Seems we were the lucky generation. In a way we did. As they say, when you're 10, 1 year is 10% of your life and lasts forever. Now, years turned into months. Time _does_ pass slower when you turn off the intertubes though.

we'd still be on the pentium pro by now. but imagine all the Doom clones we could have!

I'm fine with that

only if we got more Heretic/Hexenlikes too!

… Ya know, I think Doom may have actually been a parallel-universe/built-by-aliens type of fluke: It seriously accelerated gaming and the social perception of gaming, and in turn pushed computer technology adoption towards 3D cards (and everything else required to support them) much faster than it may have happened without Doom.

So I think if certain "killer apps" weren't released when they did, then maybe people might have been fine with tech chugging along at a more relaxed pace..

That gave me a nightmare vision of Doom clones where you pay money to appear as a different sprite and it's inflicted with last man standing type game modes and all kinds of other bad things modern games do.

you pay money to appear as a different sprite with shiny particles around it. important distinction, of course.

and iddqd costs ten bucks to unlock, but it's part of a lootbox with all the other cheat codes in it

With the current silicon temperature dissipation limits, we’re in a 10 year cycle now (and growing)

But everything feels pretty much the same and has been "good enough" for a long while now, with little left to look forward to.. I mean just look at the Switch 1 vs Switch 2.

Back in "those days" you could literally count the extra colors you would get to see on the screen after each new generation!

I think those all had close to or more than 10 years. SNES had the least but C64 was a retail product for 12 years.

The PS1 survived quite a while as well to the point some complained it was eating into PS2 sales numbers

Stuff would certainly be very well optimized near the end of each era.

Just look at the demos people are still making now for the C64, ZX Spectrum, and even the OG IBM PC! Multicolor 60 FPS on CGA!