The bigger underlying problem is that we associate those games with happy periods of our lives. The once where we could play games, do projects and not worry about anything else.
By playing an old school game, your brain extracts these happy feelings from the memory. However, it's not a sustainable source of "fun" per say. As opposed to the newer games where "fun" is being caused by the game directly.
I strongly disagree. I have zero interest in today's bloated AAA games. Simple games like Tetris, Mario + romhacks, or Civ II have given me collectively more fun that I would ever have playing some insipid shooter or uninspired pay2win fantasy game. I wouldn't trade them for any of today's games, which I consider severely flawed in many ways.
Nope, they are still getting a lot of exposure on retro websites and even GOG (despite calling themselves Good Old Games there's also some not-so-good games in their catalog).
When they speak of "old" games, I do not think they are thinking of Mario or Tetris, which are a decade newer and orders of magnitude better than some "classic" games.
> There's some classic gems, to be sure, but they were also all we had.
Some stuff has aged, but some of the best games are in the past and have never been "reached" by any newer game. Ultima 7 is an example of such games - there's just nothing that comes close to it even in modern RPGs.
For 2D platforms the best was made in the past again. All the newer Mario games are either too easy or uninspired, or both.
There's a whole bunch of genres that has been completely a abandoned by publishers and devs for years (simulators, adventure games, RTS, even RPGs - sure we get Witcher 3 recently, but there's really nothing much else on the radar, there's too few of them now compared to how many we were getting back in the days).
It's been many years that the main production money goes into making GTA, First Person Shooters, Open World games, Racing games and that's about it. Of course the indie market is very much alive, but you can't compare the level of contents made 20 years ago by large teams versus 1-2 folks making games nowadays.
I'd argue that whilst very different in philosophy, The Witcher 3 is about the closest we've come to Ultima VII since it was released.
You might also find Age Of Decadence interesting - it's a super-indie made over a decade or so by a very, very dedicated team. I've not played it and I understand it's flawed, but it looks to be reaching for the same kind of freedom as Ultima VII.
By playing an old school game, your brain extracts these happy feelings from the memory. However, it's not a sustainable source of "fun" per say. As opposed to the newer games where "fun" is being caused by the game directly.