I thought WC3 was 1990s but I went an checked: 2002. Weird. I so associate Warcraft (excluding WoW) with the 1990s.
The big one neither of us mentioned from the more "modern" era is Minecraft. It absolutely has staying power, still to this day.
GTA is an interesting one. GTA3, Vice City, GTA:SA and GTA4 were absolutely groundbreaking games, not only for their open world gameplay but also for their wit and satire. Arguably RDR and RDR2 fit here too.
But my hot take is that GTA5 was a terrible game. It lacked all the satire of the earlier games. The writing was terrible. I almost stopped playing the game when I became Trevor. And, unlike every earlier game in the series, I have never gone back to play it after finishing the story mode. GTA5, to me, was just a story to sell online play, which held no interest to me.
Anyway, my argument was there aren't any memorable games from the 2000s and 2010s or that there aren't games from these eras that people still play. It's that there are more from the 1980s and 1990s, particularly when you consider there are more games in later years. So when the market was much smaller, any given game seems way more likely to be memorable.
It goes across game systems too: Commodore 64 (and Amiga), SNES, even the Atari 2600, N64, PS1 (and arguably PS2 but that was released in 2000 so it's on the cusp).
Now one might say this is a function of age. The music a person likes is typically what was popular when they were 14 years old. The same is kinda true for video games but anecdotally I see streamers in their 20s who play games from before they were born.
Think too of emergent game play, particularly speedrunning. This is a highly active community and it's all old games.
The big one neither of us mentioned from the more "modern" era is Minecraft. It absolutely has staying power, still to this day.
GTA is an interesting one. GTA3, Vice City, GTA:SA and GTA4 were absolutely groundbreaking games, not only for their open world gameplay but also for their wit and satire. Arguably RDR and RDR2 fit here too.
But my hot take is that GTA5 was a terrible game. It lacked all the satire of the earlier games. The writing was terrible. I almost stopped playing the game when I became Trevor. And, unlike every earlier game in the series, I have never gone back to play it after finishing the story mode. GTA5, to me, was just a story to sell online play, which held no interest to me.
Anyway, my argument was there aren't any memorable games from the 2000s and 2010s or that there aren't games from these eras that people still play. It's that there are more from the 1980s and 1990s, particularly when you consider there are more games in later years. So when the market was much smaller, any given game seems way more likely to be memorable.
It goes across game systems too: Commodore 64 (and Amiga), SNES, even the Atari 2600, N64, PS1 (and arguably PS2 but that was released in 2000 so it's on the cusp).
Now one might say this is a function of age. The music a person likes is typically what was popular when they were 14 years old. The same is kinda true for video games but anecdotally I see streamers in their 20s who play games from before they were born.
Think too of emergent game play, particularly speedrunning. This is a highly active community and it's all old games.