As terrible as WoD got from Revised Edition onward, and as awful and edgy as the stuff that By Night Studios, Onyx Path, and the new White Wolf put out, it's easy to forget that early White Wolf was actually kind of awesome. Yeah, it was edgy, but it was the kind of edgy that actually worked in the 90's and fit perfectly with the time it came out in.
Personally, I think Vampire: The Masquerade First Edition is one of the best RPG's of all time. It's tied with AD&D as my all-time favorite tabletop game. I own the 1991 softcover corebook on hard copy and I recently ordered Chicago By Night 1e off of Amazon.
Then there's the Street Fighter RPG that White Wolf made around 1993-1994, which was crazy but also kind of cool in a zany sort of way.
Really, it wasn't until around 1999 with the release of the Revised Editions of Vampire, Werewolf, and Mage did White Wolf become as shitty as it is now (to say nothing of the SJW's at Onyx Path). The metaplot became overbearing and downright god-awful, you had pretentious and talentless hacks like Justin Achilli who were telling players they were "playing the game wrong" if they didn't follow the metaplot or otherwise conform to his personal vision of WoD, and the metaplot became so unwieldy that White Wolf had to torch the franchise and run. They tried to get a fresh start with New World of Darkness but everyone hated it and by that point, White Wolf was a laughing stock among non-Goths and non-edgelords.
While Requiem and nWoD made a few good changes like officially jettisoning any attempt at metaplot and taking a toolkit approach, they still hung onto a lot of the wangst and pretentiousness from Masquerade Revised (both Requiem 1e and Masquerade Revised had Justin Achilli as the head developer if that says anything), so it was a case of one step forward and two steps back.
and are now more prone to going werewolf emo as a result 
