you didn't want to own hundreds of games
even though you could because most were priced very reasonably
Wolfram Alpha says[1] that's ~$90 today.
1: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=50%20USD%201990%20in%20...
In real terms, games are cheaper here too.
(Another reason for lower prices would also be lower unit costs -- a ROM cartridge surely cost more to manufacture than an optical disc. And the gaming audience is now much larger than it used to be.)
To me, the preview video for the game looks like Star Wars meets Half Life.
Development got harder (more art assets to make, harder code to write, more of everything) markets got bigger (100 million Wiis vs 50 million NES's) and demographics shifted (from 8 - 16 year olds to 16 - 30 year olds).
Counter Strike for me counts as a childhood game, though. I was early teens when it came out and I played it on the order of thousands of hours. It was developed by a relatively small player, Sierra, who also had some other awesome games I enjoyed prior to that, and the game was initially awesome.
I enjoyed everything up to and including 1.3, and even dabbled in competitive play. I've played every version of CS since and nothing is even comparable to versions 1.3 and below. I guess all good things must come to an end, and while I really hoped to see the efforts behind cs promod take off, nobody really advertised it (it was a re-packaged v1.3 when 1.6 and later source were basically killing the competitive scene).
Thinking about it brings back those nostalgic days of WON with the fullscreen console. I had a 3 digit wonid, I remember when that was such a big deal, lol. Going over to a friend's house, setting up PCs, getting loads of caffeine and raiding the liquor cabinet, then doing cal scrims all night long.
The prices weren't necessarily based on quality either, I paid $64.99 for Ghostbuster (NES) and that game was awful.