As someone who isn’t necessarily big on the notion streamlining is “objectively” good game design… That more or less began to be disposed of the minute we had the technology, minus a few now-niche genres that rely on it. It was gradual, but mass market games as early as Zork in 1981, had save schemes.

I believe the only reason adult games aren’t as popular in Western countries as they are in Japan (and I think elsewhere in Asia?) is because there’s a stereotype that they’re low quality, which came about because of the ESRB (not sure about other countries’ rating systems) basically making it so there was no money in it in a pre-digital download world.

I like SMW better myself (actually not a single franchise entry on that list is my favorite in the series) but it doesn’t have the kind of unanimous praise SMB3 does.

I’m going to take this as “games that I never see anyone question their quality.” (I don’t even like all these games myself)

• Sonic 3 & Knuckles

• Kirby Planet Robobot

• Doom 2016

• Street Fighter III: Third Strike

• Pac-Man

• Balatro

• Steins;Gate

• The House in Fata Morgana

• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

• Gran Turismo 4

• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

• Mega Man X

• Mega Man X4

• Super Mario Bros. 3

• Hollow Knight

• Bloodborne

• Elden Ring

• Balder’s Gate 3

PSVR2 died because it’s not backwards compatible with PSVR1.

Half Life Alyx is like if we got Super Mario 64, and then four years later the games influenced by it just didn’t come.

The thing is, we know Nintendo does have in-house developed emulators that they used for Virtual Console and then NSO and the Classic Edition.

It’s fairly likely they didn’t take the effort to port those to PC for the museum, but still.

Minecraft is mostly popular with people who were 5 - 12 years old 10 years ago.

I think it’s most likely that more people are playing genres like platformers and fighting games that are designed for controllers on PC than before.

Michael Eisner once called himself “the last of the creative types in Hollywood” after he left Disney, and I can’t help but see what he meant when he said that when I look at the current American film and TV landscape. It’s like today’s Hollywood bigwigs don’t even understand why people watch TV and movies.

I kinda think this happened to Western video games too (yeah Sony is a Japanese company…but PlayStation has shown a pretty square focus on the Western market in the past 10 years.) From a consumer perspective I don’t think a new CEO is the answer. It wasn’t for Disney’s fans with Bob Chapek.

No, GameMaker Studio. That engine had it’s own controversy over moving to a subscription model, but nothing as egregious as Unity.