The era of "badwrongfun"!
Exactly so!
I quit playing around 1997 and got revised about a year before the suicide attempt that was nWoD which was an incredible line really. SO well thought out and designed but essentially a write off of their old fan base. I preferred it to VtM in the long run to be frank.
Looking back it's kind of amazing how many decisions TT RPG companies took in the 1990s which were sort of obviously perverse or likely to cause them harm, and how an awful lot of them were seemingly motivated by artistic or sentimental concerns, rather than professional or business ones.
Revised was business-y in that it was a product refresh and stood to make money, but also very sentimental in that "badwrongfun" was a major part of it, and instead of leaning in to what made their games genuinely popular, they leaned out to try and make them more the way they wanted them. You just wouldn't do that today.
nWoD as you say, was a sort of elegant suicide attempt, because it just wasn't the right time, in the middle of the whole d20 thing, to essentially say "All your investment is worthless". It was also a mixed bag in terms of whether the new products reflected the '00s zeitgeist better or were better games. V:tR was incredible, and honestly I think probably better than V:tM in all ways by the time the line essentially ended, whereas the new Werewolf... I know a few people liked it, but it didn't have the base appeal of the mayhem-filled Apocalypse. The new Mage was just dull and bad frankly, a totally unworthy successor. Was it a bit more zeitgeist-y? Well no, not really, that's the sad thing. It actually felt kind of more dated than Ascension, despite Ascension having some hilariously dated elements by then. And later games often bordered on the unplayable - Promethean was a great concept hamstrung by various design decisions seemingly taken without reference to whether this would make the game more fun/workable.
Palladium vanished up its own bum due to a sentimental attachment to a terrible system, when there was a point in the 1990s where they could have leveraged what they had into tremendous success - and again a point the early '00s, where, had Rifts done d20 version, it might have been "born anew" (esp. if they got good artists).
Mike Pondsmith, god bless him, and I do love and respect him, decided to put personal annoyance ahead of a pretty successful RPG, and just cut off Cyberpunk 2020 in 1997, seemingly very much for similar reasons to Revised - i.e. "badwrongfun" - if you read the generally excellent Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads! GMing book for 2020, you can see Mike ran a very different game to 90% of Cyberpunk players, were much more RP-heavy, romance-heavy, street-level-oriented and so on (he used
Streets of Fire as an example, and I have to admit, it took me until I was like 30 to understand what was good about that movie - now I love it!). And the big gun book having one new gun in it was such a contemptuous "You slavering hogs!" sort of deal. Even before ending the setting with the Stormfront books you could see he was wobbling, with CyberGeneration being such a weird thing (the ideas it had about childhood seemed to me profoundly 1970s, too, even in the 1990s, and very much still do to me re-reading it today), and also seemingly an attempt to "end" Cyberpunk 2020 (by essentially saying most/all edgerunners would be dead/in jail/in hiding by 2027 and a safe and boring Night City would have replaced the one we knew). The less said about Cyberpunk V3.0 the better. Honestly though if RTG, even with someone other than Mike in charge had just kept making Cyberpunk books, maybe a Cyberpunk 2030 and so on that was very much a continuation of the setting rather repudiation (as V3.0 was - 3.0 being intensely post-cyberpunk, genre-wise), I think they'd have done well. I guess he got his redemption with 2077, Edgerunners, and to a lesser extent Red (setting is fine and very much a return to 2020-style, but the rules are a mess).
I could go on, but I should probably shut up lol.
