I just played the first Mass Effect for the first time, and was really impressed by how well it had aged for a game from 2007.
I replayed the first Bioshock (also from 2007) not long ago, too, and it, too, holds up IMO.
Could we get further back than 2007?
I think some of the original frantic shooters hold up alright, for what they are. Quake, stuff like that. They're kinda niche genre now, though. Not sure about the early Dooms, hard to judge those as easily. I like them, still, but...
The Half Life remake in the HL2 engine (Black Mesa) is very true to the spirit of the original and smoothes its rough edges off very elegantly, but the original's probably still fairly playable, too.
First mass effect, oof. It suffers from a lot of "which of the three buildings they made will this quest take place in?". Also having enemies walk right past your AI teammates, who are busy doing nothing, to shoot you in the back over. And over. And over. Gets really frustrating after a while. Two is so much better. You're in for a treat.
[EDIT] on reflection the one mechanic that probably feels off to a modern player in Perfect Dark, and indeed in many older shooters, is having thrown weapons treated like ordinary weapons, rather than a secondary attack with a separate set of items to cycle through. That is, you have to switch away from your gun to arm a thrown weapon, then throw it, then switch back. That's a little clunky. IIRC throwing-is-separate model wasn't popularized until the first Modern Warfare (I've played the first Call of Duty recently and I don't think it was in that, yet—man, talk about one that doesn't seem nearly as good on re-visiting)
Perfect Dark on the Xbox One is a lovely bit of emulator stacking: it's running in the Xbox 360 VM on the Xbox One, and the 360 game is itself running a custom Microsoft N64 emulator. It works much better than you think it should given the layers upon layers of indirection; many kudos to Microsoft's game VM and emulator teams for some of the hoops they've gone through over the years.
A good way to pick up Perfect Dark for the Xbox One is the Rare Replay pack. Sometimes you can find it for surprisingly cheap given the wealth that exists inside it. In addition to Perfect Dark and its 360 launch title prequel Perfect Dark Zero, it's about as complete a set of Rare's extensive back catalog as Microsoft's lawyers could muster the licenses for (so none of the games with Nintendo owned characters, though it sounds like they almost succeeded in convincing Nintendo, and also not Goldeneye which was bogged down with licensing issues between both Nintendo and EON Productions, the Bond license owners, and apparently truly scuttled at the very last minute based on intended behind the scenes features that wound up on YouTube anyway), plus some fun Behind-the-Scenes featurettes.
I did replay Tron 2.0[2] (2003) a few years ago and it was passable, though I think the art direction helped a lot. But I've also tried to play some games I really enjoyed back around y2k and yeah... mostly had to give up even though I got them to run fine.
If you expand the remit to 2D games since they depend much less on tech, the retrogaming community has lots to offer.
Nothing about it is epic - it feels like a cramped dungeon crawl. The gameplay and puzzles are extremely simplistic (lots of slow moving enemies crawling down a hallway). The story is a bad B-movie compared to some of the compelling modern games that are raising world-building to new levels. When you compare it to modern games, I don't see how anyone could justify spending more than an hour or two on nostalgia playing.
- Half Life 2. I recently started playing it again (for catharsis, when DC was under military occupation a few weeks ago—drones, helicopters, gas-masked cops and all), and woo boy is that game still jaw-dropping to me. Plus, games built on its engine, like TF2 and L4D2, are still popular.
- World of Warcraft. I never got into this game at the time (was still a recovering EverQuest addict), but sometimes I pop on the free edition and level a character to 20. It’s still the largest MMO by player base.
- Also: Knights of the Old Republic II, The Sims 2 (best Sims imo), Metal Gear Solid 3, Halo 2, Metroid Prime 2
And if you're willing to go with simpler games Pac-man (1980) and tetris (1984) both still hold up, as does Arkanoid (1986).