I guess I see the N64 situated in a time when big changes were happening in gaming. Besides the obvious advent of 3d, this was around the time when gaming stopped becoming arcade-dominant and transitioned towards being console-dominant, which has huge implications (arcades existed in third places while consoles were privately owned). It’s for these two reasons that I wouldn’t call N64 retro (or lump N64 in a different historic period than the NES/SNES if we’re just using “retro” to mean “old”).
I think there’s a degree of millennial revisionism where the spotlight is shown on retro/whatever-you-want-to-call-that-particular-period-of-gaming console games when they weren’t even the dominant form of gaming during that time period. You’re not going to see video essays of The Simpsons arcade game or Alien vs Predator or Space Harrier anytime soon even though those were massively popular arcade games way back in the day. You can’t really compare arcade cabinet sales vs console game sales because obviously people weren’t individually buying cabinets to put in their garages but buying cabinets to put in a mall or a laundromat or a pizza place.
The dominant form of gaming was arcades. You can see this very clearly whenever movies or TV shows from the 80s and 90s reference gaming. It’s almost always some kind of arcade game. The Simpsons’ first reference of a console game (Bonestorm) was a Season 7 episode that aired 9 months before the N64 dropped in NA and even that reference was largely a Mortal Kombat reference (Liu Kang knockoff getting owned by a tank, Goro mirror match in a bridge stage that every arcade Mortal Kombat game had). Everything else before that were parodies of arcade games. You have something like Terminator 2 where you saw John Connor briefly playing Afterburner 2 at a mall while being stalked by the T-1000.
I mean it was a turn of an era for sure. But really there have been other eras since in the nearly 30 years since the N64. Gaming is very little like it was then. I’d say the 360/PS3/Wii era was the transition point into the modern console era. Digital distribution, online gaming (which yes existed before but wasn’t really ubiquitous until this gen), and the advent of media center/console hybrids. All the major changes since then are really just iteration.
Look at media references to gaming in more recent times. Usually it’s someone playing an online game. Oftentimes with a headset throwing childish insults to a 12 year old on the other side.
I don’t think we differ that much. I mostly consider 360/PS3/Wii to be modern gaming. It’s not even early modern gaming. It’s just modern gaming to me. It’s like comparing 19th century English vs 21st century English. 19th century English isn’t even Shakespearean English, which is considered early modern English by linguists. 19th century English is English with various archaisms that no one uses in 2024, but it’s still essentially just modern English.
