Citizen Kane is one example where you will still find people thinking it’s overrated the farther the generation passes it by. It’s not timeless, it’s just most of the modern movies haven’t elevated past it because they’re more interested in special effects which forces those that would push the genre to be buried under the junk food.

For this same reason, near timeless games aren’t hard to find. You just have to sway your vision from the Portals or the Super Mario Brothers.

One exception to this will be Tetris but I can see many dissing this game for it’s lack of “plot” presentation so my vote goes to Harvest Moon.

The thing with this series is that it’s gameplay is so timeless and so rooted to a sandbox that it can be repeated generations over generations again and again because the only thing that needs improving with this game are the graphics and the balance. The rest are timeless.

Evidence:

-It has the same addictive quality as pokemon but it doesn’t need to constantly recreate pokemons

-It has the same addictive quality as the Sims but unlike the latter, it’s fun isn’t supported by items but rather by the plot which unlike most games don’t work so much towards telling the story but making the characters “timeless” and “memorable” so that you’ll keep playing a few more months until you get tired of the characters lack of new plot-ness

-It is both a casual game, an action game, a hectic micro management game and a hectic macro management game where the only flaw is that all these qualities aren’t retained in 1 game but are spread out throughout each iteration (SNES HM was more strategic, N64 one was more leasure and PS and GBA ones where more hectic while next gen ones were more threading on new grounds)

I just hope that we can come up with emulators powerful enough to run any of those games from the past – console agnostic emulators that is!

But to each his own :)