In observing people on forums reaching a sort of alien-to-me fever pitch of anticipation for tomorrow's Nintendo Switch presentation, I wonder if I would be more satisfied with the games industry today if very nearly all of the games and companies I loved as a kid weren't dead?

Let's flip reality, and say that rather than the Switch being made for life-long Nintendo fans, it was:

• Made by 3DO, which had indeed become the gaming standard post-1993
• Featured modernized, high-definition takes on Gex, BattleSport, Road Rash, and Star Control 2, all in the exact same spirit as the originals
• Had a massive, mash-up platform combat game called Super Sega Bros., which contained nothing but Genesis-era fan service, and playable characters such as Rolf from Phantasy Star 2
• Featured as its centerpiece a tremendous-looking, open world take on Sword of Vermillion, using all of the motifs and styling cues from that game

It's conceivable to me that this alternate dimension might see me as excited as these forum dwellers are in reality, because it would tug at me on an emotional level, in what is-- like any luxury endeavor-- an emotions-based hobby.

Indeed, I have absolutely zero emotional attachment to Nintendo, their characters, or any of their platforms, having only very infrequently-- and never as a child-- owned any of their hardware.

Even most non-Nintendo fans have something of emotional value vested in the present industry; Sony and Microsoft have been around for the entire lives many of today's gamers! Unified Windows Platform and the PlayStation ecosystems are alive and well, along with many of those two systems' iconic games series.

For me, it's a scorched Earth scenario; Atari, Sega and 3DO are dead and buried, either for all intents, or literally. Only a scant few games on my favorites-of-all-time list still exist in any form, and even those have seen or are seeing tiny budgets and attention or care paid-- the awful looking new Toejam & Earl title comes to mind.

But then again, the couple of exceptions-- Doom 2016, and the soon-to-come Sonic Mania-- don't exactly pull at my heart strings either. And maybe that would be the across-the-board case in my parallel universe hypothetical?