Let’s see if this community still is active.
I’m not sure if it’s officially agreed upon, but I would say the release of Doom in '93 properly marked the beginning of a golden age of PC gaming. Modern homogenisation and monetisation hadn’t set in yet and over the next decade or so the PC gaming landscape would be full of innovation and passion, with a sea of classics being released in that time frame… but when did it end? Was there a specific watershed game that signalled a shift in the landscape?
This topic has been on my mind for a while, because I’ve pondered on whether there is an open niche for a community dedicated to games of this era. They’re not quite at home in Retro Gaming subs, but still old enough now that they might warrant their own corner separate from main gaming spaces.
Its pretty easy to find a dark age for pc gaming. There was a period of time, during the PS3/Xbox 360 era, where publishers were writing off PC as a platform. There were tons of console exclusives and the games that did hit PC were often bad console ports.
Still even in that period, there were PC games for people to play. If you were following game trends or interested in most of the games shown off at E3 those years then it was a dark age. If you were playing World of Warcraft or Team Fortress 2, you probably didn’t notice.