It’s not a controversial take, but survivorship bias is certainly strong with anything like this. People like classic rock because the bad songs from that era have faded into obscurity. The same goes for your favorite retro games; for every Ocarina of Time there was a Superman 64. For every Zelda there were 3 shitty LJN games.

The type of trash is just different. Instead of low-effort cash grab games, now we get high-effort overworked devs making a game that asks you to pay for it over and over again.

Are you cherry picking the good games out of older libraries? I find people do that a lot when remembering. It’s a survivorship bias thing. The good ones get remembered more and the bad one forgotten, so they seem like the population is better.

Often, it’s not really the “old games” but the “not the marketed shit”. One of my favourite gems is Outward. It looks and feels a bit clunky, but you breathe love and passion for making games on every corner.

I just finished playing the original FF7 for the first time in like two decades. I always secretly dreaded trying to play it again, worried that it wouldn’t have aged that well as a game, or that my nostalgia was propping it up as a masterpiece when perhaps it wasn’t.

It sucked me in and I ended up doing a 100% completion playthrough. The experience has shifted my thinking and now I’m more willing to replay older games. Just last week I found my old CD Keys and started up Diablo 2, the original, not the remaster. Now I’ve been sucked into that.

I personally am finding that mechanically, these older games have systems with lots of depth and creativity. They give you so many options and choices, and they rarely explain all of it so your kind of left to just… experience it. I am sure this is not true for every retro game ( and ditto for some new games ) but it is something I have been feeling when playing older games.