The NES and SNES eras have a pretty significant enduring appeal and are in the middle of a pretty lengthy resurgence, but you don't see nearly as much mainstrea

The NES and SNES eras have a pretty significant enduring appeal and are in the middle of a pretty lengthy resurgence, but you don't see nearly as much mainstream nostalgia for the previous 2D generation, like the Atari 2600. The graphics are just a little too primitive for most people, I think. A lot of the earliest 3D games feel like they're closer to the "2600" end of the spectrum for their generation. Of course there are outliers like Mario 64 that have aged much better. Mario in particular doesn't get totally let down by controls the way a lot of other early full-3d-world games do. Developers got a hang of things pretty quickly, though. The jump in quality from the stack-of-cubes characters in FF7 to something approaching recognizable humans in FF8 is pretty stark, and they improved further from there for 9.