I've had arguments like that before, I just can't remember any of them.
But one I remember was arguing over the artistic merit of "Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker". That's sure to lead to trouble. The guy says "This game has NES graphics". I did respond by saying it actually takes a lot of effort to make the art style look like this, but the idea that this looked like the NES was ridiculous. The NES can't display this many colors, the NES can't display games at this resolution. But he still wouldn't listen.
If he responded this way to Wind Waker, I wonder how he would respond to Viewtiful Joe or Okami. "NES graphics", just absurd.
And yes, there are people that don't know what game Mario first starred in, or where Yoshi wings and Yoshi breathing fire come from. Sad world.
http://spacepope4u.blogspot.com/2007/08/young-mario-players.htmlThere are three questions near the bottom of that post that are pretty easy, but may cause trouble for people who weren't around games at that time. Actually, I'd have more trouble naming off the names of some of the more obscure Mario Bros./Mario World series enemies.
Then again, I'm lucky to have been born when Super Mario Bros. for NES came out, so that I'd remember that era. For people who don't care much about videogame history, I'd imagine they wouldn't look far past when they first started playing games (or even to get a broad view of what popular games were out at that time), thus missing a lot of important info. For example, I did not know that Mario Bros. was also made for the Atari system. Most Atari games I don't know of (there's Adventure and E.T., but that's pretty much all I remember). I'm clueless on Lode Runner. Never played much of the classic LucasArts/Sierra adventure games.