I digress, I grew up playing re-releases of Space Harrier, Afterburner, Sonic, Virtua Fighter and OutRun without even knowing they were re-releases and I was old enough to have played them when they were first released too. To me, these games were revolutionary in their re-released form!
But I never really got into gaming until 1998.
When you are a kid you care about what's important, playing, beating, enjoying and being inspired by the game - as you get older you care about unimportant shit like Barry does.
So Naturally younger people want to find out about the history of a game they've been playing and are interested in the culture.
If they are passionate about their hobby, what's the problem? Sure going around repeating what the 'adults' of the gaming world say is maybe a bit lame, but this is something everyone has done when they are younger, I'd be willing to bet you probably did it with music. Learning from the experience of older people is something a lot of people do - not necessarily children. But if an old man was to tell me how good his ZX Spectrum was I'd be more than happy to shove that ZX Spectrum right up his arse.
Although repetition of priase my occur, a certain level of agreement within the individual on this opinion has to occur as well, as no matter how much someone tells you something is awesome if you think it's a big pile of shit, you will always think it's a big pile of shit and no amount of listening to some crusty old man's positive critique is going to change that.
Besides, MegaDrive was popular in europe for quite a long time, so it's pretty understandable how a 19 year old may consider Sonic revolutionary as most of my freinds had MegaDrives by the time they were 5 and sure maybe they weren't there on release day, but at the same time they played the game all the same.
You don't have a problem with age, you are just irritated by the fact that someone who was late on the bandwagon kind-of has a passing interest in something that you consider your own domain for people your own age and no amount of regressing and re-addressing will hide the load of old shit you wrote in your OP.