I mean, there have always been bad games. There were bad games for the NES:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nintendo_Entertainment_System_games

It’s just that the ones on that list that people remember are the few that someone would still be playing forty years later, the really exceptional ones. Typically, if someone in 2025 is thinking of an older game, they’re thinking about the best of the best from that time period.

I’ve seen arguments that a lot of “the good old days” mindset for many things comes from survivorship bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data.

Survivorship bias is a form of selection bias that can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because multiple failures are overlooked, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence as in correlation “proves” causality.

In architecture, for example:

Just as new buildings are being built every day and older structures are constantly torn down, the story of most civil and urban architecture involves a process of constant renewal, renovation, and revolution. Only the most beautiful, useful, and structurally sound buildings survive from one generation to the next. This creates a selection effect where the ugliest and weakest buildings of history have been eradicated (disappearing from public view, leaving the visible impression that all earlier buildings were more beautiful and better built).