This post baffles me. How do you define quality that this is your conclusion? Games were simplistic as hell and AI could be reliably reverse engineered just by playing the game for a little bit, and this was with a dumb brain 30 years younger than our current less-dumb 30 years older brain. There were never any surprises, and the few games where even the taste of emergent game-play or anything unexpect could surface were revered as masterpieces for no other reason.
I think the only objective decline in the industry is the loss of the idea of permanence. Back then, they were making games with the idea that this would be something like chess, a monument of a game that could last generations. Not that people thought that, but rather, they just didn't consider the alternative -how disposable they are. Modern games on the other hand seem to be treated kind of like garbage, disposable, limited life-span, no reason to pour your soul into it -in other words.
That being said, even those few cases where souls were harvested and captured in videogame format successfully, the technology was such that they were still orders of magnitude less complex.
Civ 1 was made in '91 and the gameplay loop was found cities to found more cities until there's not more room for new cities, then conquor cities till no cities. All the other stuff we talk about on this forum all the time, did not exist. I wouldn't call that superior.
I think you're being way too hard on Firaxis, too. They're an excellent studio with a whole lot more integrity than most others, and I don't doubt they sacrifice to keep their product more to our taste than pandering to wider markets. Give this series to EA, for example, and that would be the end of it, bastardized and turned into a scheme to milk as much money from a much wider audience.
Firaxis, on the other hand, has -with a few stumbles- nurtured their ideas successfully and sustainably from iteration to iteration for nearly 30 years.
