Don't forget that until mid-2000s there were like ten very good games a year, so every magazine had to write about them, and then you had a couple dozen okay games and something like ‘Lula the animated simulator of porn studio management.’ So everyone more-or-less knew the good stuff and not the hundreds of copycat daily-grind business simulators.

In ~five years between 2006-11 we went to full onslaught of indie games with the markets barely distinguishable from the olde Flash game sites. Everyone can make an ‘indie game’ now―they're not even called that anymore, I think. IPhone and Android happened in the same time.

BTW, it sorta helps to have ‘queues’ of stuff you want to read, watch, listen to, or play. I've gathered some titles just from seeing each mentioned twenty times on the web―many are classics by now, of course (especially since my games queue doesn't move much anyway).