Found a bunch of old gaming magazines and printouts in a box from some high school project and no surprise it was a different time right? but it was interesting to see how certain games were treated better for reasons that come off totally different to todays "get hype, because a polaris marketer on a stream told me to!" stuff.
Games like Shadow of the Colossus, Metal Gear Solid 3, Silent Hill 2 and so on. Regardless of personal taste these games seemed to only be talked about as though their high quality was an objective fact and not some modern drones vs 'haters' brand loyalty exercise but almost like some Criterion Collection type thing where regardless of genre or size of audience appeal they were treated as the high tier all imitators should be held too.
It looks like it started in 1998 which isn't surprising since 'the year of dreams' was the last big gasp of innovation industry wide that spawned nothing but iterations for a solid decade after but while its easy to see when it started its hard to put a finger on when this stopped.
You would think 2007 aka 'the year of darkness' when games overtook movies in revenue and cross media old money bought into shareholdings and the wider market appeal meme took over and destroyed so much but looking back it feels like this reverence for a certain tier of games was already gone by then. You got a few games A E S T H E T I Cfags gushed for like Mirrors Edge and genre revivals like Demon's Souls but it feels like by the PS3 and late 360 lifespan this unspoken agreement that there was some level of artisanal god tier had already died out.
When do you think it did and why?