As someone who has been gaming since the early 80's, I think we indeed are in a golden age of gaming. But the thing is that you (mostly) have to look at indie titles, not AAA titles.

Games like FTL, The Curious Expedition, Rocket League, Papers Please, Super Hexagon, Crypt of the Necrodancer, Chaos Reborn, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes... bring back the originality and the pure, unadulterated fun that we had gaming in the late 80s and early 90s, which had been mostly lost in the late 90s and in the full 00s decade, where everything seemed to be franchises and iteration on old formats.

Of course if you look at AAA games it's still mostly rehashes, grindfests and simplified remakes of classics, but I'd argue you're looking at the wrong place.

There is a problem with the indies (I have played a lot of the games on your list and more) - they rarely make the big money to graduate to big AAA houses and trendsetters so their production values remain low (and we have the travesty of retro pixelation on purpose, which is beyond me).

The only company that so far repeated the Bioware/Id story is CD Project RED - although I do have high hopes for Croteam, Klei and Flying Wild Hog making it big too.

An ecosystem in which we have only rough diamonds and polished turds is not healthy. I hope that we will get more polished gems soon.

Yeah, when I read the title I expected a nostalgia piece about the late 90s and early 2000s.

Basically after the Amiga died and before the Xbox360 came out (I would say off the top of my hat).

Offtopic but any relation to "tobold's blog" ? It was my main source of WoW sanity back in the day when WoW was a thing.

Never heard of it, sorry.

Tobold was a very minor character in The Lord of the Rings (better known as Old Toby), so it's not an entirely original nickname ;)