Its 16 years ago and the series continued. Last year my wife got all games and played them because she remembered playing the first one back then.

I don’t think it is “culturally forgotten”. Also as the amount of media increases it becomes more difficult to define a “mainstream” that everyone remembers as defining. This has happened to literary eras like a hundred years ago already. Now with music you dont have just MTV, the local radio station and maybe the one internet forum where all the fans of one genre gravitated to. So it is more difficult to be exposed to other people who didn’t forget