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The story
A thread on 5ch’s “Hardware/Industry (Geha)” board asked users with 30+ years of gaming experience, “What era personally got you the most excited?” Since the Famicom’s 1983 debut, home consoles have gone through roughly 40 years of generational shifts — from 8-bit machines to the Super Famicom, the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, the Nintendo 64, the Wii, and the 3DS. Many in the thread championed the mid-90s period when the PS1, Saturn, and N64 all stood side by side, while others pointed to the Famicom-era frenzy, the Wii’s Virtual Console, or the 3DS’s glasses-free 3D. Just what counts as the “golden age” turned out to depend heavily on which generation the respondent grew up in.
What people said
What era got you most excited about gaming?
That's when there was the most room for games to blow your mind
Though to be fair, I'd say we're still in a golden age even now
Mama Rumiko
Then after that, when the PS and Saturn came out
PS1 also felt like a huge leap into the future
Japan still had some energy back then, so there were a lot of game companies too.
I'm a sucker for glasses-free 3D
Though the Wii's hard to give up too
Online play turned Mario Kart into a whole new beast
The Virtual Console got me hyped too — having it added via a system update made it even better
Yeah
Going from character-cell graphics to pixel-level drawing, plus color on top of that
That hit harder than the jump to polygons ever did
The Virtual Console was huge.
Also the Game Boy, I guess.
It was such an intense time, I thought about games morning, noon, and night
Once Namco and Hudson jumped in and third-party titles exploded, I couldn't stop getting excited
Also the DS and Wii
Famicom, Game Boy, Super Famicom, PC Engine, Neo Geo, PS, Saturn
I don't know why, but the hype was on another level
The first time I played Resident Evil on PS1
PaRappa the Rapper too, probably
And the time I tried running Ocarina of Time on a PC emulator but my specs were too weak for it to work right
I was also super hyped for the PS2 right up until launch
Looking back I can't even remember what I was so excited about — probably just riding on the PS1's reputation
Playing After Burner on the R360, or Le Mans with its spinning cabinet, or Galaxy Force with that cockpit-riding feel
Man, I wanted one of those cabinets so bad
Around 2000? I was completely hooked.
I remember getting hyped just hearing that new titles were coming out simultaneously for both the SFC and the original FC
I was excited about something gaming-related every single day
Everything else was just so-so
The game holds up on its own merits, so I'm sure the remake is plenty fun too, but nothing can top how groundbreaking that experience felt at the time
Yeah, the Wii's motion-control games really were groundbreaking
Feels like that would still be a hit even today
Background and key points of the discussion
Since the Famicom’s 1983 debut, home consoles have moved through generation after generation: the Super Famicom (1990), the PlayStation and Sega Saturn (1994), the Nintendo 64 (1996), the Wii (2006), and the 3DS (2011). Where opinion in the thread split was over exactly when to place the “golden age” — many pointed to the mid-90s transition from 16-bit machines into the 32-bit/64-bit generation, while others championed the Famicom-era frenzy or the broader, more casual audience that the Wii and its successors brought in. This likely reflects the fact that one’s “most exciting era” tends to track less with actual hardware advances than with whatever period happened to overlap with being a kid or student. Later in the thread there was also an off-topic spat about the running of gaming-affiliate (“geha”) sites, but since it had little bearing on the original question, it’s been left out of this article.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “I want to ask people with 30+ years of gaming experience: what era personally got you the most excited?.”
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