What's your favourite era for video games?

LAN parties. I remember the first time I could connect two PC together. It was Doom, with a serial-to-serial cable. We were two players on the same fucking map. It was awesome!
Then coax cable networks with friends. We used to have two or three different networks during a LAN party since you could not disconnect the coax cable to add a player without stopping the current games. The players arrived later would plug a new network just for them, and launch a game waiting the first players to finish theirs.
- Yep, we made LAN between three 5 floor houses and we have eventually 10 people in it. That was AWESOME! We are have played: Warcraft 3, cs1.6, quake 3 arena, C&C Generals/Red Alert, Diablo 2, Titan Quest, Disciples II, Heroes of might and Magic III, and freaking World of Warcraft on our private server!
- Oh man that must’ve been a great time. Very jealous you got to experience that being brand new!

The Greatest Era of gaming was when I was between 12 and 22. And this is true for everyone no matter what their age is now. Between 12 and 22 I had enough time and energy to game all night and still go to school and none of life’s problems were stopping me
- this has gotta be the correct answer
- You know what, that’s a great answer. I think you probably hit the nail on the head

The present. I can use emulation to play all my old favorites, often for free, and there's never been such a rich plethora of indie and studio games available.
- Very logical answer. What are some of your old favourites you like to emulate?
  
  NES: River City Ransom, Crystalis, Zelda ][
  SNES: Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, Link to the Past
  GB: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, Minish Cap, Tetris
  DOS: The Quest for Glory series, ZZT
  
  Adding a separate comment to add, if you've never played it, Super Mario X was a very fun, apparently not-entirely-legal fangame made my Redigit (who went on to create Terraria). He took it down at Nintendo's demand, but you can still find a copy.

Around the turn of the millennium. Games were designed for offline use and had way more immersive campaigns, were shipped by and large ready and bug-free, and so were add-on campaigns.
And since graphics were not as refined as they are now, additional efforts were placed on gameplay.
My top list (by release year):
Diablo II (1996)
Dungeon Keeper (1997)
Half-Life (1998)
Thief: The Dark Project (1998)
Thief 2 (1999)
Dungeon Keeper 2 (1999)
Heroes of Might & Magic 3 (1999)
Gothic II (2002)
Never had a console and don't get along with controllers whatsoever, so those are all referring to the PC versions.
- Aw man that's a good list!
  
  I've recently replayed Thief and Thief 2, they still hold up well!
  Tried Gothic II, and unfortunately the controls feel very clunky today. Or maybe it's just me. But somehow third person view doesn't really work for me anymore.
- I recently picked up a few of those games on my pc. Wanting to try Gothic II out soon ish, and Thief 1 & 2 as well soon
  
  For Thief and Gothic II there are unofficial graphic mods out there that improve things massively. They basically replace the original models with those from Thief II and Gothic 3, and also fix some bugs.
  https://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=152429 - that's a user made campaign for Thief, the thread also has links to all the patches and updates. The campaign is also absolutely great with overwhelmingly massive maps, but you should play the original first.
  
  Gothic 1 is my all time favourite RPG. 2 is everything a sequel “should” be: bigger, some mechanics improvements without losing the core, and (with the expansion) callbacks to 1 and familiar characters. And yet it also lost some of the atmosphere. This is why 1 will always be my favourite.
  Despite that, it’s still a great game, and many people’s favourite. I hope you’ll enjoy it.
  
  I really hope you enjoy Thief 1/2! The two are some of my top games of all time and the second one is after 25 years still the best pure stealth game.
  As was already said, do make sure to install TFix or T2Fix (depending on the game) to get widescreen/high resolution renderer and just modern hardware support in general.

The era of SCUMM. Point and click adventures were awesome. Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Leisure Suit Larry, Quest for Glory series, Indiana Jones and the fate of Atlantis.
- How is Monkey Island missing from the list? Those games were the peak of SCUMM.
  
  I know, I did try playing them with dosbox years later but I didn't know anyone that had them to borrow the discs so I hadn't played them back in the day like all the ones I named.
  
  The Scumm Bar®
- Hell yea, Indy Atlantis is absolute peak... then again so is most of lucasarts point&click adventure games.
  Man I wish the teased sequel for atlantis was actually made :/

The 90s era of gaming, extending to the early 2000s. SNES, Genesis, PC Engine, N64, PS1, PS2, GameCube.
It was the era before the Internet and video gaming became extremely linked. The sheer number of classics that still hold up today, even compared to modern games, are very numerous.
- There’s lots of late 90’s-early 2000’s answers here. You’re definitely not alone in that thought
  
  Add one more here. Some of the greatest games came out in that period.
  I made before a list of the top 10 games that impacted me the most and a large part are from that period. In no particular order:
  Worms (particularly Worms World Party)
  The Settlers II
  Master of Orion II
  Heroes of Might and Magic (particularly the first 3)
  Phantasmagoria
  WWF WrestleMania
  Little Big Adventure
  Monkey Island (especially 1-3)
  Dizzy (all games in the series)
  Jet Set Willy
  
  I'm guessing a lot of people grew up in the late 90s to early 2000s, so it's largely nostalgia.

I loved the PS2 era of gaming a lot. This may be a controversial take, but the PS2 era did not last long enough.
Everything about the aesthetics of the games that the PS2 produced were excellent. In my opinion, this is the point when low fidelity and high quality assets overlapped just enough to make games more comprehensible to their players. That enabled a lot of innovation that the PS3/360 era handled entirely differently. Forget an era, the PS2 is the last part of an entire age of gaming that delineates what I’m referring to.
The PS2 was a huge turning point in what games were and could be in 3D. Prior to this, many games were abstract and the characters were a lump of polygons. With the PS2, this began to change. So we began to get games that our minds had to do a lot of interpreting but could see reality through. Nowadays, I’d argue that your mind does less interpreting and so the resulting picture has glaring inaccuracies.
It also helped that ps2 was primarily played on CRTs or at least plasma which helped the picture look better in plenty of scenes than a PS3. Not to mention the color palette of games after the PS2 turned to muck.
- PS2 coincided with a lot of good handhelds too. Nintendo DS is a strong contender for best handheld ever, IMO.
  
  Oh absolutely, I was going to reference the Gameboy Advance that I grew up on as a part of this phase. Unfortunately, I don’t think those handhelds even got their time in the light that they could’ve had. It seems like they’ve had a long legacy but the DS and GameBoy came and went in but two generations of consoles.
  I mean imagine what we could do with a gameboy today. Or imagine how we could easily transform a modern phone into a DS form factor. We’re talking now about running a modern resident evil game in the palm of your hand. Insane power really.
  All this is largely due to the mobile play stores having no competition or curation. Our mobile games absolutely suck now. There are gems, sure, but otherwise I hate phone gaming despite my phone being my most used device.
  I think you’re absolutely correct though, the DS is the best handheld. Slim, powerful enough, very interactive, and a great game library. I highly recommend buying one and modding it, you won’t regret it.
- I realize I'm biased having experienced this era at my most influential (as another user easily defined it as ages 12 - 22), but this was definitely it for me. I only had a Gameboy before I finally had a PS2. The big mascot character games of this console were formative for me. Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper. Kingdom Hearts and Shadow of the Colossus were everything to me. Tons of other huge titles made this generation.
  But it's the weird little games that I think about fondly. Katamari became a franchise, but it was just a funny novel idea when it dropped on the PS2. Kya: Dark Lineage, an adventure/fighting game absolutely packed with fun ideas from a studio that just made racing games prior. Magic Pengel - basically DIY Pokemon - was pretty much everything I wanted in a game. Even Eye Toy, which completely sucked and barely worked, offered a new way to play games.
  Things were just different then. I think it was maybe the last time we thought of games by their budgets. Most titles were what we would maybe call AA these days, something that almost doesn't exist anymore. Where indie games didn't exist yet, but small studios were prolific. For me, any game that let you run around as a fairly detailed 3D character in a cool setting was magic to me in a way the flat, pixelated worlds on my GBC never were. The worlds in my PS2 were believable.

For PC I'd say 1999-2010 was absolutely amazing time to be a gamer. PC parts were dirt cheap, you could overclock the hell out of your hardware, and micro-transactions and pay-to-win didn't exist.
- Micro-transactions and pay-to-win are reason enough, those are some of the worst things to come to video games

Probably the period of '95 thought to '05. Mostly because they were the days of local multiplayer with friends and also the jump in technology made things even more interesting.
Combined we had all the 4 player games on the N64. So Goldeneye, SSB, F-Zero, Mario Kart, Snowboard Kids, DK Racing, Perfect Dark, WCW vs NWO and more.
- That must’ve been a great time for sure. I’m jealous I didn’t get to be a teenager through it! That would’ve been a blast
- Local multiplayer--especially couch co-op--is a lost art. I definitely miss it.
  
  It's still there but with family instead friends now. My kids won't get the same experience though which is sad.

I think the handheld era is my favorite, it basically ended with the 3DS, but it is the DS which I really can't put down, I am playing for the first time Chrono Trigger on it, and it is my Jump Ultimate Stars machine (Wimmfi), also have some other bangers as well, but I'll bore you if I citate them all.
But hey, don't get me wrong, the current handheld era is good too, we have the Switch, The Steam Deck and a plethora of good quality Chinese handhelds.

The Commodore Amiga in its prime was one of the coolest times to be a teenaged gamer. Though NES was a hell of a thing at its time too.
- I used to have a friend who had an NES that I’d play sometimes. Good times. I never played an Amiga though; but I am aware of its existence

I'll break from the mould and say early 80s to early 90s, where we got:
Atari
Commodore 64
NES
DOS & Windows
Apple II (esp. Oregon Trail)
iconic
That era really defined what video games are, and built the framework for how we talk about games today.
- I miss the Amiga 500 in that list. ;)
- 1980s 2D had the same "every machine sucks uniquely" vibe as 1990s 3D. If the same game on two platforms looked remotely similar then someone busted their hump getting it right. By default, you were getting a game that looked and sounded as good as this system could manage, rather than being a smoothed-over downgrade of some canonical example.
  Ironically it wasn't always a great era for pick-up-and-play-ability. Late-70s games were so limited that arcade sensibilities were nearly the only thing possible, and even text-centric computer games lacked the memory to bore you with backstory. By the late 80s they could push the early inklings of an unskippable cutscene and a tutorial level. Dunno if that's better than ZX Spectrum games getting mercilessly sink-or-swim.
  Coincidentally that arcade vibe also matches the late 90s: it's how most Dreamcast games feel.
  
  One of the things I really miss from that era was the game manual. Since they couldn't put all of the backstory and tutorial stuff into the game itself, you'd get a companion booklet to read (e.g. this one for The Legend of Zelda). Some games took that too far and you essentially had to buy a separate guide. A lot of people think games from the era were obtuse, but they're really just missing the documentation.
  I honestly really liked that experience and would read the guides when I wasn't able to play.
  Arcades obviously didn't have that luxury, so they had to be games you could quickly pick up without any introduction. So you got a natural divide between games for home and games for arcades (with some overlap of course).
  And yeah, the gaming experience varied quite a bit by platform for the same game because things like audio and graphics drivers needed to be built into the game itself, and that varied by system. But that's also part of the charm. There wasn't really an expectation that a game would look the same on two platforms, so they were often judged separately (i.e. arguments about which version is better).

Honestly, I really liked Zork. (I was the right age when it came out.). Never been as captivated by a game. More in the imagination than in the graphics.
I'll put Civilization V (and sometimes IV) in second place. Homeworld was great too.

Okay, below the "=" is my previous answer but I admit it was against the spirit of the post so let me think. I choose the years from the launch of EverQuest to Shadows of Luclin. I consider EverQuest to be the greatest MMO ever made. So my answer is 1999-2002.
To this day I STILL play servers locked at the 2002 version of EverQuest. It's very populated. That should tell you something.
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Got my first console in 89. First PC in 99.
My choice is current year, because it encompasses every year before and the amount of emulator projects is greater than it's ever been.
I can make any system from history with a Saturday of effort.
Plus all the indie games that capture the retro feel. Idk, gaming is in a great spot if you don't bother with big studios.
Is that a lame answer? O well, it's sincere.
- Lame? Not really. Cheating? Maybe a little bit but yeah, if we were to go by access to the history of gaming then "current year" always wins.
  
  Yeah, my choice is basically, "all of em" lol.
  I like to cheese what can I say.
  But idk, no other era had that. Sure we had emulators in 2005, 2010, but nothing like the selection of today.
- I knew I’d get one saying that but honestly it’s the most logical choice and I respect it. I guess in a way that’s probably everyone’s choice
  
  Okay, I thought about it and edited my post with a version in line with the spirit of your question :-)

2004-2014. That captures the great tail end of the sixth generation of consoles and the golden days of the seventh
- You make a great argument. That’s basically my choice just with a couple extra years of great games so yeah, definitely. Hard to disagree

Late 90s PC, because anything was possible. 2D? Yeah, go wild, it'll be fast. 3D? Software rendering is the wild west! Voxels, polygons, texturing, raycasting, every game looks unique because they're all making it up as they go. Even consoles were on PC because emulation was faster and better than owning a PSX or N64.
These were not the best games of all time. Most sucked. You can get a taste of that in PC Gamer demo discs, or like half of Civvie11's videos. But it was an era where nothing was easy, so people reached for the fucking stars.

It's an overlap between the back end of the fourth gen (aka 16-bit) era for consoles and then a full pivot to PC gaming in the years after. I really didn't like the move to early 3D on consoles with their abysmal framerates and load times. I felt then (and still think today) it was a generation too early.
Marking the starting point is easy: 1994. An insane year for the SNES, Donkey Kong Country, Final Fantasy VI, Mega Man X, and Super Metroid all came out in North America that year. That run continued on the SNES until Yoshi's Island in 1996. I did pick up a PlayStation but I wasn't thrilled with it. There are some personal favorites from this time, too, but they still had the sprite art I was desperately missing: games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Suikoden, Symphony of the Night, Xenogears.
I'd been a PC gamer for a while, but I started moving more towards the platform with Blizzard's ascendancy with Warcraft II in 1995 and Diablo in 1996. I'd finally get a dedicated GPU in 1998, and what a year for it: Half-Life, Thief: The Dark Project, Unreal, Tribes, Freespace. The less-demanding games of the year were no slouches either: Starcraft, Baldur's Gate, Fallout 2. With a similarly impressive console lineup, it's no surprise many consider 1998 the best year ever for video games.
The endpoint is harder to pin down. Maybe the death of the space sim genre with Freespace 2 in late 1999, or Blizzard's last landmark game before the MMO era, Diablo II in mid-2000. At the very latest, a new era for me definitely began with the release of the Game Boy Advance in 2001, where I shifted mostly to PC + handheld platforms, where I'm still at today.
- That was a great read. As someone born within that timeframe I didn’t really live through it much, so I don’t have much experience with it, but I like to get a glimpse at what it was like through comments like yours!

I think most eras were decent. I'm especially keen on everything post 8-bit, but pre-"everything is a monetized DLC; fuck you pay me" era.
- Totally agree with the modern gaming landscape. It’s exhausting dealing with all the predatory tracking, root kits, privacy invasion, heavy monetization, broken games with promises to “do better”, etc. Thankfully there are many games out there to enjoy that don’t do these things.
  Personally I love the option of devs selling DLCs where the value is there: it has a reasonable price and it expands the game in a level that I’m comfortable paying for. I will happily buy DLC of games I love.
  What I can’t stand, and absolutely am repulsed by, is games that have kill switches or can be taken away from me without my permission. If when I buy the game, if the button says “Buy”, then I should own it. If they’re going to have kill switches or activation server shutdowns that render my game unplayable, then they should change the button to “Temporarily pay to lease it for some time where we will later take this game from you without your permission”. I’d at least appreciate their honesty that way.
  Ever since Ubisoft warned it would shut down activation servers for my Wii U copy of Splinter Cell Blacklist where I paid full price for all the DLC (since I loved that game so much), I discovered I wouldn’t be able to play my DLC. Thankfully due to significant complaints from gamers, Ubisoft backpedaled and decided not to… for now. But now that I’ve seen that, and continue to see this predatory behavior happening to this day (e.g., The Crew, Helldivers, etc.), I am much more hesitant when it comes to buying video games.

My first machine was a ZX Spectrum.
I love the 8 bit games I grew up with but I'm not stuck in that timeframe. I appreciate that I can still play all my old games and the new ones.
I just wish I had more time to enjoy them.
Excluding the 8 bit games, the games where I spent more time are: Doom, Half-life, Portal, Bioshock Infinite, Skyrim.
If I had to choose one, it would be Doom. Such a simple game, so much brainless fun, so many great mods.
- I still regularly play the original Doom on my PC. A couple years ago a friend and I found an RTX mod for it that we played a ton. I still play that all the time
  
  Try the Brutal Doom mod if you haven't already for an added dose of violence and gore. Combine it with mods like Eviternity for huge new maps and enemies. Enjoy!

for me there was a peak in the late 90s. Ocarina of Time and Half Life in 1998 alone.

I've been working my way through Atari 2600 games right now, they have over 500 to choose from!
- There’s some great games for that. My friend’s dad had one we used to play on as kids, and always had a great time. Got any favourite games?

'96 to 2014 or so fucking ruled.
Though it's much more heavily concentrated in the 1997-2003 range.
- Any particular favourites in the 97-03 range?
  
  Too many to name individually... I played pretty much everything at that time. Ultima Online, Quake 2, everything on the Build engine (Duke3D, Blood, Shadow Warrior, etc), GoldenEye, Ocarina of Time, System Shock 2, Deus Ex, Half-Life, Metal Gear Solid... Shit, I think most of the franchises that continue to exist today started in that period or have some of the biggest hits from then, like FF7, 8 and 9.

'95-'05 with the advent of 3d gaming
- Definitely a pivotal moment in gaming for sure

Probably fifth and sixth gens (PSX-PS2 era), for three reasons:
graphics - there's something about art styles used at the time that aged surprisingly well and is just pleasant to look at, even compared to later games.
variety - both gens were filled with mid budget titles trying out new, often weird ideas that didn't always work but can be really interesting even to this day (as long as you can overcome jank usually present there).
(least important point) there's a lower chance I'll find games from this era to be too old-school for me. I have a high tolerance to old game design but I'm not immune to it. Sometimes there is such thing as "too old" and that's alright.
- Do you have any favourite games from those console gens? My first console was an original Xbox but moved on to the 360 very quickly so I don’t know too many games from then, especially not on the PlayStation
  
  Couple of disclaimers to start with: I'm primarily a PC player, even most of the console games I played happened via emulation so I'll drop stuff from both. I'm also really fond of games willing to try something different, even if they end up mediocre or bad - these ain't GOTY material.
  With that out of the way, here's a short list of titles I really enjoyed:
  Croc: Legend of the Gobbos (PC, PSX, Sega Saturn) - 3D platformer with relatively slow and clunky gameplay (kind of similar to classic Tomb Raider games). Colorful, cute and simple.
  Kao the Kangaroo (Dreamcast, PC) - series very similar to Croc though might feel a bit less polished at times. Don't really care about the sequel even though it's not a bad game.
  Parasite Eve (PSX) - JRPG set in 1990's New York. Interesting combat system focused on guns and positioning, great art and fun story.
  Gothic I & II (PC) - German RPGs with a unique atmosphere and world. Surprisingly open-ended with some of its quests. Has an unusual keyboard-centric control scheme.
  Sheep (Mac OS, PC) - game about herding sheep through various wacky levels. Lots of humor.
  Metal Wolf Chaos (Xbox) - crazy story about an American president fighting FOR DEMOCRACY in a mech suit, created by From Soft. Has modern ports for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.
  Oni (Mac OS, PC, PS2) - the best Ghost in the Shell game without actually being one*. Third person action with a great melee combat, big empty levels and rough difficulty spikes. Has a community made "Anniversary Edition" with fixes and access to mods.
  I haven't played all of the GitS games to back that up.

In terms of consoles, I got the most enjoyment out of Super Nintendo. I think that's in part because my kids were still young at the time and we played a lot of coop mode games on it before they got older and their tastes started diverging from mine.
It was the golden age of platformers I guess, and the focus was still solidly on game mechanics over production. I especially liked Bomberman. The gameplay was just perfect the way the challenge scaled naturally even as you got upgrades or added a 2nd player. Literally a blast!
- I’ve got a lot of fond memories playing DK Country on the SNES with my dad. Good times

My favorite is the 3DS Era. I was a young adult then, and sure I could say I loved 16 bit, 64 bit eras because I was younger and had much more time to play video games. But I had so much fun with my 3DS.
Specifically - 3-D integration into certain video games introduced a new way to play them, and I enjoyed the new layer in puzzles for games like Mario 3D Land and especially A Link Between Worlds.
But what I miss the most about 3DS was StreetPass. How fun it was taking my 3DS everywhere and getting visitors in both my games plus in StreetPass Plaza! I loved the hell out of those mini games and would drive all over the place to different hotspots and collect visitors! Carrying it work and making friends over StreetPass was also such a nice bonus.
Gaming was so much fun in this era and on this console. Probably still my favorite console due to all these memories tied up with it. I could get in so many gaming sessions, and if I needed to handle something quickly I could just fold it shut and go about my day. The OG suspend lol.
P.S - Street Pass is of course officially dead along with many other features of the 3DS era. However, there are archival projects so you can at least get visitors to your console. It requires custom firmware, but look into StreetPass 2 for more details.
- I loved my 3DS. I mostly played Pokémon on it but played other games on it too. I never took advantage of street pass but agree it was a great concept

Early-mid 90s.
The latter years of the NES, the entirety of the 16-bit console era (SNES/Megadrive ["Genesis"]), the golden age of PC adventure games & the dawn of multimedia (CD-ROM based games & talkies).
Just before the release of Doom, where FPS took over; and the PSX/N64, where (bad) 3D was teh hotness; is where it's at for me – likely why I love my MiSTer FPGA so much.

Xbox 360 was a fun time. Gears of War is still striking today. Also, the best designed controller ever made