Yep -- I think you're right. There's something about the newness of the medium that created such an accelerated sense of aging. While it's true that no-one today would say of movies today (as we did with gaming consoles throughout the 90s and 00s) that a new movie essentially leaves previous ones in the dust and basically irrelevant ... back in the 20s, when "talkies" emerged, they did make silent films feel abruptly "old" and irrelevant. Color TV, when it emerged into the mainstream, did the same thing with black-and-white TV and black-and-white shows. You got a bit of that with CDs, too: They were touted as being so "clear" in sound that you should ditch all your cassettes and vinyl and rebuy your music in CD. So any media form that goes through a big shift in technology will probably have these cultural effects.

Still, the way this played out in gaming feels ... a little different and more intense than in other media. I think it's because there were so many more shifts in the technology of games than in film/books/music/TV, and so many vectors: Graphics, sound, framerate, controllers, media formats, multiplayer, massively multiplayer, portable vs. console vs. arcade. None of those other media had so many things change, so quickly, for so long!