>>3908029
We'll bang, okay?

>>3908029
Because FO3/NV and Skyrim came out in the 2002 - 2010 gap. There were actually rather few games in those days which a majority of gamers played. Around 1999 - 2003, There was the Infinity Engine D&D games (BG1/2, IWD1/2, PS:T), Morrowind and EQ1. These titles, between them, dominated all RPG and RPG-adjacent experiences in their particular sub-genres. In the case of EQ1, it was almost the only title of its kind in the entire fucking world. They did have quips and lines which did circulate in meme culture in those days (though the term "meme" wouldn't even dominate for another decade yet).

Then WoW landed in 2004. It's impossible to overstate the influence of WoW on early oughties gamer culture. It just consumed an entire generation's gaming hours... and it had ZERO lines which were memorable, partly because players had no reason to read NPC dialogue, and partly because it wasn't voiced, and partly because there were no singular moments of experience which all players shared.

The next phase transition wouldn't happen until FO:NV and Skyrim. Both of which were 2010, basically. That year is a landmark in gaming history for several reasons, but suffice to say that the WoW era was ending due to a transition away from its wildly popular design and into a new era that just was not what players wanted. And players were tired of it. FO:NV and Skyrim literally killed WoW. And unlike WoW, they each do have singular moments with epic lines and voices that all players shared. Notice a pattern?

Since then, there have not been such memeable moments in any RPGs that came after (even though the post-2010 era saw a renaissance of RPGs, culminating in Owlcat's titles). The closest thing to "hey you, you're finally awake" since 2010 was Eder's comment about how many corpses are hanging from a tree in PoE1. But it was very contextually specific, and so it isn't really something you can make a meme out of.

Fus Ro DAH? What's that? What game?

>>3908089
>cont'd
It's also somewhat age related. Children are more into meme culture because they're not really able to construct a culture or synthesize a meaningful response to what they are experiencing in a given moment. Adults don't need to rely on memes, because they have a genuine, sincere grasp of a situation and thus their response is similarly authentic.

Children, as you might have noticed, aren't often playing twenty-six year old games with dated graphics and required attention spans. Otherwise you'd hear Zoomers saying shit like "You have much untapped power. Do you even realize your potential?" or "Ohhhh ho... you - you are a smart one! You said what you did just to get me mad!"

And then there's sociological claims about the development of a monoculture. Let's just say that the internet was very different in those early days. Communities were connected to each other in networks, but posts within those communities weren't really transferable. A forum comment on an obscure fan site didn't have the reach to affect a show writer in Hollywood who was writing dialogue for fucking F.R.I.E.N.D.S. or whatever. These days, Marvel movies commonly reference memes and slang of its contemporary year. In the early oughties, the internet and video games were a thing that only profoundly un-cool shut-in geeks and dorks were involved with. It was NOT ok to play video games as an adult. It was NOT ok to talk about internet forum culture as an adult. Stuff that happened "on the computer" was inherently negligible and "not real life".

That's changed. And the major point of inflection was around 2010 when social media and smart phones matured into a form that resembles what they are today.

>>3908094
>cont'd
All of this is a long way to explain that memes require a lot of people to host and transmit them, in order for them to spread and survive for a while. Exactly like any other virus.

Social media reaches hundreds of millions of people within minutes. Many orders of magnitude more than the few hundred people who would read a popular forum thread back in 1995 - 2008.

One of the factors of viral propagation is the size of the host network, which is also one of the factors of long-term survival. The memes from years ago that you keep seeing... are literally echoes as the wavefront of that virus' propagation is bouncing around within the network. You experience the arrival of that wavefront washing over you literally as seeing the meme again.

>>3908109
Lol

>>3908089
>X was a setback
>You are not prepared
>Father is it over?
Don't listen to this anon, he doesn't know what he's talking about. As if COD and GTA weren't a thing in the oughts