ]]
   Nothing will ever beat the excitement of Pong. The
   rush of those first arcade games, playing what was
   to become a new transformational hobby was amazing.
    

[[ The Very Early Years (1976-1980) ]]
   The classic home-consoles and the early arcades.
   There was a purity to those early titles and systems
   that later, ever-more complicate games lost.
    

[[ The 8-bit Years (1980-1987) ]]
   The C-64, the NES and the golden age of arcade! It 
   was a period that created the genres and tropes of
   video gaming that are still with us today.
    

[[ The 16-bit Years (1987-1993) ]]
   Classic DOS and 16-bit excitement! For the first time,
   video-games start to achieve their potential; more than
   beeps and bloops, they are story-tellers and world-
   builders. The Video gaming world develops its own
   culture too.
    

[[ The Transitional Years (1994-1997) ]]
   3D bursts into the scene and everything changes. Games
   become ever-more complex, and gaming starts to become
   mainstream, and not just the domain of kids and geeks.
   Big business stars pouring money into the industry too.
    

[[ The New Tech Era (1998-2003) ]]
   All those rapid tech changes causes everything to change.
   It's impossible to keep up and that's half the fun.
    

[[ An Era of Consolidation (2004-2011) ]]
   After a decade of headlong rush, developers finally start
   to get a handle on the capabilities of their new tools.
   There's more focus on creating good games, on smoothing
   off the rough edges, than creating entirely new genres.
    

[[ A Period of Peace (2011-2020) ]]
   Having figured out what makes games good, there's a
   long period where developers just pump out hit after
   hit. Meanwhile, the Indies burst into the scene and
   add some experimental spice.
    

[[ The Modern Era (2021-now) ]]
   Fifty years of video gaming experience and techno-
   logical advancement have resulted in an era when it's
   honestly hard to make a TERRIBLE game anymore. Not
   everything is great but the bar has been raised so
   high that even garage-developers are creating stuff
   that would have blown the minds of a gamer two or
   three eras previous. Can it get better than this?


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Myself, I think the most fun I had was in what I've called the 'New
Tech' era. Man, what a time. It seemed that every other day there was
some new CPU, or video card, or faster RAM. You'd buy a PC and even
before you got it home from the store, it was already three
generations obsolete! But that was half the fun, and game developers
were making the most of it! Not only were games becoming better
looking, but with all that extra RAM and CPU processing capability,
they were developing entirely new forms of gameplay. Such classics we
got back then: Half-Life, Unreal, Heretic 2, Battlezone, The House of
the Dead, Battlefield 1942, and more. Not all the games were great -in
fact, a lot of them were terrible- but it was such a plethora of
change that games felt more alive than ever before.

(that said, I'd like to give a shout-out to the 16-bit years, because
I've a soft spot for a lot of the DOS games released in that era. But
as much as I loved those games, they don't match the sheer rush of
late 90s/early 2000s video gaming for me)


So... what was the most memorable and fun era of video-gaming for you?
Are you old-timer enough to remember the fascination of the ancient
oldies or are you a live-for-today who loves the modern era the most?
And remember: there's no wrong answer; that's what makes it a CRAP
poll! ;-)