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.
