The PSX/N64 era was truly great, but only because production costs were so low. Consider the amount of time, manpower and money that must be spent on a mainstream game today as opposed to the ones they could pump out back in the day? There were countless terrible games on both systems back then, as well as a large few that were awesome. Littered here and there were a few brilliant gems no one noticed. It's different in today's gaming age because all those countless shitty games can't get the OK for production; or the odd gem won't be produced because it isn't solidly included in the mainstream ideals. So we get some amazing games still, and some shit games. It's just that the magnitude of selection has decreased with the increase of production cost. That's my opinion.
Well you know, while it costs 50 million dollars to make a game today it still cost like 3 million dollars or whatever to make a game for the Playstation or Nintendo 64. Either way you're still talking about a huge amount of capital that either needs a large corporate backer, a lot of venture capitalists, or both. When you're talking about any development cost that exceeds a few tens of thousands of dollars, you're talking about a serious financial risk and a project that needs to appeal to your "mainstream" in order to recover its investment. Like I don't want to be the guy that says NUH UH YOU ARE FULL OF CRAP but you know you really are if you're saying that games made for the Playstation are somehow less driven by market research and
the quest for a dollar or two you're actually pretty much completely wrong.
If you want to talk about games not made with
mainstream ideals in mind the closest you can get is probably the mod scene or homebrew scene like RPGMaker and GameMaker games (even though stuff like the Torque homebrew scene are now completely inundated people selling their services and their games and real indie producers who want to make free games in their spare time aren't taken seriously by the community and it's pretty lame). But you know if you have been paying attention even those scenes are dominated with the dream of being the most popular nerd on the internet so that's pretty lame too.