I’m going to have to actively disagree with that one.

While child-like wonder is certainly part of it – and VERY hard to recapture – my nostalgia is more based on how it could or should have been rather than on how it actually was. I do not wear rose-colored glasses.

Heck, when and where I was a kid, I couldn’t even get any fantasy minis or most other minis, for that matter. The only figures available in stores were Airfix historicals, Elastolin hand-painteds (WAY too expensive to build an army with), some ‘dime store’ Cowboys & Indians and a very expensive line of hand-cast and hand-painted  tin soldiers depicting mostly 19th century parade soldiers. I did, one time, manage to save enough money to order a small (VERY small) box of Minifigs at age 13 or so, that took many months and my dad – who HATED my interests – had to come with me to the customs office to get the box cleared and pay insane amounts of ‘import tax’. For a box of tin soldiers barely bigger than the palm of my hand.

Again: No rose -colored glasses here….

However, fast forward to the 80s and 90s and you could walk into a wide variety of brick-and mortar stores and find a bewildering array of games and miniatures from many different manufacturers. Almost all of those stores are now gone and you have to order everything online. Pretty soon we’ll have to order vegetables online. Until they shut that down, too….

There would be several tables  right there in the store, with people playing different games, while others were just shopping. Today, if there are any gaming tables, they are cordoned off and security cameras are scanning the store. If you can even find a store….

Companies used to advertise in magazines – such as White Dwarf , which used to be 3 times thicker and WAY more creative and dynamic than it is today – or Dragon , which may not even exist anymore (not into RPGS, so I don’t know) and many of them published their own PRINTED catalogs. What’s so great about printed catalogs ? They are always there, you can look at them anytime and anywhere you like, no need to turn something on, log into something, up-, down-,cross- or backload anything, they don’t crash and they’re still there when the power goes off. Not even the fanciest website will ever be able to match that. Sure, ordering was more tedious and time-consuming, but mail service was also a lot more RELIABLE back then than it is today. Lost packages were practically non-existent, even without tracking numbers. Fact, not ‘nostalgia’.

The phone I grew up with was a Schrack brand rotary dial, hardwired into the wall, about as portable as a brick, never needed service, never dropped a single call, reception was always crystal clear, even to overseas, and would probably still work today if rotary dialing was still supported. Today’s flimsy crap is obsolete – or just broken – after a few months (or weeks) and disservice sketchy at best.

The list goes on, I’ve already exhaustively covered why I prefer minis from before 2000.