It's not rose tinted glasses; older game music was better.
The combination of more personal touches - usually one guy, or a small group, working with a small dev studio of four to thirty people - and the limitations at the time requiring the composers to get creative in order to make the music as distinct and memorable as possible resulted in much better music than today, where they're being made for large studios owned by corporations and have access to all manners of instrumentation with no technical limitations.
Limitations are vital to creativity. Only a handful of people in any creative field actually make good use of no limits; most need limits to produce anything worthwhile.