I really really need people to understand two things.
First: Sometimes people talk about games in the 90s and early 2000s being 'AAA' games because they were headliners for their publishers or even platform sellers, big important titles that had a lot of marketing force behind them. That's fair. But do not take this to understand that the scale of production in any way resembled what we call 'AAA' today, or that this concept even existed. Symphony of the Night, the last great hurrah for 2d home console games, was made by a core team of roughly 20 people. These productions were what we'd consider small-to-midsize today, they just had a dramatically different place in the market. More programmers are credited on Blasphemous (2019) than on Symphony.
Second: It is very tempting to compare the median game coming out today to the games we remember from this era and assume that games back then were better, or that they were made better, or whatever, but no. The median 16-bit era game is not Symphony. It's The Mask for the SNES (1995). Most games are not masterpieces today and they weren't masterpieces back then.
As a tangent, this isn’t just true of video games - it’s true of all sorts of art. Literature, visual arts and sculpture - the first time I encountered this was in my first music theory course when as a bright and brilliant 8-year-old I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that “classical music” was “all better” than “the secular garbage” that was all over the radio and the community college professor was significantly kinder than anyone could be expected to be and derailed almost a whole week to talk about survivorship bias in art history.
The classics endure because they’re good, or the popular endures because it’s popular and becomes “good” through tradition and history, or rarely something survives through another vagary of fate and becomes “good” in the same way a British pub song notorious for its difficulty and often used as a drinking challenge became a national anthem for a country full of people who’ve forgotten how to sing, and we just assume everything was better back then for any number of easily propagandized reasons.
The only art form that I’ve seen come close to dodging this phenomenon is the movie - and it’s not beating the allegations there, not at all, but awareness of old “bad movies” is higher overall than a lot of other media, even outside my own personal sphere. I am biased; I’m an avowed and lifelong bad movie fan (ask me why Manos is one of my favorite movies of all time someday) but it’s not just that particular preservationist subculture that’s aware, a lot of people remember!
Anyhow, this kind of drift is a fascinating phenomenon to watch.
