I feel like this is mostly a nostalgic view. I find that most people whom did not grow up with these games, dont seem to "get them". Some of those games are just classics and will be essentially timeless to some extent.
When people say they don't "get" games from the past that are broadly recognized as classics and timeless then usually it's not an issue of the supporters having nostalgia, it's more like the opposite state exists in the minds of those that dislike the thing. A sense of "the stuff from before my time is not as good as what we have now which I'm more familiar with." that creates an automatic disconnect. I do also kind of feel like the broader reach of the pop cultural bubble is shrinking over time (like when I was little cartoons made references all the way back to the golden age of hollywood or 50s/60s pop culture and you learned about that stuff. So that's a reach of like 30-40+ years. Nowadays you watch a show with pop cultural jokes and if someone makes an 80s or 90s joke, the same rough span of time compared to my previous example, it's usually only to go "uuuugh, that's soooooo oooooooold. That's ancient history when cavemen walked the earth!" instead of to poke fun at aspects of that time. I watched Animaniacs make Rat Pack and Humphrey Bogart jokes on the basis of finding those references funny for the gag itself. Compare that to the Spider-Man scene in Captain America: Civil War where Peter makes a reference to Empire Strikes Back and the whole crux of the gag is that it's "a really old movie" so the younger audience can laugh at all the old people distraught by the way it's framed and the older audience can roll their eyes in a "damn, we
are old" sort of way. It's just not the same. I imagine most of that shift is on how the internet tends to accelerate cultural cycles. Memes and jokes now don't have the lead time they did with traditional entertainment, so something becomes a gag as soon as it surfaces, gets pushed in a broader and more omnipresent way, and burns out quicker. Therefore people get more used to the rapid turnover and the range of "you should know this stuff" cultural references shrinks as a result.
But back on the original track: if liking stuff from the past is simple nostalgia, then how can I be nostalgic for things that I didn't grow up on as a young kid with a formative, developing brain but which were also from well before my time? There's plenty of old movies and TV from before I was born that I enjoy in spite of never having had exposure to them when I was younger. I own the complete series of Perry Mason and yes it is limited by being a product of its time (both socially and technically, though on the former it had some solidly progressive behind-the-scenes aspects) but it's still enjoyable in spite of being off the air for like two decades by the time I came into this world and not being a show I watched as a kid because of any of the adults in my family. Or in a reverse situation when I was little before I had a NES my family had a Mattel Intellivision. It had a baseball game, a couple of TRON games, some casino stuff, and other sorts of games on it. And I admit I had lots of fun with it. but I don't now have the nostalgic love or reverence that I do for that NES or its games. Mostly because while those games were enjoyable, the NES represented a level of craftsmanship that shone and created timeless games. Like NWSharkie says, sure Goldeneye doesn't hold up as well anymore because it was part of the infancy of console shooters and the genre has progressed since then. But give me SMB3 or Super Mario World and it's still just as enjoyable today as any of the modern 2d Mario platformers. Hell, take Super Mario 64 and address its chunky graphics and clumsy camera and it is, in many regards, indistinguishable from playing Super Mario 3D World. Because it has tight, responsive controls and a compelling 3D world to explore. I could give someone the newer game, then give them Mario 64 and while there would be a curve to learning the control differences, it wouldn't be that big of a deal.
comparatively the difference between playing a modern NHL game of the last 5-10 years and plugging in NHL 99 is night and day. Even the SNES/Genesis era games like NHL 94/95 feel like they hold up better than 99 does because the simplicity of their design makes some of their quirks more forgivable.
Thank you for coming to my sociology/cultural psychology TED talk.