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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

2004-2014. That captures the great tail end of the sixth generation of consoles and the golden days of the seventh

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.

I've been working my way through Atari 2600 games right now, they have over 500 to choose from!

'95-'05 with the advent of 3d gaming

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.

'96 to 2014 or so fucking ruled.

Though it's much more heavily concentrated in the 1997-2003 range.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!