For me, it was joining the Super Smash Bros. competitive scene roughly a decade ago. Before then I had switched over all my consoles to an LCD, but something always felt off about it, even if I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain it back then. I just kinda assumed that display tech was always going to be getting better, and left it at that.

Going back to CRT after years of gaming on LCD was revelatory. I couldn’t believe how responsive it was and how fluid it looked - thus beginning a journey of learning about this technology, collecting sets, and optimizing my cabling and console outputs. Seeing 480p F-Zero GX on a VGA monitor was what locked me in for the long haul- I never would have thought native 480p could look that good.

I’m of the opinion now that gaming lost a lot more than people think in the transition away from CRTs. I truly believe that many gamers who grew up in the CRT era who now think they’ve “gotten worse at games” are actually symptomatic of this transition, dealing with input lag and poor response times that didn’t exist before.