When does your personal mental cutoff for "old games" begin? Do you have an end date as well?
"old consoles like the N64" and "my parents used to play Resident Evil" are but two examples of phrases that have made me think "wow I am old" when doing the rounds of the forums over the years. In my case I had been playing games for a long time before the predecessors of the consoles in question were even industry rumours. This often leads to people maybe knowing about games from "back then" (wherever that may be) but seldom having lived it and lumping/blurring all things before then together in their heads, despite the massive changes that any would be student of the art in question will tell you about. If games are hard to conceptualise this for then maybe think what you think of as old music, or old films, and then consider that you can likely find hours of long form documentaries detailing the importance of maybe 5 years (or just one band) wherein something like jazz and blues formed, or rock and roll, punk, metal (and divisions thereof), hip hop and more besides. Coincidentally 5 years is also about the average length of a console generation. Modern historians of any field will also consider living memory as part of their work, and while they tends to refer the world as a whole there are offshoots.
On the flip side I have met the opposite side of things where people might not have fallen out of gaming, but fallen out of current gaming. Now my misgivings with the current generation of consoles formed the basis of a previous entry in this series but it does also mean that while I was very current with the xbox 360 and DS (often writing up and discussing new releases as they dropped) I am rather less familiar with the order of releases (or indeed no releases worth considering) for the PS4, xbone, 3ds and beyond. Now I contend that is for good reason and that things today are plenty recognisable but don't do it that well, probably by virtue of bad monetisation schemes, but the effects are still the same. I have seen others that fell out during the PS2, but still retain a seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of 8 and 16 bit consoles, even the more obscure ones. Do you have something similar, or maybe just a gap somewhere?
Assuming you are not old enough to remember the first game (and are also willing to forgo the electromechanical debate) then when do your memories of games start, and when do they start to be fairly crystallised with respect to time (this came after that, this led to that, this paved the way for...)? One also wonders how it might play out as not everybody got gaming magazines or TV shows, or possibly cared about such things, and thus while technical release dates are one thing if you never got it before the next year (or maybe if you are in a PAL region you might only just be getting it).
In my case in addition to the lack of current stuff above then the commodore 64 is probably fairly in order, and while I played many things on a bbc micro, vic20 and whatever else (I was doing retro before it was cool, mainly because it was cheap and things still played well enough) they are all "old games" in my head. The NES I can do reasonably well but it would be the 16 bit era before I can recount releases. PS1 on through the 360 is all very clear. Being very much PAL bound before the N64 (and even then that was but a handful of games with an adapter) it will also be very PAL, or indeed UK, centric. Some of this is likely also changed or informed by my tendency to go for second hand games when they get cheaper, or indeed after consoles have died and we are onto the next.
Or to finish the "wow I am old thing" then if you are 18 today it is quite possible your hand me down console you got at say 5 or 6 (so 2006, the xbox 360 having already been released and seeing the release of the Wii and PS3) was a PS2 and everything before that might be expected to be from the before times. If you were from a richer family, or just starting out, said 18 year old might well have started with a PS3, 360 or Wii.
This is part of a discussion series wherein we contemplate things about games, be it concepts, individual games, the industry at large, mechanics or the gaming culture at large. Previously we discussed games and media franchises you know mostly from offbeat and forgotten sources.
game franchises that rose from the dead, and those that should have stayed dead,Back in my day we didn't have X but did have Y. Gaming edition., what would $20 get you in your preferred gaming genre, games you play by your own rules., the state of VR and 3D and whether they had once more failed to take hold, the last game skill you unlearned, The game you invested the most money in, times where people said gameplay styles would not work for a platform, the value of online play, emulation vs hardware, a favoured game style that might have become less common in recent times, skills one might have learned or honed because of a game, games on the PS4 and Xbone that will stand the test of time, games that got better after launch, cancelled games and shuttered devs, and story canon in games.
