I would say Atari but that’s just low-hanging fruit because it’s a generation I never really got to play as it was before my time. But I am starting to fall out of nostalgia for the NES which is held dearly in a lot of hearts of retro gamers and gamers that have enjoyed what that system had to offer for a few decades.
I know it had offered a lot of classics and gave so many games their start, most of which are still with us today like Final Fantasy for example.
The best guess I can give about why I don’t care as much about that generation is because it is very oversaturated when you start entering the world of retro gaming. For retro gaming I prefer SNES and Genesis, because I technically did start playing those when I was born and they were first released. So I have more favorability towards those than the NES and generations before and during it.
Games getting bigger and bigger in gigabytes, but still hampered by slow optical disks and slow hard drives. It was good tat the time, but I have more fondness for the cartridges which came before, whose immediacy felt like magic.
I have to admit that the anticipation of launching a PS1 game is nostalgic for me. I feel like that’s the last time that loading screens were bearable. At least until we got SSDs and indie games, lol