But looking back at old magazines, gaming TV shows, and message boards of the era, the sentiment was extremely common. A lot of the gaming community was so gassed up about the leap to 3D that they viewed 2D games as obsolete as black-and-white movies. When official publications reviewed 2D games that they had to push positively, they seemed ashamed or in denial about the game being 2D, and tried to talk up its other graphical features (Okay I’m talking about Nintendo Power specifically in this case).
This sentiment didn’t really begin to die until the late-00s retro boom and the simultaneous dawn of console indie games. A whole decade of people losing their shit if they saw sprites, lol

