I guess to elaborate on my position, when I was a kid video games meant one of two things... the quarter sucking arcade, which was full of zaxxons, tempests, pac mans and defenders, and the Atari which was full of... well... lower quality zaxxons, tempests, pac mans and defenders. Every game was simplistic. They were all usually single board, single objective, very simple things. The equivalent of ball in the cup... you just toiled at them until you got good, then you got tired of them and moved on to the next challenge. I didn't get a computer until I was in my early teens so I never experienced any kind of "complex" game... until the original NES.
Then when the 8 bit nintendo came out it was like seeing color for the first time. The games were... gasp... complicated! They actually had plots that were more detailed than "start here, go here". Zelda blew my mind. Castlevania, Blaster Master, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Metal Gear, Final Fantasy, Shadowgate, Ultima, Bionic Commando, and on and on and on. The NES basically laid the groundwork for nearly every video game genre and trope.
And I think that is why I don't appreciate the 16 bit generation as much as I should, because to me it feels like a continuation of what the NES started. Not so much innovating but improving. Comparatively the 16 bit gen was a definite leap up from the 8 bit gen, but the 8 bit gen to me is always the eye opener... the "Star Wars" that showed me that video games could be more than just bleeps and bloops and big squares bumping into other big squares.