> You seemed to only have lived through game consoles.
Why are you always so presumptuous and obtuse in your responses? It's needless and unproductive.
No I haven't just lived through games consoles. However I focused my point on games consoles because we're talking about the "golden era of gaming" on a thread about a games console emulator. Clearly focusing my point on games consoles was the logical response contextually speaking. However I'm happy to debunk your bullshit with a dozen counterexamples on 8-bit microcomputers, 16-bit personal computers or IBM-clone PCs. As it happens 70s and 80's home computers was the golden era for me as a games developer and I converted to games consoles later in life. Or maybe you want counterexamples of games written on main frames, programmable calculators, or 70's kit computers?
You could copy and paste most of my post and apply it to both of those contexts too quite easily. They weren't mutually exclusive industries. Quite the opposite in fact.
Take the Atari ST and Amiga for example, the amount of crossover games between consoles and those two computers is so big that many gamers considered those computers to be consoles in their own right (I know they're technically not correct but it does illustrate just how big the crossover library was).
As for arcades, they were often the worst for milking genres. How many Street Fighter clones were released after SF2's success? The Galaxian/Space Invaders example I made previously are arcade titles. Same with Space Harrier and Outrun...massive arcade titles who's formula got copied over and over (to be fair, Outrun wasn't even the first arcade racing game of its ilk to hit the arcades either). Then there's Streets of Rage / Double Dragon / Turtles in Time / etc. All pretty formulaic brawlers and there were hundreds others just like them. NeoGeo is another example of a publisher releasing a library of similar arcade titles. All of these are massive names too, so just think about how many similar games made it into arcades but weren't so successful that you still remember them these days.
That all said, one thing the Atari ST and Amiga were better at was innovative early 3D titles. There were a few really interesting mouse controlled 3D games that wouldn't have been possible on your traditional 80s/90s console. But those titles were far far far outnumbered by generic games (and "generic" here doesn't mean "bad").
It surely was, if you were attending Assembly, Breakout or any variant of them.
You seemed to only have lived through game consoles.