What Was Gaming Like In The ‘90s?

what was gaming like during the 90s the 90s was dominated by an antique culture of bad haircuts handy Downs capris sons and expensive awesome video games it was a phenomenal time of 16 32 and 64-bit action couch Co-op and some of the best games ever like Chrono Trigger Street Fighter 2 and all the N64 and Playstation 1 Classics PC gaming was just getting started with games like Diablo doom and Lemmings online gaming itself was virtually non-existent and finding places to buy games or find info on popular titles was a challenge in the 90s you relied on magazines in Word of Mouth for information there was no GameStop online stores or Amazon free deliveries the most reliable place to find video games was Toys R Us where you go to the game aisle find what you wanted take the slip of paper underneath the fronts and get your game from the kiosk if it was available sometimes you got lucky like when you bought Super Mario RPG because the 3D box art looked cool as heck a lot of the time though it backfired and you went home with a piece of crap but let's be honest you played it anyway because you didn't have a lot of games and you wanted to get your money's worth in the 90s kids didn't have cell phones or any way to talk to people beyond our own streets gaming communities consisted of whatever smelly kids were in your neighborhood willing to converge on whoever's house had a gaming console set up in their garage with an old smelly couch everyone could cram into the only connection anything bigger than that ragtag group of kids was the Nintendo Power Magazine there was never a feeling like the world was full of Gamers because the world seemed so small when you were a kid until you discovered an arcade the gaming world was the quarter mile radius surrounding your house so anyone who played games on your strip was your friend you'd stay up late taking turns playing Secret of Mana and you'd throw down playing Street Fighter 2 until her mom called you in for a cheap hamburger helper dinner you'd have sleepovers and if you were lucky they had Lucky Charms in the morning but let's be real it was probably marshmallow Stars you then run to the bus and share stories of your gaming Adventures on the way to school and at recess everyone had a different game and a different console and you Relish in their stories fascinated by who beat watts and who was able to make it the furthest in the game you wanted whoever was able to get past the shooting Barrels in Donkey Kong was revered and if someone actually had a copy of Super Mario Kart with two controllers they were worshiped there was a degree of rivalry you were either a Nintendo fan or a Sega fan or a Nintendo fan or a Sony fan but it was innocent unlike today kids were just as worried about games as they were about getting a chocolate milk or juice box in their lunch bag the worst you get was some smack talk about how your version of Mortal Kombats had sweat instead of blood people who played games stuck together in the early days because gaming was almost a secret society if you played Nintendo and found four other kids who also played Nintendo you were basically in The Goonies the culture was just different forget everything you know about modern gaming because it didn't happen in the 90s it was an heirloom time but in a good way like the sand lots forget fortnite loot boxes endless free-to-play games Giant open worlds with radio towers to climb season passes Twitch streaming sweaty BR lobbies guides walkthroughs reviews Reddit YouTube and everything like that and fact forget the word Gamers because the word Gamers did not exist back then nobody called themselves a gamer in the 90s if you play games you're a nerd and you probably did other nerdy stuff like play board games or collect pogs gaming wasn't a way of life it was a way to pass time because the world felt like it moved in slow motion as a kid video games were fresh on the Block most people outside the sphere barely even knew about them the only way you knew about Wolfenstein was if you got detention on purpose by pulling Stephanie's Ponytail just so you can be in the room with the one computer they had in school for the afternoon PC gaming had barely gotten off its feet only a handful of people actually knew the existence of Oregon Trail Doom didn't come out till 93 in the late 90s would just barely see the start of crude online forums and rudimentary chat rooms like icq and only if you were lucky enough to hold the phone line hostage while you dialed up to the cardboard speed internet your family had no the 90s was more or less defined as the rise of the 16 and 32-bit console era as well as the proliferation of the local arcade but still it was far before anyone took games too seriously it wasn't until the late 90s when the boom of the RTS Battlenet GameSpy and more sophisticated console games came into the scene that people actually started talking about gaming culture playing video games was something you did not necessarily something that defined you today people build their entire lives around it we were just as happy to go outside and play Wiffle ball on the streets or have epic water gun wars we rode Redline bikes with chromies we had real birthday parties outside in the backyard where we chomped on Big League Chew and slid down the slip and slide you better hope your dad checked for rocks before he laid that thing down because if you didn't someone's was gonna get ripped a new one the problem with gaming in the 90s was that no one had any money and games were so expensive if you were a kid back in the 90s you were at the mercy of your parents but chances are your parents probably didn't have any money either especially for games games and consoles were so expensive the only hope you had to get one was to wait for Christmas put it this way it was more rare to see a console in someone's house than to see a pool in their backyard just think about this for a second games and systems cost the same now as they did back then you think 60 bucks is a lot for a game today try spending eighty dollars for a copy of pilot Wings on the N64 when the minimum wage was three dollars an hour that same game today would cost 150 dollars the Sega Saturn was 400 bucks in 95 which is over 750 bucks adjusted today if you really wanted to buy a game you were outside In the Heat of the summer setting up a lemonade stand sweating your ass off begging for someone to come by and give you a quarter for that watered-down Kool-Aid you were selling families barely had enough money in the 90s to get by let alone shower Jimmy with a bunch of new video game that were already incredibly expensive but there were two things that we could do if we wanted to play games at any time game rentals and go into the arcade foreign the evolution of video game difficulty as time went on prompted a huge rental market in the early 90s most if not all games were on cartridges and storage space was limited the SNES had a capacity of six megabytes and memory cards wouldn't be invented until the PlayStation in 94 so there was only so much game that could be put on that cartridge this led to a lot of cryptic maze-like games like Simon's Quest where they could ensure long frustrating play times and more importantly increased the difficulty part of it was due to terrible controls but a lot of it was sheer game difficulty devs couldn't let you blaze through an entire game in a single day so games were designed to be ass kickers with unfair gimmicks respawning enemies if you hit the screen's Edge and jumps requiring ridiculous Precision a lot of games were based off eight lives and continue system which made sure that the small storage space could be used efficiently if you ever played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES you know exactly what I mean with horrendous difficulty spikes Marathon marches before checkpoints and terrible controls most games could not be beaten easily thankfully in the 90s external memory cards allowed for permanent save states but that of course inflated the already in tremendous cost of buying a video game console and all the accessories you would want because Publishers were pretty much in direct competition with the rental market the games also had to be hard enough so kids couldn't finish them during rental periods every town had a movie store where you could pick up a game for a day or two for a couple bucks the rental market was huge and Blockbuster Video opening in your area was a godsend but the companies who made the games didn't want you to go there and rent them because they'd lose out on sales potentially so they made them hard hard enough to where there was no way in hell you'd finish them before you had to run it back to the movie store why make a game that's easy enough to be beaten in a day they'd never sell any games that way the movie store could simply buy two copies and rent them out to 85 kids 85 sales Nintendo would never get that's five thousand dollars and that's just one game in one store in one tiny city in California multiply that five thousand dollars by every game and every movie store in America and you can see how much money was up for grabs console games were also competing with arcade games so they had to provide value that competed with a quarter this in addition to the rental market resulted in games being hella hard and hecka frustrating games were so hard and information and helped so unavailable that it led to one of the most necessary but blood sucking Industries ever the video game tip line remember there was no internet to tell you how to beat a level in the 90s if you wanted help you had to know someone who could help you or you had to buy a game genie and a Game Genie code book or as a last resort call a video game helpline for 90 cents a minute you could call helplines and ask them any question about any game ever made yes live on the phone but remember that clock is a ticking lost your way in A Link to the Past can't figure out where to go in Secret of Mana I want to unlock all the secret characters and internal Champions trying to finish the water temple in 1999 trying to finish any point-and-click Adventure game ever made can't figure out how to beat psycho mantis in Metal Gear Solid yep you needed help game FAQs wasn't founded until 1995 but even then you you probably didn't have an internet connection anyway God forbid even if you did Grandma was about to call it or so Mom would say so you could never hold that phone line hostage anyway so the only thing you could do was sneak off and call the hotline when Mama wasn't looking for the price of your entire month's allowance you had access to a certified gamer God who had all the secrets in all the games they did everything from walking you through dungeons room by room to unveiling Easter eggs guiding you to all the hearts and Zelda to exposing all the cheat codes and exploits in any game you wanted and for the really cryptic stuff they'd even mail you map guides if you were stuck on the air Castle in Fantasy Star you could call up sega's hotline and they send you a step-by-step walkthrough of the joint it was like stumbling onto Jesus as a kid except no one had the money or permission to call these companies so you called and talked as fast as you possibly could so you wouldn't rack up a fat build and when someone came on the line and talked at a turtle's Pace you immediately hung up and ate the 90 cents fondly do I remember stealing my mom's credit card and calling for help in Simon's Quest you know the part where you had to face a wall while crouching and holding up a specific orb for a certain amount of time to get transported to a new area remember there were no save states in most games most games had password systems that would send you back hours from where you actually were so it wasn't like I was going to shut the system off I needed help now and no one in the world knew how to get past this wall in Simon's Quest better than the Nintendo Power hotline that was incredible Gamers did have a little bit of help when magazines came into circulation like Nintendo power and egm though Nintendo Power was a little viable for kids in the 90s offering articles news walkthroughs and even reviews of games if you were lucky enough to have a subscription you could even write to the author and ask some questions if you were stuck on a game these magazines were the only contact kids had with the outside world so when you got one in the mail you crapped your pants it was luck of the draw if the new issue had the games you were interested in but magazines were the only way to find out anything new about games getting released so you poured over every page regardless before the internet you needed advertisements to tell you about the new features of products or new games which is kind of ironic if you think about it thank you the only other way you were able to play expensive games if you couldn't afford them or even discover was heading down to the local arcade dude the arcade walking into an arcade in the 90s was one of the great Wonders of the World forget the Taj Mahal an arcade was the eighth wonder of the world the flashing lights the digital beeping computerized sounds the pinball machines clanging and kids scarfing down hot dogs and yelling I got next if you were lucky enough to have a buck or two in your pocket you felt like you were the king of the world as you approached classic arcade cabinets like Time Crisis cruising USA and NBA Jam in the 90s you love to have people watch you play and in the rare case compete for the high score of the cabinet arcades had a culture of their own one in which you were a nobody unless you proved it you got in line by placing your quarter at the edge of the screen alongside the other nine coins Challengers were always sanctioned to the right side of the screen in a fighting game and huge crowds would form around goliaths like Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct it was a Bloodsport and the only way to survive was to beat whoever stepped up to the plate next to you but if you did get good at a game you were a God because win streaks were proudly displayed on screen at all times it didn't matter if you were black white brown yellow or purple buck teeth or four eyes you were just a kid a broke smelly kid desperate to play just like everyone else battles would rage on for hours while kids would teach each other moves share stories and go on fat win streaks until some four foot Asian kid who could barely see over the joysticks slammed you with a 32 hit combo like it just materialized out of The Wizard movie silencing the crowd and claiming his thrawn at the top as he finish you with a rare fatality no one had ever seen before so Titanic was the blow that you staggered back in a moment of pure amazement and embarrassment bowing to your new Baraka Overlord arcades in the 90s were a cultural icon as the 90s went on video games aged like a fine wine four of the best consoles ever made debuted in this decade the SNES the PlayStation the Nintendo 64 and the Very under-appreciated Dreamcast in 1999. there has never been a 10-year period where so many cult classic games released from Super Mario World to Donkey Kong Metal Gear Solid GoldenEye f-zero Diablo and so much more all of these options Force Savage competition which is why games and Tech developed at warp speed games went from 2D to 3D in this man of just a few years which changed the face of gaming forever fighting games flourished in the arcades RPGs became bigger and better Platformers rang Supreme and PC gaming began to explode at the turn of the decade with their online playability in massive worlds if you were to tell me that we'd be going from pong to Baldur's Gate in just 15 years I would have never believed you there's a lot of crap in the industry today a lot of companies do a lot less than they should franchises are sometimes run into the ground a lot of Gamers were toxic and it makes games Less Fun and Things Are chopped up and spit out so unfairly that it looks like they're purposefully trying to steer the industry in the wrong direction sometimes but if you told eight-year-old me in the mid 90s that we'd one day have a game like Apex Legends or PlanetSide 2 for free I would have damn near exploded right then and there I didn't play too much of PlanetSide 2 but the idea of a team-based MMO shooter with gigantic planets immersive 3D graphics and futuristic sound design that is completely free it's something we often take for granted in the grand scheme of things I think games have come a long way and looking back into the mirror of the 90s the controls the mechanics options Graphics storytelling and creativity are night and day to what they used to be there are games from the 90s that aren't as good or better than anything released today but the progression of technology has made some of those ideas even better and the options people have today are incredible there's a game at a price that everyone can afford and the craziest most Niche styles that anyone could ever want sometimes they're a lot more style than substance but the industry has grown so far from the 90s that it is truly amazing if we've lost anything from the 90 these it's that feeling of Wonder the feeling of being so tiny and part of something so mysterious and fascinating conquering a game in 1990 was an achievement few today can even imagine blink once and all of that challenge can be replaced by walkthroughs guides and information available online bat and I and the Mystique can be Jaded by the thousands of Clips streams and vods available for any game at any time you don't even have to play games today you can watch a let's play or skip straight to the end cut scene but not back then games were surprising and delightful and as someone who lived through the 90s as a small kid I can tell you that it was an incredible weird and fun time to be alive in the video game industry so much of what I experienced today reminds me of so little of my gaming past I've changed and the games have certainly changed too if I had a time machine and could live through it again as I am today I guarantee you I'd have a completely different experience I guess you just had to have been there you can never truly look back into the past without some form of rose color because the truth is we often prefer to remember the great Parts about our time on Earth so it's possible that the 90s wasn't as cool as I remember but I like to think that it was if you two live through the 90s please feel free to tell us about your memories in the comments section below take care of your nerds and I'll see you in our next video peace a special thanks for today's video sponsor surfsharkvpn surfshark is a VPN service that keeps your identity safe by encrypting all of the information sent between your device and the internet you'll 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Channel: Downward Thrust

Views: 758,651

Keywords: video games, diablo 4, video games in the 90s, 90s video games, games, gaming, best games of all time, downward thrust, video game essays, top video games, diablo 2, diablo 3, video game addiction, video game documentary, Documentary

Id: r6hqvWJljAM

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 21 2023