I've found that with quite a few games.
One issue is there wasn't much choice, you had one game that your parents paid for, or maybe you did with your hard earned money, and you couldn't complain about it 'cause that's what there was. You made the best of what you had.
Another is the old version of DLC - either it was arcade games which were just really hard and only gave you a high score in exchange for quarters, or it was a game that was impossible to finish and that you were supposed to call in to the help lines to get the solution. That mentality of hiding something became useless with the advent of the internet and walkthroughs. They'll still try to sell Prima Official Strategy Guides, but for the most part, games can't be really difficult, otherwise someone will look up the walkthrough and then complain about how stupid the solution is (rightfully so). That's what killed the point and click adventure game. You could even blame it on AOL, as the last adventure game for ages was Grim Fandango, right around the time AOL was sending out those 50 free hour CDs.
Finally, you've got games that were amazing in their time for doing something no other game did (or at least that you had played). Even though Pitfall did it much earlier, since Super Mario Bros didn't support going left as well as right, when Metroid did it people had their minds blown, even though it was a pretty terrible game otherwise (or maybe decent if you like that type of thing).
Gears of War, Halo, Half-Life, they're all like that too, doing some rather small tweak that makes a big difference initially but is really easy to do much better. Gears of War doesn't set the benchmark for good cover based combat, in fact it's pretty easy to do it a lot better, but it was the first title a lot of people saw that made use of it, so it's seen a lot more fondly by people who played it first than by people who came from another cover based game and went back to it.
The games that are really good in the long term are usually the later games in a generation. Kirby's Adventure is pretty fun, but it was one of the last NES games. Ristar is also pretty fun, but it was a later Genesis game. It's the same with the current gen - Uncharted 2 will always be a good game, but they had a less impressive Uncharted first. Late gen PS2 games are also impressive, especially the post 2005 ones which went for gameplay as they couldn't compete even remotely with Xbox 360 graphics, and as a result some of the best PS2 games are Persona 3 and Persona 4.
Off hand the only game I can think of that really stands the test of time and was a launch title was Super Mario Land for the GameBoy. It's still great fun today, despite being right at the beginning of the life cycle, but that's keeping in mind that Super Mario Bros had already been out for years, so it was still a refined game.
