when was the golden age of the video game?

I think that was between 1996 and 2002 : era 16 and end of 128 bits

 

There never has/never will be a 'golden age' of gaming. It's all based entirely on how old you were when you started playing games. I might wax nostalgic for the ZX Spectrum/C=64 era, but someone else might feel exactly the same about the SNES/Genesis or the Amiga/ST, etc.

It's entirely subjective.

Just saying.

 

Or, you can look at it objectively. How much money was being made? What innovations were in the industry? What did contemporary critics say about the medium? Find an era where all of these elements are mostly at their peak. For example, if anyone is going to say the mid-90s was the best time for rap music, they'd get laughed out of the discussion.

If you limit it to arcade games, there is such a consensus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_arcade_video_games

As for videogames in general, I think it's gotta be the transition from 8-bit to 16-bit. So many great games were coming out at that time, both in arcades and for consoles. A lot of those games still demand a high price. Some arcade ports were nearly perfect - look at street fighter ii on the PCE! And arcades were still relevant because there some arcade games that simply couldn't be replicated on a console. After that, arcades offered no real benefits over console gaming, except for niche genres like competitive fighters and music games.

If we're talking about strictly console gaming, I might just have to agree with OP.

 

This is a pointless question for one main reason. It all depends upon your age. Many will say the Atari 2600 age was the golden age but I think it was the 16 bit age with the Mega Drive and Super Famicom/SNES. I'm old enough to think it was the Atari age but I just don't. In my opinion the 16bit age was when graphics looked like they were mean to be. You could easily see a character, a car, a monster and so on. Sound was also a big step up especially in the case of the SFC as that could reproduce anything.

As I said it's a silly question because everyone has their own idea.

 

The thread would work better if it's titled "When was YOUR golden age of video games"

Now, if that's the case, I'll go back to the Spectrum and C64, but not because of the games, but the memories of watching the birth of the bedroom coder. People could sit in a bedroom and write a best selling game (Jet Set Willy) Rob Hubbard squeezed sounds out of the C64 that were light years ahead of the competition, the Stamper brothers at Ultimate revolutionized the quality of games not just once, but repeatedly, trading games in the school playground but also being able to afford good games, reviewers actually wrote honest reviews... it was a time of gaming innocence - before profit margins became more important than the games themselves.

But if you ask me when the best games were released? I'd say now.

 

If the 32 bit systems hadn't focused to hard on 3D polygons, that could seriously be the best 2D era ever. The 2D games that did come out for the Saturn/PS1 (and to a lesser extent the N64, but I can't think of any off hand) looked gorgeous, but most of the 3D games of the era did not age well at all.

For a personal opinion, while I liked the late 16-bit era, I would probably go with 1999-2005. The sixth generation had a complete ton of games come out (yes, many many bad ones, but a lot of diamonds in that rough), and making games hadn't gotten so expensive that innovation was entirely stifled. There were more than a few quirky games to play, and some complete classics as well. Hell, the Dreamcast alone, in its tragically short lifespan, had both classics and quirk.

 

Many say 16-bit. The most creativity was around then I reckon. Started to fade after 1999...

 

Plus that was right before non-gaming companies (Sony, Panasonic (hehe, CD-i) and later Microsoft) got into the console business. A lot of Microsoft haters forget that they made a lot of games for PC during the early Windows years.

 

i totally agree. my golden age of gaming was from like 1975-1988. i grew up with a pong console, then 2600, vic 20, apple ][, 5200 and colecovision, c64 and amiga. as a kid i never had a chance to own alot of game consoles. but between age 7 and 20 were my golden days of gaming i will always love.

 

Saying the Golden Age of Gaming in 1996 is also saying the golden age of comic books was when Todd McFarlane was king. Neither is true.

 

I realize this is not the topic of the thread, but what era do YOU consider to be the golden era of rap music? I ask this as the golden era hip hop is generally considered to be between 86 and 96 by fans who started with something other than Lil Jon.

 

I'd say for me the time frame between NES, SNES and N64 is the golden age. Where NES is the rising, SNES the pinnacle and N64 the slow decline.
The N64 is the system I grew up with so I like it the most but even I have to admit that the SNES had more very good games, especially if you're into RPG's.

 

It is a subjective question, really. The best answer is probably when it was most profitable - like it or not, that was likely in the late Seventies.

I would say it was at its best when the arcades co-existed with home computers / game consoles. If you've been watching the Japanese documentary I linked about game sound designers, someone mentioned how exciting it was in the 16 bit era that you could finally play games just like at the arcade. I'd argue that the Mega Drive / Super Nintendo wasn't EXACTLY like the arcades still, but very good.

Definitely the low point came when the consoles could do whatever was required, making arcades obsolete. Not only that, but original gameplay went out of the window in favour of improved graphics for long-running IPs.

Both in arcades AND consoles originally, you were limited as to what you could do - how much data you could fit on a board / in a cartridge, what types of sounds you could make. That was a challenge and there were some unique gameplay elements that came as a result. Repeating sprites for characters and backgrounds, synth music and yes, original gameplay ideas all featured prominently. When you no longer had to use sprites to render the games or a limited sound bank, it was another exciting era... but sacrificed the charm of the games up to that point.

Uh, really? Like what?

SubLOGIC / BAO made Flight Simulator right up to the first Windows-based version, for Windows 95 (not really the early days of Windows - I'd accept 1990-1995, the 3.x era as "early", even though 1.x/2.x were around for 5 years before that). In that period, Microsoft made Microsoft Entertainment Pack (solitaire etc. - some of which were probably licensed) and Microsoft Arcade (definitely licensed from Atari). Hardly groundbreaking stuff. They only published Flight Simulator originally - likewise Microsoft Golf. That's the same for a lot of their Windows 95-era games - Age of Empires, Close Combat, Deadly Tide, Monster Truck Madness etc.

 

Sorry, I meant to say late 90s in my original post. One of my least favorite times in rap was that time frame right after the golden age of hip hop through the early 2000s. I was thinking if someone was trying to say Ma$e was more important than Eric B. & Rakim or something like that - that person would get laughed at. The golden age of hip hop was definitely around the time between when Run DMC hit big and De La Soul's Midnight Marauders & Wu-Tang's 36 Chambers came out.

You're right though, and that's my point. It actually is possible to take nostalgia out of the equation and you can look at this objectively... Gaming has seen plenty of booms & busts, and if you accept that gaming has peaked (and it seems like many of you have), then you can look back and find a "golden age". Golden age doesn't mean your favorite age, it means the best age, the most important age, the most influential age.

Maybe we won't reach a consensus, but we can certainly come closer than "it's purely subjective".

 

I would say the same general time frame. From the later years of the NES up in my opinion to around 1999. And I agree about the limitations having something to do with it. I guess there is just something interesting about being able to create a fun and quality game on limited hardware compared to what we have now where the limitations don't seem to limit the ideas or shape them in the same way as before.

My favorite platforms of all time would definitely be that stretch of time, NES, SNES, MegaDrive, PC-Engine, Saturn, PS1, N64. Like others have mentioned, it's certainly influenced by that is what I grew up with. I did play Atari though too, but it had nothing on NES.

 

My golden age of video games was 2004 until now. I love to play and collect old games with increasing passion, and I nowadays we have amazing resources to form communities on the internet and gain more information on them than ever before. Old interviews from Japanese magazines are now frequently translated, documentaries and vintage VHS are created/ripped on YouTube, we see new book releases on vintage gaming with fantastic content in English/Japanese/French... if you ask me, it's an amazing time for retro gaming that we live in. The only thing that sucks are the prices for collectibles... it really does. I'm far from having all the things I want, but even with the few games/consoles I own I'm very happy that I don't have to start from scratch. With all these newbies around throwing money at trashy cartridges, I'd have to take up a loan to rebuild my collection.

 

16 bit era was the ultimate.

Always been a Sega fan as they just seemed to push gaming forward so much. (I was 8 in 1993 when I got my MegaDrive 1)

 

Seeing the age of the medium there hasn't been a "golden age" or renaissance especially considering everything is still in it's infancy. But like most people here they do have a favourite era.

 

Philips made the CD-i, Panasonic made 3DOs, although they were only one of the companies who used the 3DO license.

 

As others have mentioned, it depends on your age.

Either that or the "golden age" hasn't occurred yet since it would be pretty undeniable for the majority of us.