It never ceases to amaze me what people are doing with these "classic" video games. I have immense hope that the current generation of video games, ten or twenty years on, will have fostered the same degree of love and devotion in their fans, leading to such astounding mods. I can't wait to see how the more advanced physics and rendering technologies in recent games are twisted by the brilliant and insane minds of hackers and digital circuit-benders.
There are some good examples already (the GTA4 negative wheel friction hack (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0cUkU9rZyE) or some of the Mario64 Tool-Asisted-Speedruns come to mind), but we're not yet anywhere near these beautifully orchestrated sublimations of classic Mario, Zelda and Super Metriod.
I think contemporary videogames are too complicated to do this with. Older, simpler games have a minimalistic beauty all of their own; newer, complex games are more of a spectacle but lose a lot of the simple elegance. It's similar to the difference between the deliberate, minimalistic, kendo-style lightsaber battle in Empire Strikes Back and the hyperactive, flashy lightsaber battles in the Star Wars prequels.
But perhaps you're right. There does seem to be a sweet spot in the balance of 16-bit era games, where the technical complexity wasn't so constrained as to force a boring outcome (as with 8-bit and earlier), nor so complex as to require a herculean amount of effort.
Time will tell. I would rather err on the side of being hopeful.
I think it's possible to use newer technology more tastefully and minimalistically. I was going to add a huge analogy to the end of my comment about the subdued use of color in recent films, comparing that with earlier color films which were more vivid and gaudy, but I don't think I have enough of a grasp of film history to really tell whether that was the case.
I was tempted to post some Halo examples (not to mention Morrowind!), as I was really big into the Halo:CE jumping community back in, oh, 2001/2002. I have many, many fond memories of halo.bungie.org and the like — in fact, I remember seeing sneaky Halo-related hints on Bungie's website before they even did the famous reveal during a Macworld keynote (with you-know-who): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2obYHzJ3n8.
Then, Halo 2 came out with off-the-shelf Havok physics replacing the (wonderfully) "buggy" penalty springs-based physics from H:CE. Because Havok was "more-realistic", it was extremely difficult to do the sort of insane physics-stunting the first game allowed. It was this single change that turned me off of the rest of the Halo series.
Like Super Metroid, H:CE was a magnificent case of the weaknesses in code allowing for brilliant system-breaking ingenuity on the part of users. And as long as video game devs are forcing themselves to the very bleeding edge of technology under a merciless deadline, we're bound to see more "glitchy" games offering plenty of opportunity to enterprising and creative sequence-breakers, speedrunners, stunters, and the like.
There are some good examples already (the GTA4 negative wheel friction hack (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0cUkU9rZyE) or some of the Mario64 Tool-Asisted-Speedruns come to mind), but we're not yet anywhere near these beautifully orchestrated sublimations of classic Mario, Zelda and Super Metriod.