I'll never understand the point of collecting older games and yet playing almost nothing but new stuff, which actually seems pretty common around here. I feel bad for anyone that can't appreciate the joy of playing classic games every bit as much as modern stuff. Heck, if anything, I'm the other way around. I keep buying modern games, yet after a brief try, they usually sit on my shelves unplayed so many years that they become "retro" by the time I play them too. :P I still have loads of N64 and PS1 games that I bought new and haven't played more than a few minutes.

I don't have any limit on how old my gaming is either. I'll happily give anything a go, but if I look at what I play most frequently over the years, it would probably be SNES and PlayStation. I generally don't put too much time into pre-NES games as they don't tend to have an end goal and I'm not obsessive about improving scores, but they're great for short bursts of fun now and then. If you have trouble getting into pre-NES games, you should give Colecovision a try. In terms of hardware capabilities, it's not such a shock to go from NES to that as to, say, Atari 2600. And since you can play 2600 carts on Colecovision with the proper module, it can be a great entry point to pre-crash gaming. It also has some good conversions of Japanese-developed arcade games from Nintendo, Sega, Konami, etc., so if you're used to the Japanese school of design on NES, that too makes it an easier transition.