Only retards who didn't actually grow up in that era. I had a nes, snes, genesis, 64, emulated most of the good ps1 games on old crappy early 2000's emulators. All those companies had good and shitty games. If you care about which company made them and feel the need to defend these video game companies, you're a zoomer who never actually had those consoles who desperately needs to fit in.
The whole "Nintendo Switch is for cuckolds" thing comes from how there are just so many soyboys in their 30s and 40s who should be old enough to have grown out of that mindset, but just never did.
Though you're thinking in the right direction, since it's funny how romanticized growing up during the pre-Gamecube days are. Most of the kids I knew in school didn't have any video games. The smattering of kids that did usually only had a single console with one game, and that game was usually just some sports one. Even Mario seemed to be relatively unknown, let alone Final Fantasy. The games you'd usually see lining the shelves at Target were mostly sports games and movie tie-ins. Rentals were popular, too, but that experience kind of sucked because the best games would almost always be rented out, leaving me to pick between Cool Spot and Bart's Nightmare.
On top of that, a lot of kids weren't even allowed to play video games at all because of fake news propaganda. According to American news sources, Doom caused the Columbine shooting to occur, and Grand Theft Auto III is teaching your kids how to kill hookers for money. Speaking of which, nobody ever talks about how the Satanic Panic of the 1980s was probably a big reason why RPGs didn't catch on until the late 90s, when Final Fantasy VII and Pokémon were new.
You also couldn't just get Gamebit screwdrivers by mail order, so a broken console was either headed for the trash, or destined to sit in the basement for decades. Bad games were landmines, with how you had to rely on magazines for any info at all, and most stores already had policies against allowing returns on video games. Games also cost $50-80 a pop, and the inflation calculator says those prices in September 1996 are equal to $86.50 - $138.40. Imagine buying a game today that costs $100 and it's a piece of shit and you can't make it past the first level, and you can't even save when you finally do. You can't return it, you can't vent online, and nobody around you even knows what video games are, let alone why you're getting so mad over one. $100 well spent.
I'm not trying to make it sound bad, that's just how it was. There are a hell of a lot more conveniences and resources that have made video games as a hobby so much better than they used to be, and there's definitely something to be said about all the hype on the internet making certain games out to be bigger than they ever were when they were new. Earthbound's a perfect example of it, as I even had a copy as a child, and I enjoyed it a lot, but still thought Final Fantasy VI was the better game. You could get an airship and everyone could learn a massive swath of spells. Earthbound was really linear and straightforward, and full of stuff I wouldn't come to appreciate until I grew up, and that's in part thanks to the internet pointing out tons and tons of details. Earthbound became such a legendary game because Starmen.net had some ultra-turbo autists that treated it like the second coming of Christ way back in the web 1.0 days, right at the same time ZSNES was getting really good, and dial-up connections were stable enough to where the 3MB rom wasn't hard to download. And speaking of which, the poor sales always get attributed to the gross-out ad campaign, right? Nah, I think it just sold poorly because the cover and title don't give a single indication as to what this game even is:
It's a big gold spiky thing with... a window? A visor? Is the kid behind the window or reflected in the visor? What is this? Why does the background look like an oil spill? Why do we need a guide? Is this going to be a hard game? Forget this, let's see what else they hav-Ooh, this looks good:
Looks like a wild time, let's buy it.