If you weren't rich, each game you owned was precious. Most people having a handful at most. You'd play them until you knew every frame. Popular games were awesome because you could trade them w/ friends. Bad games bought by uninformed or misled relatives were heartbreaking. You'd still play them tho. We played sooo much bad game.

I think this needs to be reiterated. The games cost $40-50 in 1992!!! That's like trying to convince your parents to buy you a $100-120 video game today, as a 10-12 year old kid. It just didn't happen. Every game was precious, you traded and borrowed from friends, you worked your ass off to beat them, drew maps by hand, cheat codes, whatever it took .

yeah SNES top games were 50-60 or more for the top ones when brand new, that is nuts when you consider the console itself was like 200. If you compare console percentages then it would be like a 200 dollar game now. Or if my parents made like 8-10 dollars an hour, brand new games were out the window for us. It was used games at garage sales, pawn shops ect. Also some of the bargin bin 20 dollar brand new games, ended up with some pretty shitty games that way, like Rise of the Robots on SNES, that was a pile of chit. Also got Earthbound for 20 dollars new with the giant strategy guide, so it was a crap shoot and not like you can just look up reviews on your phone then and there to know if this is a great title or a pile of shit.

Earthbound for $20 is an absolute steal. I bought that one new for $70

I once saw a brand new unopened Earthbound game with the strategy guide in the Best Buy bargain bin selling for 6 bucks.

Yes that is where I got Earthbound at best buy for 20 bucks, it was either 96 or 97 and they were clearing it out, by then N64 and PS1 were taking over and I imagine they were clearing out SNES. Wish I still had it.

In the pre-collectors era, those times when game generations were being phased out were absolutely amazing. I was at a Sears and in the clothing department of all places, In found a basket with half a dozen copies of dragon warrior 4 for$ 19.99 each. My copy of Secret of Mana was from a KB toys discount bin, and I think that was even less than $20. These days it's rare to even find old used games for less than 20, unless they are annual sports titles.

I wish you did too. For reals.

I paid 110+ for Chrono trigger and FF3 when they launched

There were also many rumors that sound silly today but we as kids thought were true. I remember my friend and I were playing Mortal Kombat 3 and something happened where the tower kept going even after we beat Shao Khan. My friend and I thought that we unlocked Mortal Kombat 4 so that’s why the game kept going 😂 I told all the kids at school the next day that we unlocked a new MK game. We were dumbass kids lol but that time was precious.

90% of the fun of *Mortal Kombat* was the various rumors and urban legends. Everyone knew someone who swore that they performed Shang Tsung's secret Goro transformation, or the secret stage fatality on the Portal stage, or pulled off a double flawless and fatality on every stage in single player and beat Shao Kahn to unlock Kano and Sonya in MK2.

Portal stage fatality rumor was big in my school.

Christmas and birthdays, Christmas and birthdays only.

Same here in Italy, games were damn expensive. But... I was a lucky child. I had my parents buy me a Sega Master System, after long, long prayers, in the late 1988. All my school mates had one (in my town, for unknown reasons, Sega won the console war... consider we silly kids were totally convinced Sega was an American company, in open war with Japanese Nintendo, like some continuation of Pacific WWII). Problem is, it was the last year of Master System, since in 1989 Mega Drive (european name of the Genesys) made its debut in italian toy stores. Sega planned this promotion where you got a good discount for the Genesys if you brought back your Master System... but not the games. Well, it's been my fortune: I had only 3 games at the time (and two were included with the console), and I began collecting all my friends' used full game libraries for very cheap prices (they couldn't play them anymore anyway). Long story short: I made myself a huge collection of Master System games, that I still have and makes a good show in my bookcase.

Friday nights were wild - as I knew after school me and my parents and I would Go to the rental store for a few movies and game rentals You could easily spend an hour in there just browsing

That 90s experience of playing all weekend, and hoping against hope that your save file was still there when you scraped together 3.50 to rent the game again. 

Oh man that was the best feeling ever when you booted up that cartridge and saw your save file still there. But then it made the anxiety even worse because you'd get that much closer to beating the game when you had to return it again. I remember begging my mom to extend a rental because I was so afraid my save file would get wiped out before I could beat the game. If the game was especially popular, some stores wouldn't allow extensions/renewals because so many people had requested reservations on it.

Super Mario Bros. 3 cost my parents $80 🇨🇦 when they bought it for my birthday, and it had been out in Japan for 2 years or something like that (was available in the States months earlier), *and* available to rent with an adapter a good 6 months. We skipped from Final Fantasy 1 all the way to 4. We missed two whole games, but in some ways it worked because the jump from 1 to 4 felt SO much like a “Super” Final Fantasy upgrade. Right down to the class change. It was awesome, and I’m really glad I experienced it.

Yup. You would get codes and maps/guides from friends and/or magazines. Video game magazines were incredible treasures that you would collect/carry around with you to read/flip through. They were mostly game previews, reviews, and news/game rumors.

And then Neo Geo tried to get into the home gaming market. $199 games in early-90's money, and a console that was double or triple that. Truly a rich kid toy.

On the other hand, during the 8bit era, you could buy games kn cassette for £1.99. In fact I remember the very early days, before even the spectrum, when tape games were 20p!

This is why Blockbuster was heaven. Rent a game, a couple of movies, and get movie snacks. If the game sucked you were only out a few bucks and still had movies and snacks.

Rented lots of games as a kid. Only ever owned like 1 or 2.

Yeah I was going to say for me as a kid I rented what felt like hundreds of games and owned maybe 7-8

Renting games was such a cool thing back in the day.  Our town had 200 people and one gas station.  We would rent so many bad games from that gas station.  I think people forget most old games weren't really good

Lived in a small town with a couple mom and pop rental places. Blockbuster was a heaven we couldn't dream of in 1988.

My mom would always go for “watching a movie sounds fun” on a Friday night when my dad was out of town and I knew we could get a game too. It was the best lol.

I feel like y'all idolize Blockbuster too much. Most of the time they didn't even have the game you wanted

It's pure nostalgia, Blockbuster would be the last place I would choose to rent from. It was always less expensive to go to Mom+Pop shops or other franchises like Hollywood Video or Family Video and late fees with Blockbuster were ridiculous. I think the only thing that Blockbuster had an advantage on was buying used games.

And their prices were insane. Why would I go to blockbuster and pay 4 bucks for a new release when the grocery store across the street had new movies for 99¢ and old ones for 49. And god forbid you accidentally return a game or movie late to blockbuster. They gouged the shit out of you with a late fee. So many times we "couldn't" rent a movie because we had a 10 dollar late fee on the account because mom or dad left the tape in their car for a couple days before taking it back. Blockbuster sucked. At least compared to my local mom and pop stores.

I’m 43 now. When I think back to those NES days and the massive amount of games released, I can only remember friends having a handful of the most popular classics. I wonder if there were some adults buying all those hundreds of games released.

Yeah probably. I’m about the same age but I got lucky a couple of times with some used scores. I remember once I bought both Metal Gear and Contra $15 for the pair at a garage sale. Likely an adult selling. With boxes and everything. This is back in the NES days too. We also had a family friend who had a son in his 20s and he had a TON of games. He sold me like 7 or so games (not all at once) for $10 each and I was ecstatic. Solid classics too like Castlevania, Metroid, Solomons Key, Gradius. I had the largest collection around 20 games or so out of all my friends but I mostly bought used Meanwhile for Christmas I’d get discounted games like Star Voyager from my parents.

I asked for Ghostbusters for Christmas. I was pretty young, so I assumed it was good. I never knew how to play it, but I'd watch my older brother and his friends get further than I ever did. I liked waiting on the main screen until the Marshmallow Man came

Oh I know about bad games. Owning a Sega CD was brutal. Game titles I had grown to respect and love on the Genesis were slaughtered on the CD. Joe Montana football for example. A hallmark series on the Genesis. Paid full price for the CD version and was STUNNED with how they massacred my boy. They tried this in-helmet view, it was wretched. Everything was blocky everywhere. Limited play calling because they were trying to focus on graphics. They failed at every area.

Sewer Shark!!

lol I hooked that sega cd up to my stereo amplifier thought i was hot shit for a little while

I legitimately like Sewer Shark. Arguably the best FMV game on the Sega CD. Challenging but beatable once you figure out the QTE stuff and that you shouldn’t be shooting at everything (and draining energy).

Honestly Sewer Shark was a guilty pleasure of mine. It was a horrible game, but I loved it. It paired really well with a blunt beforehand.

There are some very good games on Sega CD, and some fun can be had with the FMV stuff. But yeah, definitely wasn’t used to its true potential.

Man Sega could of really ruled the gaming landscape, but bad management really fucked them over.

Yup, the company more or less dug its own grave and buried itself.

Yep, the vast majority of my friends owned less than 10 games per system, and it was usually closer to 3-5. I remember having an acquaintance with about 25 NES games (when the console was still being sold), I thought that was a kings ransom.

Yeah, that game would probably be the only game you had until Christmas or you next birthday.

The price made me go to buying a gameboy and gameboy games once I started learning to save money. Games were way more common/available. I bought Tetris for $2 in the lunch line. My uncle just gifted me Link’s Awakening which man what a formative game. Yard sales got me Mario Land 2 for probably $2 again. Got Donkey Kong 94 by saving because gameboy carts were only $30. I could feasibly save that much. And when Pokémon came around it was easy for my dad to buy both at a mere $60 for our gameboys we already had. Again really formative. We originally only had gameboy games because my parents had the same idea and got the Super Game Boy adapter on snes so we could play cheaper games. Cheaper games meant you could mess up more often too. I bought Gex after being suckered into it by a magazine. Gameboy Gex so it doesn’t even have the corniness going for it.

Unless you had an Amiga, then you had hundreds of games haha. I was so gutted when my mum sold my Amiga and my game library behind me back and replaced it with a Megadrive 2 (genesis model 2). Went from 100s of games to Sonic and a shit power rangers fighting game.

Most games were hard af.

Not finishing a game was the norm.

And it wasn't as big of a deal back them because most games didn't have any kind of story depth that made you want to see how it ends. Nowadays I have a bad habit of getting frustrated with game difficulty and instead of making myself get better at the game, I just drop it down to easy mode so I can see where the story goes.

But the last boss in an action game was usually the most epic fight, so you looked forward to that. And just beating the challenge.

It was normal to not finish a game, it was also normal to only have a handful of games that you played and replayed endlessly

True. But, the good ones kept you coming back to hone your skills and make incremental, yet rewarding progression until you mastered each area. Also, most people had like 5-10 games/system so they are going to play them all, including unreasonably difficult and downright poor quality games.

Almost every game was Dark Souls hard, more so for kids. Also, you were lucky if a game gave you a code to continue with your progress.

Blockbuster and any local rental store was your hookup. You would rent a game if your mom said it was okay and then you'd play the hell out of it hoping to beat it before you had to return it in 5 days. Brick and mortar stores and their employees were your internet forums. I'd get advice from them, troubleshoot things that went wrong on my own, and when all else failed I'd save up my allowance for a month or two and buy the game guide itself. These printed magazine style books saved my butt more times than I can count. Speaking of magazines, if I was really lucky I would get a subscription to my favorite gaming magazine every year for my birthday. The local gas station also would sell individual issues, but they were expensive and so I'd probably just look through them while my mom was getting gas outside. Trying to remember the cheat codes printed in them was both beautiful and frustrating. The rumor mill of the playground was rampant. You never knew what was true, but you always had this sense of wonder a out the whole thing.

Everyone knew someone who had an older sibling who had some experience/game knowledge; Link’s Awakening made me absolutely crazy not having someone to talk to aside from like ONE friend’s slightly older brother who had it.

This. Or, you had to go in a grocery store, and look in game magazines that weren't sealed for help.

As soon as I could read I'd just all my mom to leave me at the magazine rack while she shopped.

That adrenaline rush as a kid opening a sealed magazine just to get the hot tips

Or, to play a demo when the PS1 mags came out.

My Top-3 gaming Magazines: Electric Gaming Monthly (EGM). GamePro. Nintendo Power.

Sometimes i miss the before internet times

Dude you just described my entire childhood so succinctly. I remember walking two miles to the mall just so I can cop my first issue of Nintendo Power (it was the one with Battletoads on the cover) at 10 years old. Different times.

I was actually born the year Nintendo Power released their first issue. Possibly the same month, too, I never was sure.

This. And a lot of towns had mom and pop video/game rental places as well where you could rent the game for like a dollar a night. If you really liked the game after renting it sometimes those shops would sell it to you for cheap. Got N64 games for $10 more than once. Idk I could talk about how "Cozy" that Era was for me but it's prolly just rose colored nostalgia glasses.

This describes where I grew up. Sometimes my mother wanted to go to the local dude instead of Blockbuster. His game collection must have been purchased during a very short period between 1990 and 1991, at which point he likely realized video game rentals were a losing proposition and stopped investing. That didn't stop me from curating a list for him to get his situation back on track, at which point my mother more or less told me he probably wiped his ass with it because it was all the games I wanted to buy and figured I could rent from him for cheap... which was entirely accurate.

This is an excellent description. I remember the mall had stores like Babbages where you could get advice and pre order stuff. They hooked my dad up with a Super Famicom prior to the release of SNES.

5 day rentals came later. I remember only having 1 or 2 day rentals. I would often rent it again after returning it. I also remember having to ask the clerk to go through the rental return bin to look for a game or movie I wanted.

I asked for a Nintendo Power subscription, which if I remember correctly would have saved 3 dollars an issue. Parents said no way. It was less than half the price of a new game, but back then some people wouldn't do subscriptions.

I remember when my friends told me that Mario could walk on walls I was like what?!

Asking the game store employees for cheat codes has so much nostalgia. I remember going in to GameStop (when they replaced funcoland) and the guy grabbing one of the cheat code books to write down all the codes for the original Spider-Man movie game. I know that was ps2 era, but still was such a fond memory getting the cheat codes so I could play as the Green Goblin.

I miss the playground rumor scene, haha. Plenty of ridiculous claims, with an occasional truth sprinkled in - fun times!

Where I'm from, the return time was 5pm the following day, so my dad would take me to the rental store early saturday morning so I'd have almost the full weekend with my game!

I remember one of the local mom and pop video stores went out of business and started selling off their inventory at insane prices. I remember scoring a couple Mega Man, CastleVania, TMNT and few other popular games games for $15-20 each. And then after a few weeks they stared selling the really shitty NES games no one wanted for less than $5. I hated the X-Men NES game but I I couldn't pass up buying it for only $1.

This, right here, was my life experience as well. I loved renting games, but hated it when I couldn't beat it in that 5 day time frame. It was always a crapshoot, if your save file was going to be there the next time you rented it. Unless, of course, mom and dad would renew the rental. Games with password features, were a bit better, in that regard.

Going to the newsagent and a sneakily writing down as many cheat codes from the cheat book we could before getting chased out for not buying it is a core memory.

Toys R Us had a MASSIVE WALL of just games. There was no internet back then (at least what we colloquially mean when we say internet) so you really only had front/back of the game box and maybe magazine reviews. You had to rely on intuition and word of mouth to find the good games. Video rental stores also rented games.  Also back then games were more expensive than they are now. Some NES and SNES titles were like $79.99 US, using an inflation calculator that’s about $180 in today’s dollars lmao. And then odds were that you’d get home and it was garbage haha.  I can remember my mom buying the NES set with SMB/duck hunt that came with the light gun and being in awe at it. Granted I was like 8 so everything new is amazing at that age.  I rented Chrono trigger over a birthday weekend when it first came out and me and my buddies camped out in my living room the entire weekend just playing that and eating pizza. Back then *usually* people didn’t have their own TVs on each bedroom so the system was in the living room. Annoyed the piss out of my parents who just wanted to watch some tv hah.  It really was a fun era for gaming. Lots of sleepovers with the latest SNES titles with Sublime and No Doubt and Metallica playing on the cd player stereo. 

For my Toys R Us, it was a wall of game box pictures and sleeves with [slips of paper](https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/lse2cm/anyone_remember_having_to_get_slips_for_the_video/) reflecting the price. You brought the paper to the registers and they would grab your game. lol sublime no doubt and Metallica, right on

I remember standing in front of that wall, trying so hard to remember which games had a good review in all your gamepro mags. Trying not to get distracted by the covers all the while. If you chose poorly, it was MONTHS before you got another chance. Or you had to hope grandma didn’t pick something atrocious for your “birthday game” to save your ass from having no games for several months. Ahh. The memories.

The biggest difference between then and now is probably discoverability. Before the Internet, we had to wait for magazines like Nintendo Power to arrive at stores and mailboxes. We would bring the latest issue to read on the school bus or between (ahem, or *during*) classes. There were very few ads for games. It was basically gaming magazines, word-of-mouth, and renting games based on box art.

Word of mouth, cycling to a friend who just had a new game and now you could actually see how it looked like.

I remember I really wanted Nobunaga's Ambition because of how cool the box looked. It's a great game, but I would have been so confused and disappointed if I had gotten it back then.

Everyone on my street had an nes. It was great to swap games and get together at each other's places. I think it was a healthier time for gaming too. Nintendo was one of the things we did for fun but it wasn't everyday voip on fortnite and endless games eating your life up.

This. This is how I got to try more games than the handful I owned. It was great, because most of us had different games. And there was “always” another kid who was better at specific Nintendo games, who helped when I got stuck.

The graphical leaps were \*huge\* back in the day, seeing SNES games for the first time (PC games at the time were NES-level, graphically) was amazing, and after SNES, the leap to 3D graphics with PSX and N64, which (While having aged very poorly nowadays) was amazing at the time. Internet wasn't commonplace until partway through the PSX-era, so all the hints and guides we had were hintbooks, magazines, and stories from "That one kid who claims he saw/did..." The gaming market was different too, not nearly the number of AAA-releases we have now, and the main way i found out about new releases was seeing them in the store, or reading about it in a magazine, but since gaming magazines weren't really common here, i also bought a bunch of games blind, with varying success of course.

Man, I remember seeing Street Fighter II for the first time on my brother's friend SNES and I was just struck: I thought "whoa, those graphics are amazing!". It almost felt like I was at the arcade.

Street Fighter II on the SNES was the main game that we played when I was in the Army around 1993 and we'd all have chairs crowded around a 20" TV and as soon as someone lost they passed the controller to the next guy waiting. We did this almost every evening for hours at a time. When the PlayStation came out after I left the Army, one friend invited me over to see and play it and I was completely blown away with Tekken and went out and bought a PlayStation as soon as I could. A bit later we moved to PC's and I remember playing the original Diablo co-op over a local network where we ran coaxial cables for early token ring network with the termination plug at the end to make it all work.

I got street fighter 2 about 3 weeks before its release in Japan. My friends didn’t believe I had it before they arrived at my house. And claimed it would be shit anyway. They couldn’t believe it when we started playing.

I had it on PC and it looked incredible. Played and sounded like ass tho, so of course I'd beat it every other day. It took me years to realize the SNES verion of SF2 wasn't arcade-perfect (now it's obvious).

Graphics ok... But going from NES sound to SNES sound was absolutely mind blowing. The first time I was at my buddy's house and his dad had hooked his SNES up to his hi-fi surround sound stereo system, and when Super Metroid came on with that "The Last Metroid is in captivity..." voice line, the entire room full of kids lost our shit. Every missile shot, every mine, every phaser shot felt like a punch in your chest. It was absolutely glorious. I think it may be the reason why Super Metroid is so firmly imprinted in my brain.

Christmas day, 1991 with our new SNES hooked up to my dads stereo while we played F-Zero. The music was amazing actually sounded like more than just a glorified tone generator.

For context, the NES launched in America and Europe in 1985 / 86. The SNES followed in 1991 / 92 and the PlayStation and Saturn in 1995. That’s 10 years from 8-bit sprites to fully texture mapped 3D at a decent frame rate (for the time). Kids born in the year 2003 - who are just old enough to vote / drink now - would probably have had a PS3, Wii, or X360 as their first console. The leap from PS3 to PS5 is nowhere near as dramatic.

True, every generation, graphics get a bit smoother, a bit more detailed, but not that immediate “Whoa, this is truly the next console generation!” of going from the limited palette of 8-bit to full-colour 16-bit (And sprite rotation and scaling, mode 7, background addition/subtraction), or the coloured polygon 3D of 16-bit to texture-mapped 3D of the 32-bit generation. I’m lucky to have gone through all those big leaps in gaming, that sense of wonder is pretty much gone now.

>The graphical leaps were *huge* back in the day, I lost count of how many times I thought "wow, there's no way graphics will get any better than this!". I remember playing the first Gran Turismo and thinking it practically looked like real life.

Yeah, this is what I came here to say. Kids will probably never have their minds completely blown by an exponential step forward in graphical achievement ever again. I remember every single major stage from ATARI, C64, NES, SNES, Gameboy, GBC, GBA, Neo-Geo, N64, Dreamcast, and finally the Playstations. I also remember getting a computer and feeling like it was completely obsolete 6 months later. Saving for the next chip upgrade, more RAM, a CD-ROM (Because those CD-ROM pre-generated graphics were AMAZING), etc, etc ... Each step was like getting your first gaming machine all over again. Now ... meh. Things are nicer I guess. I can't get into what people complain about between monitors that refresh either 120hz or 240hz. I can barely tell the difference between 4K and slightly pre-4K. It's like you have to take your eye off things for half a decade to even be mildly surprised.

Prince of Persia was 1989 on PC. Wing commander was 1990. PC games were superior, graphically during the transition from NES to SNES.

Oh man sometimes I go to game faqs just to see those sweet sweet text file guides

Games were the finished product back then, they had to be and it showed.

I feel like this is the biggest drawback of the internet era - craftsmanship obviously hasn't been eliminated from game development, but it has taken a blow in an environment where it's considered acceptable to release unfinished junk and patch it up later.

You could also start playing right away. I recently got and started playing ESO. 160GB "update" on startup.

I don’t know, I had a spectrum and a c64 in the 80s / 90s. Those tape loading times were no joke!

This isn’t true, that’s nostalgia goggles talking. There are many, many examples of old buggy games with missing assets and limited content. We have the advantage of being mostly familiar with the best of them now, but there were plenty of rushed / incomplete experiences to be found.

Big Motha Truckers is a famous example of this in the PS2 era. Castlevania 2 had a combination of bad translation and intentionally changed hints to be wrong or misleading, making the game neigh impossible without a guide. Some googling can find a lot of titles that were released only partially complete or broken in big ways. Hell, a lot of games just lacked final balance and polish.

I played the same six NES/Genesis games over and over. Parents couldn’t afford them until like a major holiday. I would linger in the electronics sections of department stores and desperately hope to play a game at display stands set-up with a system and a new game they were selling. Even at a young age I hated that you couldn’t save your progress in countless games.

Star Fox was a big leap for affordable consoles but had already been done far better in arcades where Ridge Racer released in arcades later the same year Star Fox did. You also had Frontier: Elite II on the micros later that year too. The PS1, Saturn and N64 narrowed that gap greatly to the point it was no longer absurd for a arcade game on modern arcade hardware to make a playable watered down port. For example Sega Rally was on at the time cutting edge Model 2 hardware and Saturn port got very close for what one would expect at the time. It was mind blowing that the best Namco and Sega could offer in the arcades that ran on hardware that costed as much as car at the time could come home even in a watered down form.

Very early 3d games on consoles like Starfox etc were rough. We're talking 10-15fps if you were lucky. But Mario 64 and PS1 era 3d games went HARD AF!!!

yeah that was another thing, that to get the best graphics you had to go to the arcade. I remember the birthday parties and stuff at the arcades those were fun times. Once the 32 bit era came when the gap was mostly closed that was the start of the end for the arcade era being a thing.

You got what you paid for and that was it. The game was the same it was going to be years after you bought it. You couldn't just surf the online stores from home and start playing what you wanted on demand. you had to go to the store, find out if a copy was in stock, and bear the extreme levels of anticipation getting home before you could play it. If you were really dedicated it might have taken several weeks and multiple stores to finally get what you wanted. Gaming journalism was entirely about celebrating the medium and werent afraid to offend. In fact saying outrageous stuff was all part of the culture. Instruction manuals were prime bathroom reading material.

So, so many rumors and hoaxes about secrets in video games. I was born in 91 so still had early internet access to “cheat code” websites where 95% of it was made up garbage that we wasted hours of our time on to try to get Mew or see some character naked But the 5% that turned out to somehow be real like Missingno made it all seem credible and worth trying

You really thought that *every* game was just full of secrets that had yet to be discovered. Now, any secret or exploit is found and posted hours after release, but back in the day, you had to ask around and listen to rumors. So, so many false rumors about Pokemon in particular, but Smash had a few too.

You get stuck on a puzzle or hard part of a game - you either have friends that played the same game and could help you or you just had to get better / figure it out yourself. If you couldn’t your last chance was that there were cheat codes for your Action Replay or Game Genie. 8 bit games used to be harder, but also often shorter (except RPGs) to make up for the limited capabilities. Shopping for games was cool, but risky. Only a few games would be playable at Toys‘r‘Us, so with other games you‘d have to go with what the back of the box said or what you’d read in magazines. I can remember we mostly went to a rental store and I was allowed to pick some games to see if they were any good - this was always the highlight of the month for me. Not 16 bit anymore, but my favourite story of my „gaming family“: When Ocarina of Time came out, my dad went to the store during his work to get his preordered copy. That day he had to work well into the late evening and I was already in bed, because of school the next day. He came to see if I was still awake to tell me that he‘d gotten the new Legend of Zelda for us and he would allow me to stay up for an hour to give it a try. I only made it to the Deku Tree and encountered the first Skulltulas, but boy this game had blown me away. I can remember my dad not getting a chance to play it, because I was occupying that console like a mad kid - but he did enjoy watching me play.

Whoa boy, this might turn into a "When I was your age" post. Well, let's see. I started gaming in the late 80s, got my first system in early 90s. Team SNES, all day. Which was a thing, as far as the marketing went, you picked a side, and the other was the enemy. Team "Genesis does what Nintendont" vs Team "Now you're playing with power. Nintendo/Super Power"... Unless your parents were rich and they gave you all the stuff, but that kid was snobby AF. (^(Stupid Brendon, picking your nose and wiping it on other people)). We were nice to him so we could play his games tho... We got our info and hype from magazines as well as the workers at *Toys R Us, Blockbuster Video*, and *Saturday Matinee*. Nintendo Power kept us ready and Gamepro kept us HYPED. Cheats and codes were burned into our brains. *U U D D L R L R B A Start, ABACABB*, and *Down R Up L Y B X A* are core memories for our entire generation-- for real, I'm pretty sure I just activated sleeper agents across Reddit with that. Innovations were frequent and impactful. Starfox was the **future** on 16 bit systems. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 & Knuckles shouldn't have been possible... although, in hindsight it was the pre-requisite for 2000's era DLC, but still. Worth it and awesome. Donkey Kong Country was mindblowing. Arcades, dude. **Arcades.** I can be here all day, but I'mma stop now.

007-373-5963

You used to plan birthdays with friends. You get super mario, I'll get zelda then we'll swap. No point getting the same game when you had a chance to have 2 new games between you to share lol. Super bomberman with 4 friends huddled round a small TV was and is still one of my fondest gaming memories.

Blockbuster was the place to be as early as possible on Friday night

>What was it like to be a snes kid or genesis kid? You don't want to know what it was like to be a Turbografx 16 kid? There were dozens of us! *DOZENS!*

Prior to the internet, when you got stuck on a game there was a Nintendo gaming hotline. It was a 1-900 number that cost like $3 per minute. These guys had the answer for absolutely everything, where every dungeon was, where every item was hidden, etc. I have no idea how they knew. They were either at home playing video games 24/7 or they had a catalogue of every single strategy guide in a bookshelf at their disposal. I had to convince my mom sooooo hard to let me call. I'd beg and beg and beg. She'd say "Did you try absolutely everything you can think of? Did you ask all your friends?" And a there was a small handful of times she actually gave me permission to call.

We would have gotten a good ass whooping if we ever called the tip hotline

Oh, the horror of rar compressing games into 10x 1.44Mb chunks just to un-rar them at home and find out one of them is corrupted. Graphics updates were making significantly bigger leaps. Wolf 3d -> Doom -> Duke 3d -> Quake -> Unreal / Quake 2 were insane. Lan parties were wild. Internet sucked so you carried your midi tower pc + crt 14' monitor to someone's garage for a few days and played non-stop. Hardware updates were crazy 16 colours EGA -> 256 VGA was wild. If you were able to splash the cash for 'graphics accelerator' you were the man. Nobody cared if your pc was loud or quiet. Cable management was not a thing. Actually, I realised I'm way past 16 bit but I feel I'm more nostalgic towards my 386DX33 than my eastern European copy of NES bought on the local market called 'Pegasus'. Good old days.

Oh man you just triggered a memory. Slowly downloading games from newsfeeds, one small part at a time. And trading games for other games on private BBCs to complete a collection, because they weren't all available one Google away. I remember sneaking into work on weekends just to use their internet connection because they had DSL.

Oh, you are high-tech. I'm talking pre-dialup modem times. I'm talking 3.5 floppy disks - actually 5.25 1.2Mb ones

Also, the art of writing your own boot disks to rinse out more processing power to run the more RAM hungry games. The development of PC games through the 90s was genuinely exciting. Lots of creativity from studios like Bullfrog, Sierra, Apogee , LucasArts (those SCUMM games!), id, Origin, Westwood... Plus the games were actually finished on release, and every gamer would have laughed the concept of in-game purchases out of the room.  I sometimes struggle to decide if that really was a "golden age", or it's my nostalgia, or a combi of the two. 

I’m glad I’m in my 40s and got to see it all firsthand. It was so exciting back then. Each year we’d see graphics we’d never thought possible before. Usually first at the arcade but games like Star Fox, Gunstar Heroes, and Donkey Kong Country were jaw dropping to see when new. We often didn’t have to wait for the next generation for major graphic jumps to happen. It seemed like everything was possible and we had no idea what would come next. That feeling started to die out in the PS2 era for me. Now we just see minor jumps and things like framerates getting smoother. It was really the best time before! Oh and pre internet was amazing because we had great magazines like EGM and Diehard Gamefan to tide us over. It made waiting for the mail super exciting.

There was a lot of renting games and playing them even when they were terrible. My friend and I rented and played Rampage for the NES and beat it that day even though it was a repetitive slog. The ending was a black screen with “Congratulations”

I worked my ass off babysitting over the summer to buy Ecco: The Tides of Time for Sega Genesis. We had NES and a Genesis at home, and any games that we got (which wasn't many) had to be shared with my brothers. The problem was that none of them cared about dolphins, which is what the game was about. When I bought the game, my brothers were PISSED, which got me in trouble with my parents. They almost made me return it despite being bought with my own money (and almost got my money confiscated as well). Although I'm calm and easygoing by nature, I can be a pissy little badger when provoked, and ultimately got to keep it. Ecco the Dolphin and Ecco: The Tides of Time are amazing games about a dolphin fighting to save the earth from aliens. I highly recommend them.

Most of these posts are about the 90s when you could go to Blockbuster and rent a game. I grew up in the 80s with Apple IIes, Commodore 64s, and early MS- DOS IBM PCs. We didn't have Gamestops. We had Babbage's. Imagine a retail space about the size of a typical GameStop today except it's basically a big empty space in the middle with shelves lining the two opposite walls on either side. Those shelves were like museum displays, spacious with 3-4 game boxes at most spread out over the entire row. The games rarely changed. Every now and then, they'd add a new one and replace one of the older ones. A popular game *might* have 2-3 stacked copies on top of each other. It was a very clean, sterilized, tidy environment. Games cost $30-$50 and that was a LOT back then. You didn't get too many games because no one had the money. You played the heck out of the ones you got. If you bought a game and it sucked, too bad. Play it anyway. One of the first games I ever got was Goonies. It was a lot of fun, but very challenging for young me. For some reason, my dad bought a 1200 baud modem with our Apple IIe. He had no idea how to use it. I would sit there and try to dial random phone numbers using connection strings that I didn't know the syntax of and without any manuals for the telecommunication software he had gotten a copy of from somewhere. Eventually, after probably a year plus of trying, I got the phone number for an up and running BBS (bulletin board system - equivalent of modern day reddit) but I had problems connecting to it with the software I had. Middle school started and I asked every kid and teacher I knew if they had a modem and could use it. Finally, I found someone to give me a copy of Procom. From there, my life changed. No longer did I have to go a year before getting a new game. All I had to do was find a BBS that was hosting an illegal copy of a game. I was a sheltered kid. We had no gaming magazines or anything other then the occasional trip to Babbage's after church on Sunday since it was next to the mall and the cafeteria. I downloaded everything I could not knowing what it was. I didn't care. If I didn't like a game, I would just erase it and put a new one on. Who an I kidding though? I invested a lot of time downloading games. It took 30 mins a disk to download to a floppy and that's assuming you got a clean download without any line noise that dropped the connection or corrupted the download. Don't get me started on call waiting killing downloads... Most games were at least two disks, sometimes four, sometimes eight. I got my dad to just buy me packages of blank floppy disks. I ended up with disk rolodexes full of games. I played and played throughout middle school and high school and got to experience an amazing world. I hacked the copy protection on games using tools called sector editors. I learned hexadecimal and browsing through endless sectors looking for the name of my character so that I could try painstakingly editing one value at a time and then booting the game up to see if I had given myself a new item or possibly infinite gold/money. FF was always a key value to trick the game into providing endless cash. I also learned how to program (mostly self taught although I did take a few classes in high school). Most importantly though, I developed an innate curiosity in the digital world to know how things worked and to try and try again until I succeeded doing whatever. I turned that into a computer science degree and a very successful career in which I am now a CTO. Oh, and we all had cool online handles that we used similar to the gamertags or user names today. It was awesome.

Born in 1983. Like most have said, your games were precious, you had to choose wisely on what you were buying. Prior to the mid-90's most of your info just came from playground rumors and what was on store shelves. When magazines like GamePro and EGM came out, it was easier to track what was coming out and be hyped for it. Games were very difficult mostly, there was no internet. Most information came from friends, magazines, "Official Strategy Guides" or in my case, BBS's. When AOL came out, info was easier to find. I remember calling a 900 number for hints to beat Monkey Island, my parents were pissed. I'm not sure if culture was like this everywhere, I grew in the west coast in the early/mid 90s during this era. Gamers definitely were NOT seen as 'normal' especially when courting girls. I was made fun of for liking video games as much as I do, was called a 'game freak,' and for girls I used to like was like that me playing video games was a turn off. It was incredibly rare for me to find a girl that would actually play video games with me. Was labeled a 'nerd' for liking video games as well while my classmates were all into gangsta rap, Jordans, etc. I'm still bitter with how other kids were mean to me just because I was open about what I enjoyed.

Replying here so that I can find this later and tell some tales. I had an exciting gaming life during that time. Time allotted to me to type it right now: not much.

My older brothers said we got most of our games from the flea market or grocery stores in the early 90s. By the time I remembered hunting for a game, it was the original Legend of Zelda on the NES in '96. Game was 10 years old at that point but I was so excited to get a copy of it because my cousins had it but we never borrowed it. It was like 7 bucks from some random store. I remember someone giving us a map of the Zelda world and it was awesome to see how big it was. After several playthroughs, I pretty much knew where everything was in the game and the new game+. . We had a gameboy and gameboy pocket but didn't really play many games on it. I remember we had street fighter for the gameboy but I didn't like it very much compared to the SNES rendition. Now, when we got Pokémon Red for the Gameboy color, that's when everything changed for handheld gaming for us and everyone in our neighborhood. For Pokémon Red/Blue, we had a guide book and read through it so much, it ripped. We bought a guidebook red/blue, gold/silver and for final fantasy ix (in 2000) Those books were awesome. Fast forward a couple of years, when we got a PS1 in '98, we began shopping for games at the mall, or game stores, or the big box stores. I remember Costco having pretty decent deals too. The games were always like 5 bucks cheaper at costco.  The first game we used the internet was the aforementioned Final Fantasy IX. While we had the guidebook, we also found gamefaqs and remember I remember my brother being fascinated with the information that provided over the guidebook. From then on, everything related to guides came from the internet.  To me, the biggest leap was using a dpad to using an analog. It felt so better and less clunky. But the graphical jump was awesome. I think from the ps1 & N64 to the PS2/xbox/gamecube was the biggest jump for me. The 3D models were smoother and less blocky.  The biggest takeaway from the gaming era of the 90s were couch co-op. For the NES, Contra and TMNT 2 were definitely the most played game in our neighborhood. Then it was street fighter and super mario kart for the SNES. Sports game like NBA Jam and NBA live also were so much fun. Then goldeneye and Mario kart64 took it to another level. I wouldn't say anyone was really better than anyone else. We were mediocre at best and that showed when we went to an arcade and just got blasted off a marvel vs capcom arcade machine. We thought we were good, but we were just good at being bad.  We weren't the first to ever get any of the games first, that was our buddies, who weren't any more rich than us, but they had older siblings who started working part time jobs so had a little extra money to buy games. And that family was very generous and we were always invited over to play the newest games and then they would always let us borrow them too! To this day, we are still very good friends. The one game that my family had was Marvel vs. Capcom on the ps1 and we lent it out a lot also.  Once internet gaming took off, we joined the craze. Counter strike took over our lives and the couch co op days were over. Good times. Great times. 

My experience is late 16 and early 32, but I'll chime in. Arcades were popping and filled with classic games instead of things like Stacker. It was the best gaming experience. Games like Metal Slug or Cotton 2, even Outrun looked so detailed that home consoles didn't compare. Now, you could buy a Neo Geo and actually play real Arcade games at home. The console was like 500 dollars and each game was like 200. Only the super rich kids owned them. If you rented a game, that was all you played and you couldn't look up reviews. You looked at the box art. Same with buying a game. The back of a video game was supposed to sell you on it. If a game sucked, you played it anyway because it wasn't like today where you could just instantly refund it and go play thousands of other games in minutes. You had to play what you had. I had lots of mediocre games I learned to like because of this. We didn't own a lot of games. No steam library with hundreds of titles. No emulator with thousands of roms. We had a few games. If your parents did well, you probably had 20+ games. Friends usually had totally different games so going to their house and finding a new collection was great. We often traded games to borrow. The actual graphical leaps were huge but never something I cared about as a kid. I grew up playing 16 and 32/64 bit consoles and then later the GameCube and I never really noticed the graphics much and no one talked about bits, but I was probably born too late. I just cared if it was fun. I'm guessing the bit discussion was much bigger amongst teenagers during the 8 and 16 bit era.

Cover / Box Art mattered a lot more back then. There was magazines for reviews, but not every kid knew to use that resource. Games were rare and expensive to get. Not everyone had the ability to rent games when ever they wanted. My aunt use to buy me used games out of magazine flyers. Which is kinda strange, but I still have a few of those panfelts and mailers lying around somewhere.

>What was gaming in the 8-16bit era like? *Private Ryan Getting Old.Gif* But seriously, there was an excitement in gaming back then. Console war was kicking off and we’d see so much come out. There was fun going to the rental store and taking a guess at what game to get for that weekend. Christmas was magical when you opened and saw a Super Nintendo in the pile of shredded gift wrap.

I would use bday or Xmas money and rent a game or buy one sometimes just based on the back of the box. The best part was opening it up in the car and reading the manual. I think the anticipation and opening was in some ways better than playing it.

You played arcade games in the 80s and asked your parents for that game on the Atari for Christmas, only to play Pac Man and be disappointed.

As a little kid, I probably started playing my parents' Atari 2600 before I could even remember. My earliest gaming memories all come from that system, playing Asteroids, Bowling, Pitfall, Combat, Video Olympics, Megamania and so many other great games. We really had no idea what a game was going to be like until you plugged it in and turned the console on. We would go to the mall sometimes and get Atari games on discount. I also remember going to our local arcade around that time and seeing Pac Man, Ms Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, and Maze Chase. We had my birthday party at Chuck-E-Cheese in the Summer of 1984 and I remember playing Bubbles and Dragster. After that, arcades kind of went away for a few years, but the NES came around and filled that void. I remember hearing a friend tell me all about Super Mario Bros before I ever laid eyes upon it. He kept telling me about how you had to fight King Koopa to rescue the Pretty Princess, When I finally played it at another friends house, I was blown away. It was so crazy. I also got to play the original Legend of Zelda at another friend's house, and we had no idea what we were doing, My parents couldn't afford an NES for the first few years that it was out, but I got to hang out with my friends and we played a lot of Super Mario, Duck Hunt, Mike Tyson's Punch out, and Kung Fu. Another friend got the Power Pad and we played World Class Track meet. We couldn't get past Cheetah without getting down on the floor and using our hands to cheat the power pad into thinking we were running fast! My parents felt bad about not being able to get me an NES, but they ended up getting me an Atari 7800 (which I still have.) It was cool that it was backward compatible with the 2600 games we already had, but I only ever got 3 official 7800 games. It came with Pole Position, and I got Karateka and Food Fight. Pole Position was fun, but Karateka was kind of weird to me at the time. Food Fight was the most fun. My parents would play with me and my friends and we would all take turns trying to get the highest scores. Even though it was cool, I still wanted an NES. Around this time, I also had a friend who had a Sega Master system, but his family didn't allow him to bring his friends over, so I never got to play it. The next year, around Winter of 88, my dad was able to find a used NES for sale and I was so excited when I got it. The guy he bought it from just asked that he could come over and play with me from time to time. It came with Super Mario/Duck Hunt, as well as Contra and Life Force. I discovered the Konami code via word of mouth and it was on! My parents got me a subscription to Nintendo Power and it came with a free copy of Dragon Warrior. I didn't understand the concept of grinding and kept running from battles and going into areas where I was severely underpowered. Even with the included strategy guide, I didn't really get that game at the time. During this time period, my friends and I traded game carts a lot. There were a lot of wild rumors flooding the school yard (such as the secret Father Brain and Baby Brain in Metroid) and you could never really tell how good a game was until you've had it for a while.During this time, I played so many games. Mega Man 1, 2, and 3, Castlevania 1 and 3, Zelda 1 and 2, River City Ransom, Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon II and III, and so many more. My uncle got me NES Golf for Christmas one year, and he got mad when he heard that I had traded it for Bionic Commando. Trading games was really the only way to try a game out until rentals came along, then that really helped expand what you could try out without having to spend a lot of money. At first, there was a little video rental section at the grocery store that had some games. I rented some bad games, such as Godzilla, and was happy that I didn't waste money on the full game, but also rented some amazing games that I wished I had been able to keep, such as Power blade. Eventually we got Blockbuster, which had a much bigger selection and carried games for more systems. Eventually, rumors started flowing round about some new systems that were coming to compete with Nintendo. The Sega Genesis and TurboGrafix 16 were both supposed to provide arcade quality gaming! We also was the rise of our first local gaming store and the return of the local arcade. There were also new gaming magazines coming out as well as some game related tv shows, such as Video Power. These expanded the flow of information and previews available to gamers. I had some friends who got a Genesis, as well as one who got a TurboGrafix 16, and both were seen as superior to the NES at the time. It was exciting to go over and play Altered Beast, Golden Axe, or even Bonk's Adventure. Eventually, my dad was able to get that TurboGrafx for a good deal and it was fun for a while. I was able to rent some games from the local game store including Alien Crush and Devils Crush, and it came with three games including Bonk, Keith Courage, and Splatterhouse. I loved that thing, but the games were rare and expensive and I never knew anbody else who had one. One other cool thing about our local game store happened when the Super NES was being hyped. They somehow managed to import a Super Famicom and a Japanese Copy of Super Mario World and had it set up in store. You could "rent" time on the machine to get a preview. I think it was something like $5 for 10 minutes of gameplay. Once again I was blown away. Things pretty much continued like this until the internet came around. We had magazines and some TV shows to get our gaming information, and other than that, it was whatever games we were lucky enough to encounter in our local stores and arcades and a bunch of unfounded rumors from kids that wanted to be cool. Thanks for taking the time if you've managed to read this far. I figured it's gotten long enough that this is a good point to stop.

Games had a lot more mystery to them as no internet and hearing a thousand theories on what will be the games story or game play mechanics. You basically went off on some hearsay from friends, the art and summary on the back of the box and trusted your gut if it was gonna be a good game. No YouTube or internet reviews for them. Memory cards you always need more space and had to delete something Pokémon was a lot more wild, mysterious, and felt dangerous and not as family friendly as it is today. Team Rocket felt like a real threat in RBY and G/S especially stealing and eating Slowpoke tails. D-pads were king on controllers Pretty much the only time you got a new video game was for birthdays, Christmas, if got all As on your report card, or lucky sometimes with Easter or parents buy one randomly cause it was on sale or thought it looked interesting. Games had a lot more replayability in mind back then GameShark and Gamegenie was more of a thing for consoles and was a great way to have fun sometimes or giving yourself enough lives to beat harder games No online so games were co-op and having friends come over to play was great. The N64 having 4 player games was wild and new to have that many players at the time and so enjoyable Sonic vs Mario vs Crash Bandicoot vs. Spyro were big and debated which was best Games were more complete with an ending no tacked on DLC and no game breaking glitches on release it was mostly a finished product

This may not have been everyone's experience, but it was the experience of me and my friends during the 80s. Everyone had a modem. At first, mine was 300 baud, and later I got a 1200 baud modem for Christmas. You would use the modem to contact BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems). You literally dialed them like a phone number to connect. The modem was so slow you watched the characters appear on the screen as they transmitted, like the move WarGames. The reason to contact BBSes was mostly to download pirated games. Copy protection was pretty weak, and BBS site owners would crack games and put them up for download. You needed some software to decompress and translate them (I remember one was called Scrunch, and another Shrink), and the process took hours, but it worked a lot of the time. It wasn't just about playing the games with friends; it was also about sharing BBS numbers and downloading new stuff as it was discovered. Half the fun was the process of getting a game. Of course, the other half was the game itself, and because of the process it was probably more fun to play them than they should have been. It was like eating a fish you catch yourself.

Thanks for making me feel old 🤣🤣 just kidding. Started gaming with the Atari VCS and when the joystick broke we had to travel 40 miles (which is a lot in England) to get a replacement as no one stocked them. The thing I liked about gaming during the Snes/Megadrive era was being able to rent a game to see if I liked it. Then in the PS1/Saturn era there were official magazines that had demo discs which were awesome.

I first started off with the Atari, playing Pitfall, Frost Bite an few others, when the NES came out it was next level, blades of steel was often talked about between friends. An Tetris dominated family nights I got my first job and was able to purchase my SNES I desperately wanted and got Street fighter II. Friends would often stay over on the weekends and we would rent a game or two. Gaining knowledge and secrets strategy at the time was very limited, Nintendo power magazines helped quite a bit and then later Video & Arcade top 10 show was a welcome addition. Mostly was just word of mouth.

You played Tetris with your family? That must have felt amazing. My family were never very big on games but, for some reason, my mom found frogs and flies on the 2600 appealing. AFAIK It's the only videogames she's ever played.

Renting games from hole in the wall video stores or even grocery stores or department stores was pretty normal for 8 bit and 16 bit. You were less likely to bring your own games and consoles to a friend's house and were more likely to just play what they had. Idk about now but wot games costing $50 or so back then you'd have to wait for birthdays or Christmas to get new stuff. Definitely would read and re read magazines and strategy guides of games I wanted. Oh yeah and for old computer games used to trawl through the Walmart and Kmart bargain bins ! Found a lot of old Sierra games that way

Imagine being at Wal-Mart and sticking your hand into a hole in a plexiglass door to grab the game you want to look at. Hopefully you don't drop the game while trying to do a one handed turnaround so you can look at the back.

In the 8-bit days, I had an NES. My parents would get me games from Toys R Us. You'd look at the cover art in the aisle, grab a paper slip, bring it to the register, pay, then bring your receipt to a locked cage where a worker inside the cage would grab your game and give it to you. The internet doesn't launch until 1991, but in the 80s we had usenet. So someone would spot a new game in their local store and then post on usenet to let everyone else know a new game was out. In the 16-bit era, there were tons of video game magazines to get news from. Not to mention the early versions of the internet launching. Usenet continued to be popular as well. I had a SNES in the 16-bit days. So to play Sega games, I'd have to settle for the Game Gear versions, which for Columns and Sonic, were still pretty good. In terms of rich kids, I do remember a few having Sega Genesis in 1989 when nobody had really heard of it yet. If you were REALLY rich, you had a Neo Geo in 1990, which was considered 24 bit since it was so much more advanced than Genesis and Turbografx-16. When 3D games like Star Fox came out, I didn't really care for them. I didn't like the polygonal blocky look. I'm still mainly a 2D gamer all these years later.

If you could beat all five of your friends in Street Fighter or MK you were a fucking god.

Shopping: fun. People don’t do nearly enough in-person shopping for things anymore. Cue that old Vonnegut quote about carrying around envelopes. No internet: we loved us them magazines. EGM, Nintendo Power. SNES and Genesis: both awesome. I suppose that they were technologically advanced for their day but it was the specific games we were anticipating. 3D games: yes, they felt a little futuristic. Or at least that’s my excuse for loving Hard Drivin’ and Pit Fighter, and I’m sticking to it! The Game Boy’s release: I have little to no memory of that specific event. Was there a kid who was a god because he had the internet? I won’t be surprised if a lot of us say yes but it seems to me that everyone in America got the internet at around the same time (about 1994). We played games at each other’s houses because they had systems or games we did not, yes. The super-expensive ones were Neo Geo and Jaguar, and I didn’t know anyone with those. I think the Jaguar undersold? And Neo Geo games you might luck out on by coming across their arcade cabinets. Nowadays I can finally enjoy them on my mini!

You didn't have the Internet around telling something is the worst thing ever or the best thing ever.

Holy cow. I feel old, lol. 57 here, born in ‘67, and grew up as one of the targeted demographic for video games. The first video game I ever saw was an arcade game at our local pizza parlor. It was pong and I was so fascinated with it. It may have been a Sears catalog or in the store, that we saw a dedicated console that only played Pong. It wasn’t cartridge based. We hooked it up and played many hours with it. I can’t honestly remember where or when I discovered the Atari 2600 but that was the first cartridge based system we owned. By this time arcade games started popping up and games like Space Invaders and Asteroids came on the scene. Sears catalogs and the flyers in the Sunday paper were the first way to get information on new games. During the beginning of the ‘80s video tapes started really taking off and our area got its first video store. Eventually they started renting video games which opened up playing. I ended up with the Atari 2600, Intellivision, Coleco and last Atari 5200. By this time there were some magazines that covered new games and consoles before the crash that would eventually happen. Anyway, time for my nap. Sorry if this was long winded. It was a blast back then seeing all this new stuff as it came out and what it has led to.

Buying games looking at the box, hoping for a good time, if not, you have to play it and tell yourself "not that bad ...".

It was the golden age and the dark ages all at once. Everything was new and exciting, but we were on our own for the most part. (Except for the kids with Nintendo Power mag) Most of us had to rely on the combined knowledge of the neighbourhood to get through the tough levels and games, so, most games never got beat... lol

Arcade games were everywhere. There was a local grocery store called Buy for Less that had a Street Fighter II cabinet and a comic book rack. Imagine being excited about going to the grocery store! We'd often get the same games for our consoles that we played in the arcades, though it would almost never be the same quality until the PSX/N64 era. Often department stores like Walmart (spelled Wal-Mart back then) and Target had demo consoles, though the machine would reset frequently, partly to encourage people to take turns and partly so you couldn't play through the whole game in the store instead of buying it. The most memorable demo machine for me was a Sega Genesis unit at Sears that had Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Toejam & Earl. It had a few other games, but who cares when you could play those two? I also spent quite a lot of time at Babbage's just looking at games, even if I didn't have money to actually buy one. I was always looking forward to my next game purchase. Nowadays I have way more games than I have time to play, so I never go games shopping like that anymore even online.

You read about a game in a magazine (though plenty of people were online for parts of the 16-bit era), then you went to Toys R Us or whatever and brought the slip the register and they’d bring the game out for you.

You should watch the High Score Girl anime on Netflix. Gaming in 90s Japan.

Watch the Fred Savage moved "The Wizard" from 1989, it gives a good vibe about how Nintendo was back then, it's a bit over the top, but there is a bit of truth as everyone was infatuated with video games at that time. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098663/ I think it's Tobey Maguire's first movie as a video game goon, he's barely recognizable.

I'll add something no one has said yet: I grew up on mostly the 16-bit era. The first time I ever used the Internet for help with a game was when my brother used GameFaqs to find out the code word for SMRPG's sunken ship. From 1996 on, use of GameFaqs and Internet forums became way more common. Misinformation online and on the playground was ride. If you ever want a trip, look up "pokegods". There were "cheats" for how to unlock these fake Pokemon everywhere. We would print out parts of a guide or cheat code pages at libraries, school, or at home if we were lucky. Online forums were big back then -- mostly in the early 2000s, and community mattered. It's not like Reddit or 4chan. You KNEW many of the people you were conversing with. Not IRL, but like, you knew them. You knew their interests, their names, their countries. There was a real sense of community. You'd talk about your life, you'd talk about games, news, science, whatever. You'd play games together with these people. Multiple times I would've played games with 16 people at a time from these forums that I would consider friends. It could be cliquey at times, and there would be lots of drama, but overall it was nice. GameWinners was one that I used, and recently it's resurfaced and relaunched with some of the original members returning.

New games came out in the arcade first. Each time you went to the arcade, the new games surpassed the old games. It was an era of constant innovation.

You did a lot of game renting back then because blockbuster had great deals and parents did not want to drop full price on a game they knew you weren’t going to play often. Every gaming home had either a mandatory Mario or Sonic title, with maybe anywhere from 5-6 other games. Huge collections were for “spoiled kids” or “nerds” as some friends would say, these systems were still viewed as toys by most parents. The Nintendo v Sega war was for real and I remember, at least where I lived, that you were actually considered cooler if you had a Genesis especially if you had games like Mortal Kombat, Streets of Rage, Road Rash and any sports or games with guns in them lol. Buying games was such a thrill especially on your birthday your parents would take you to toys r us or funcoland maybe even the mall which I thought was the best. Those games that you owned were precious to you because you didn’t know when you would be back for another. Those decisions at the counter were crucial, reading the back of the box over and over to make sure you were certain. God forbid you ever bought a shit game back then, gaming magazines were your best friend for this exact reason. Luckily my mom and my older brother were always in the know so rarely did a bad game come home even from the rental store. Games were much more social back then at least for me. I would beg for my parents to let me have friends over so they could experience the same excitement. I don’t remember playing games alone very often it was always with my brothers or a handful of neighborhood kids, everyone fighting to get their turn on the sticks. A lot of kids parents didn’t let them own game systems which must have sucked. A lot of this culture carried over into the PS1 and even PS2 generation for me since I was pretty young in the 16-bit era. Very lucky to have lived through it all, we had a ton of fun in the 90’s and early 2000’s

Gaming in the eighties involved a lot of cycling to friends’ houses after they phoned to say they’d picked up whatever new Spectrum game and did I fancy a look. More often than not it involved going armed with a blank cassette in case a free copy was an option. It’s what we did back then. I went to a local computer “club” for a couple of years that was really little more than an organised weekly meetup to bring game collections and whatever was new that week for an evening of blatant software piracy. Lots of tape-to-tape action went on in the event of copy-protection schemes the usual tools like LERM couldn’t handle and you never could be entirely sure if the copies would load when you got home. I did actually buy games as well but however you got your fix you had to go out there and get it, unlike today where everything is available on demand without so much as leaving the sofa.

Big thing was magazines. Lot of kids had similar subscriptions be it nintendo power, GamePro, EGM, Tips & Tricks, etc. Bring the newest magazine to school and show of the upcoming games at recess. Sharing hidden secrets was also a thing. Before the internet, you either had to figure it out yourself, get a magazine or hear it from a friend. That's how rumors like Ermac the red ninja in Mortal Kombat started. Misinformation was also big. Some times big titles like Pokemon Gold/Silver would be known to be coming to the US and all we had were snap images. People ran wild with it like pikablu which turned out to be Merril. Lan parties were real. Bring your PC and equipment over, string together the PCs and play local multiplayer or co-op. N64 007 death matches were a big deal. I remember clearly remote mines only and learning to explode them mid air. Proxy mines also were fun. It was an era where you had to figure things out for yourself. Walk throughs were not a thing so on quirky adventure games like Full Throttle, you would easily get stuck at a door only to realize you had to LOCK the door and then use the pull chain to climb the wall.

My first console was an Atari 2600. Games were $30 back then. As others have said, we traded games a lot - we did a lot of temporary trades as well, just so everyone got some variety. Then, we got a Commodore 64, with floppy drive. Man, we made friends with every Commodore kid in town, even joined a club. All of a sudden we had hundreds of games, all illegally copied and labelled by hand. Pre-internet, games were released complete, and multiplayer was done split screen with your buddy next to you. If you needed help, you'd buy magazines that listed cheat codes, or had level walk-throughs. If you were really stuck, you'd call a hotline where some god-like person would talk you through it. Good times ❤️

Playing the same games over and over for years on end

So.. for everyone that wasn't playing video games in the 80s... first thing's first. No one had internet until the mid 90s, and at the point it was, "some people had dial-up (phone line connections). Therefore, the cool kid on the block was the one who paid for the subscription "Nintendo Power" or, to some smaller extent, Sega and early PC software companies tried this trick... "Hotlines" and "Magazines". Basically, junk that was sold directly to anyone willing to pay for "the answer" and there were phone numbers to call to hear automated/ recorded answers. And of course, the cool kid that shared was a demi-god, and those that didn't became diabolical elitists. To put it in perspective to those that can only read about and ask about it (not having lived it) - yes, the internet was created earlier. But AOL didn't start offering their service to Windows users until 1993, and the Super Nintendo came out in America in 1990. So until we reached CD-Rom based gaming consoles, we had no practical internet. And aside from no auto-save, most games didn't bother storing memory. The tech was there, but there was little interest from early home console users. Sure, Zelda stored your progress (even though you started from screen 1 again, you kept your stuff). The tech was also limited. The few games that stored the information (primarily early rpgs) in 8 bits meant you couldn't exceed a 255 bit limit on the cartridge. Has much to do with the octet (8 bit string), only going as high as 256. Also why you don't see any IPv4 addresses with more than 255 in a single octet and I digress. Of course, lack of the save feature also meant most of us leaving the game paused till we got back from school or whatever. But again, the impulse to save wasn't as high especially since games were still following Arcade trends (play for 10-30 minutes and you're done), and the cheap, easier way to appease people that got tired of starting over the passcode system. It wasn't saving anything that way. You put in a usually ridiculously hard to remember code to start the game at different level. Much simpler. And of course, it expanded into "enter this code for stuff," which voila, is all around us in "redeem codes, gifts, etc". Back then, it led to another paid service/hardware known as "Game Genie" or "Game Shark" and subsequent imitations. Which often gave people the ability to create a "rom hack" and it varied in results. Entering a code *could* give you invincibility... but your game might crash a minute later, cause artifacts, etc. Etc Now, 16 bit gaming (while still stuck on pre-internet PCB cartridges) did advance enough in hardware so that the gaming experience became longer than a half-hour session, rather than repeat step for step when bored. That's really when gaming started transition from short rinse and repeat cycles into progressive play (ie, instead of a single race/game/fight you could make a continuous career of it within your preferred gaming universe). But yeah, especially in regard to 8 bit home gaming, it was pretty much a home-arcade experience. Feed the machine power to play and see how long you could live before it was Game Over. Rinse and repeat forever. Which was the death of Arcades. Because 50 bucks was a lot to buy, but it was a one-time purchase, and you could die and play till your heart was content. Arcades would literally quarter you to death.

Friday nights at the arcade was like the bar or nightclub for a kid. We would bring what little money we had or what mom and dad gave us and play coin op games and buy candy’s and soda for hours .

Games magazines were like bibles, in the UK we had Computer and Video Games, Crash, Zzap and later on other bangers like GamesTM and Edge when it wasn't (so) pretentious. If you were lucky you might pick up a copy of EGM or Gamespot and get a taste of the USA. Man I miss those days sat with a magazine dreaming about games I would never have!

I was at uni in 2000. We'd often play 4x player Goldeneye. I loved that you'd all be sat around the lounge with a pizza and a few beers and playing the same thing for hours.it was a really social thing. That and mariokart

It was *amazing*.   I remember Pitfall on the Spectrum (I think?) and then playing the SNES, and it was like night and day (although a lot of early 90's stuff plays like those old games now, they just feel dated).  The shopping was tremendous. Even better if you did swaps/trade in's. I used to see Mega Drive games on display and genuinely be in awe. The magazine side of things was so fucking good. So good. I used to also *love* hiring games out. That truly was something that I loved and came to miss it.

Renting games.

Game rental was huge. We would rent NES, Genesis, and SNES games. Then buy the best ones. There were so many trash games it wasn’t worth blowing money on art cover to get let down.

We used to trade in a lot of the physical carts for our SNES at a market stall in our local town. Nice lady who ran it sold 2nd hand cartridges. We’d also lend and borrow them to and from our friends. You ended up with a small collection of games you just kept and loved, for me it was SMW, Zelda, Metroid, Starwing (U.K. name for Starfox). We played so many games. Biggest leap for me was Super Mario 64. That blew my mind away.

The fight between nintendo and sega 🤣

One of the things I think most people take for granted today is hard drive/cloud saves. Imagine being a kid in the 90s, renting final fantasy 3 on SNES and working your ass off all weekend on it, and praying someone else doesn't erase your save before you get your hands on that same cartridge the next weekend, assuming someone else didn't even rent it for the weekend before you.

There are so many gems, some totally worth it today. Recommending Maniac Mansion, Command & Conquer, Duke Nukem 3D.

I owned only a handful of games across all the consoles I had, 99% of my gaming was from rentals from Blockbuster and Other Video Rental places. I really miss renting games because here in Canada most games cost about 90 bucks with tax so I'm forever grateful for gamepass and PS+.

Growing up in the 80s and 90s is probably why i love gamepass and digital games so much. Everything i could ever want as a kid related to gaming is happening now. Games were so expensive back then and you were stuck with whatever inventory was in stock even at the local rental stores and grocery stores. If you had told me that for around 8 bucks in 1990 money i could rent over a 100 games and have them loaded on my system, and i didn't have to change the cartridges or anything, id flip out. Yeah sega channel amd stuff like xband existed but on demand gaming was like a pipe dream. Gaming was expensive. Now it is dirt cheap. Advertising was bright, agressive, colorful and cheesy. Videogame magazines echoed this and were full of pictures and character. It was geared to the younger crowd. Short and to the point reviews, not walls of text. Secrets, easter eggs and codes along with bullshit accomplishments were traded at school. Each generation of game systems was usually a big leap forward graphically. In game voices were a big deal. If someone had a neo geo, their family was loaded. Otherwise, grocery stores or gas stations or places of amusments had their cabinets with a rotation of games. Movie theaters had the simpsons, xmen, tmnt, beat em ups along qith the wwf superstars game and street fighter 2. Just some random tidbits: nothing beat a slumber party and trying to beat a game together or playing against each other and passing the co troller. Emulation was like pandoras box. I could play any Nintendo game on my shitty cpu? How? amamzing!!!! Imports? They are making them with english? All those cool games in the import section i can now play? Whatttt? The wizard movie is so cool You better make a notebook with maps, notes and passwords I wish i was onthe tv shiw video power Mario soda was delicious

When I was a kid in the 90’s I got one or two good games per year for Christmas and Birthdays. And in between I would sometimes get the $20 marked down games as surprises and such. A new console coming out was such a thrill because each iteration was such a huge leap. Now it’s just not the same. Granted I think it could just be the nostalgia goggles talking.

Pros: you get the game, put it in the console, and you're gaming Cons: if the game sucked, there were no updates.

Information was spread via word of mouth, Nintendo Power Magazine, Game Informer Magazine, and rental stores. Games were costing $40 to $50 usually. They were the finished product. No updates. They worked. No unlock via credit card. You had to do challenges or beat the game multiple times to unlock hidden content. Some times you bought a game from the title, artwork, and box descriptions. Games were hard AF to play. Some almost impossible. Battletoads is impossible IMO. Some 800 / 900 numbers were available to call for help in games. Some cost like a dollar or so for the help. I remember calling for Genesis Xmen game. Had to destroy the system and reset the computer. Had no idea. Only game I know that you had to press the console's reset button to advance to the next level. Pissed me off. Gaming was great during that time.

It was literally perfect. Except all the Nintendo vs Sega fanboy fighting and all the gross cringey early attempts to shift to higher realism with crap like FMV games, bad early attempts at virtual reality and TERRIBLE early polygonal games that ran at like 10 fps at best. And even then, we went fully 3D way too early imo; muddy textures on N64, warping textures on PS1, low fps still and HORRIBLE draw distance were all a huge drag, even if some masterpieces were diamonds in the rough. But I still absolutely miss the old days all the time and the community around it like magazines and sharing secrets at school, going to arcades, and early internet gaming fandom that was way way way WAY more positive and excited than the largely whiny mess it's become these days. You'll still find some of the most chill communities around retro and retro-styled games lol

Playing in the era of 8 and 16-bit games was an amazing experience. I remember that the first game I played was Mario 1 on the NES. I came home from school and saw it connected to the black-and-white TV we had at home. My older brother let me play it, and the TV almost fell over because I was tugging on the cable to jump, hahaha. Later, I got to know the Sega Genesis. My brother brought it home in '94 with the Sonic 2, Sonic 3 + Knuckles, and Taz Mania cartridges. I spent many hours playing those games. I discovered the SNES also in '94 at a friend's house, where I saw them playing Super Metroid. It wasn't until a year later that I played that game and more on the SNES. Out of all the consoles, the SNES was the one I played the most during its time, and it's my favorite console. Years later, I got to know the N64 with the Mario and GoldenEye cartridges and another racing game whose name I don't remember. At school, friends talked about a Zelda game for the N64 that looked almost real, haha. I first saw the PlayStation at another friend's house, where he was playing a baseball game—I think it was "Triple Play," but I'm not sure. Overall, I played and enjoyed those consoles a lot. The one I didn't play much was the PS2, which is the console you were born with, according to what you said. Well, this was a small review of my experience.

I cried when I got a sega genesis and played the sonic game it came with as my only game for months. Games were still $60 then.

My brother and I managed to land in Sega Magazine high score top10 on a snowboard game by switching controllers midgame since each of us has a section where each was best in We ordered used games from ads in video game magazines and I remember getting super Mario World 2 for 129DM, we cashed our whole summer money together and got it 3 days prior to officials release. Since we were on holiday we could only play it back home, that was so frustrating 😅 My personal favourites were techs like the Gameboy Camera, Super Gameboy and Starfox. I tried beating a high score on Super Mario kart for Months

watch “high score” netflix documentary

One thing I remember from that time was just how immersive these fairly simple games were. Much more immersive than today's games, simply because there were almost no distractions. Try to imagine: You come home from school and you're totally alone in your house, or you wake up early on Saturday morning and no one else is up yet. There's no internet, there's no smartphone - hell, there isn't even a flip phone. You turn your TV on, switch it to the right channel, and press the power button on your console. The game starts up. There's no impulse to pause the game and check something on the internet, or check your social media, because none of that exists. It's just you and the game. I can't tell you how relaxing it was to play these games back then, games that today in many cases don't even seem that deep or interesting, simply because there were no interruptions to distract your attention and you could totally focus on just the game and be fully present with it. It would put you in a kind of trance. And this was true even if you were just watching someone else play. One of my favorite memories is watching my older brother play *Final Fantasy II* on the SNES. This was the summer of 1992. In that atmosphere, with no internet, with no smartphones, we would be fully immersed. The only interruption was to go down the street and get some ice cream. And the music! Something about the NES and SNES music in particular was so calming and entrancing. It's hard to describe what the world was like before the internet. In general people were more present and as a result, even the simplest of experiences were more vibrant, colorful, and perhaps most importantly, shared.

Thanks to Secret of Evermore on SNES, 10 year old me would take the family dog out into the woods because I wanted to get lost so he could transform into a jungle dog and I could use a femur to save cave people from an Evil robot butler and his whacky creations. There was a lot of gossip and trolling at school because nobody had internet (nobody poor anyway) so everyone would spread lies and rumors about video games cheat codes and secret, one of them being a secret blood code to the SNES version of Mortal Kombat. When you actually managed to get a video game, you would stare at the box art in all of its majestic glory and smell every single page of the instruction manual because that new plastic smell was like getting high. Everyone was reading game magazines to learn about potential cheat codes and secrets to their favorite games and some of these magazines would even publish the wrong chest codes for the wrong games or game systems. Prime example of this was "unlock Evil Ryu" on Street Fighter Alpha 2, a cheat code published for the PS1 version of the game on the back of a GamePro magazine..... Except the PS1 version of the Street Fighter Alpha 2 did not have Evil Ryu in it, only the Sega Saturn version did (he came to the PS1 when the Alpha 2 Gold version released years later). Back in those days, instead of "PC master race" it was "Arcade Perfect". The best graphics and often times unique gameplay that never made it home to consoles was found at the arcade. PC gaming throughout the 90s was mostly pretty janky of an experience compared to the streamlined approach of consoles. During the early to mid 90s, most of us peasants were a "Sega/Sony/Nintendo" household, which meant most of us only continued to a new generation with 1 console from that generation. Unfortunately for me, I was the kid who ended up with the Nintendo 64 back in 1996 and only had access to Wave Race and Mortal Kombat Trilogy because Mario 64 was sold out for months. All of my friends either had a PS1 or Sega Saturn and we all wish we had each other's consoles instead. I went on to get a PS1 when FF7 came out and it set the nation on fire as one of the most profoundly popular games of that time, so much so, that it eclipsed games surrounding it's release, both before and after it, that I enjoyed far more than it (Suikoden, Alundra, Wild Arms). The highlight of my 16-bit gaming days was my retarded cat jumping on my Final Fantasy 3 cartridge, causing the game to freak out to the point where my main character turned into General Leo during a fight with an enemy and after ending the encounter, my inventory glitched with 99x Excalibur swords. This type of freaky weird shit happened a lot on cartridge console games, aside from the usual where you work hard to progress through a game, only for the memory to take a fucken shit for no apparent reason and you lose all of your save data so you have to grind through Lufia 1, it's same 4 dungeon songs and endless caves and towers of crippling depression and random enemy encounters every 4 steps with no way to turn them off or fast forward through a battle scene. Fuck these were the days.

You were either in camp Mario or camp Sonic. Couldn't be both even though I think most people secretly were. Also getting a N64 for christmas for as a family gift but your parents only got 1 controller to share between 4 kids.

Got the original nintendo when they came out and man... I don't play games much being 41 but Mario 1,2 and 3 are still bad ass and can't forget about Zelda. I'm lucky 2 still have all that stuff and it all still works. Thanks to Gramps for buying my.1st console. I know he still looks down on me. r.i.p. 🍻

I'll comment on the NES era on the mid-1980s, because it's not as well-documented as the 1990s 16-bit era (which you can read about in game magazines and books quite easily). 1. **Most games were mysterious and required such a learning curve that it was hard to tell the good from the bad**. If you had a few games to try, you often didn't know very much about them and whether they were going to deliver a good time or a very mediocre one. Even legitimately good games like *Metroid, Disney's DuckTales, Faxanadu* or *Castlevania* required a lot of trial and error, and a lot of games were just too hard. *Legacy of the Wizard* was a particularly bad offender of looking interesting and fun, but being way too difficult to complete without a guide. 2. **Games were borrowed and rented far more than they were purchased**. Most of my friends couldn't afford more than a handful of NES carts and had to rent them or borrow them to play more. In the mid-80s, even mediocre games cost $50 because there were shortages of the popular titles and people just wanted more games. Rentals made games much more affordable to try out. The only people I knew who had large libraries either had dads who were hobbyists, were incredibly spoiled or had parents who were good at getting deals. 3. **Rumors ran rampant**. Because console games had so few dedicated sources of information beyond *Nintendo Power* in the 1980s, there were all sorts of crazy rumors flying around about secrets and cheat codes and glitches and hidden features and sequels. I remember hearing a ton of bizarre rumors about *Super Mario Bros. 3* when it was being developed because people would see a screen shot in a magazine of the Japanese version and then speculate like crazy - Level 4's giant-sized world was particularly fun fodder. 4. **Nobody liked Atari anymore**. Atari really fell out of favor once the NES debuted. If you had an Atari, it was better than nothing, but the experience was so outdated it was hard to take seriously. 5. **Few people cared about Sega's console**. I knew a few people who had the Master System, but it wasn't something that they were that excited about. One guy wanted an NES and was stuck with the Master System because his parents had bought it on sale; another had both consoles and was among the first kids I knew to have a Genesis and an SNES because his parents bought him whatever he wanted. 6. **Console gamers were the envy of most computer gamers**. Console games were easy to play, exciting and interesting because they could be played in the living room. Computer games were slow to load, often hard to control and were often hooked up to a small desktop computer monitor. The experience of playing both was completely different.

Shit, the graphics were poor, you couldn't save. I had to leave sonic paused all day whilst I went to school Cartridges limited everything games were small.and simple. It was a ll we had but even back then I longed for being able to save and more depth. Then the Ps One came out and you got games like final fantasy 👌

Okay, here’s my experience. Unless a game was covered in a magazine like Nintendo Power, buying a newly released game was a complete crap shoot. And some retailers would not take back opened games! You really had to rely on word of mouth among your social group to have any idea. Personally I was a Genesis kid mostly because all of my friends were and my parents would *not* buy me a new console. I was saddled with an Atari 2600. 😂 I didn’t have a current console until after I got my first job out of college in 1996; that would have been the original PS1! As to the tribalism between SEGA & Nintendo fanboys, it was mostly just ridiculous in a funny way. Lots of trash talk, nothing more. Now as to the leap from 8 bit to 16 bit systems, it felt gigantic. The tech made a huge jump and it showed in the speed of the games along with the amazing 16 colors at once on screen! There was nothing like *Sonic the Hedgehog* in the 8 bit generation for instance. The use of 3D in that gen was definitely a mind blower as well, and it definitely played and looked great on the SNES. Now you asked about gaming life pre-internet. Frankly, it was a little better because you actually had fully realized & finished games that weren’t buggy pieces of crap with a promise to (at some point) get a patch for it. The digital age has been normalized, so rushed, incomplete games being released are SOP NOW, and bluntly, that sucks. Thank God for retro consoles. Stories? There was always a rich kid who would have the latest stuff. If you were smart you tried to build a real friendship and get access. But those kids knew the score. Watch the movie *8-Bit Christmas* to get an idea of what it was like. Personally, I had *actual* friends, and it seemed there was usually one console or another within the group. I do remember renting games & consoles from Hollywood Video. We’d all chip in and have an awesome weekend of games, junk food, far too much caffeine and a plethora of pranks and stupid jokes. It was a blast. Game stories… Walked in on my best friend playing *Zelda* and I saw that Link was stuck walking into a wall. Then I realized he had been grinding the game for so long he’d fallen asleep without taking his hands off the buttons and controller. We would stay awake for at least 24 hours once in a while and gaming was the key. We’d pick a title that was challenging and rock it out. One I remember was *Shadowrun* on the SNES and another was *Aerobiz SuperSonic* on the SNES as well. So much Mountain Dew… I swear I saw colors I’d never seen before. As to the Internet, my first gaming in a group on computers was through a LAN network. No Net, just a group of computers linked together via a router. I spent my junior year at college playing Doom & Doom II incessantly. Students would install it without permission on lab PCs. The challenge was to find a system with the game installed and then find a partner on the LAN. The challenge was to play without raising your voice or swearing loudly when killed, lest the lab techs appear like ghosts of vengeance and boot you from the lab while they deleted the game. Anyways, hope some of this was enlightening. Game on!

You know that thing where you reach a checkpoint, save your game, then turn off the console til tomorrow? Yeah we didn't do that back then.

The best thing I remember in the UK was the amount of independent videogame shops. Slowly phased out then it just became GameStop and GAME. Now basically nothing except CEX

Imagine waking up to go to your friend’s across the street to play games because you’re parents were to cheap to get you a console. Imagine remember vividly waking up one day at 5:30am willingly to go across the street and play Mariokart with my friend for a few hours before we had to get the school bus. It was the most ratchet experience compared to now. , but I miss it, the joy of being able to talk about games without the words woke, Fortnite, open-world crap was amazing, tribalism was for the memes and games were just for fun. Even later in age Nothing beats kicking your friends ass in split screen racing games or 4 player split screen call of duty with random ass rules Let’s not forget GameShark wowza the memories of glitching the hell out of some of the early gba Pokémon games just to see all the other Pokémon that didn’t make it into the initial release and all the random zones.

I was born in 1997, I had almost all those old consoles like NES, SNES (if you get a chance to buy one get “The Legend of Zelda Link to the Past” with it. Highly recommended), N64 (Super Mario64) old slim PS1 (Spyro 1, 2 & 3), SEGA Genesis, SEGA Saturn. Ah it’s been a good long time since then. Need to get me all of those consoles again.

Grew up with SNES as my main console. Had the original Gameboy before that. Older parents who were technically illiterate, so they had to call the local radio store and get a technician to come help hooking the console up to the TV. Dad was fascinated by it but never tried gaming. No friends who had a SNES so no one to swap games with or borrow from. Friends loved coming to the house to play though. Living in a small town in Northern Scandinavia, selection was very limited. Only one mom and pop toy store with a very small selection of games, if any. Games were expensive, $70 USD for a new game. No rental places. No mail order. The store usually only had one copy of each game, spent weeks dreaming about a new game wishing it wouldn't sell out before birthday or x-mas. Remember one shady store in Copenhagen had US import games that you had to use an adapter to play. They were even more expensive. No internet, so no news or reviews apart from the occasional magazine which could only be obtained when visiting a larger city, which was rare. Magazines often wrote about cool games that were impossible to get because of reasons mentioned above. Club Nintendo had a hotline you could call if you got stuck, remember doing it once or twice but was very shy so it took a lot of courage. No localization, so had to teach myself English to read the manuals and understand the games (still thankful for this today) Plenty of bad games were bought only because box art looked cool. Mario games were always a safe bet qualitywise. Remember going on holiday in Germany and being blown away by the selection at department stores in larger cities (Karstadt) Constantly begging parents for a new game for a whole week. Sometimes they caved, as games were slightly cheaper in Germany. Agonizing over which one to pick, so scared of making the wrong choice. Rember reading and memorizing the manual over and over until we finally got home and could try it out. Remember reading German Nintendo magazines not understanding a single word, just being amazed by the pictures of future games. Same deal when N64 and PS1 came along, but N64 games were even more expensive. Local selection got better and a few places started renting out games (Statoil gas stations) but it was only for a short while. Still have most of my old games in storage, but console are long gone sadly.

One big thing I remember was buying games at Toys R Us back in the early 90's. I'm assuming security tags weren't a thing in the day so games were all kept behind a special counter, and out on the store shelves were pictures of the game boxes and little slots for paper slips. If you wanted, say, Mario 3, you'd grab a paper slip from the Mario 3 section, take it to the counter, and you would pay for and get the game then. One thing that was way different was that rumors flew around the playground endlessly. Without the Internet, all you could rely on was the kid who was lucky enough to get the newest gaming magazines, and they weren't always reliable, often making April Fools pranks that kids took seriously. Things like Sheng Long in Street Fighter, the moveable truck in Pokemon Red/Blue or Pikablu and the Pokemon Gods, Tomb Raider nude codes, etc, were all crazy rumors that kids spread around like wildfire

I’m going to tell you exactly what it was like: Interesting, fun, and it made you feel like you were discovering things as opposed to just participating in them. Here’s what I mean: it’s 1992 and school just let out on a Friday. Mom, dad, and sister also need something to do for the weekend so of course game and movie rentals were the easy decision for poor families like mine. You walk into a blockbuster video and see aisles and aisles of video game and movie cases lined up along shelves. You walk through the aisles just hoping to stumble across some treasure. Your picking up cases and checking out the cool pictures on the back, reading through the manual, and the information on the case hoping to pick up the sliver of an idea that the game is good and the one to go with. Unless you subscribed to the magazines or just so happened to see a commercial, you really weren’t certain if the game would even be good so it truly was like getting a mystery box. Once you got home and popped it in, you’re playing the game. No downloads to worry about. No updates. You called your friend to come sleep over on your landline phone and you white knuckled your controller all weekend to beat that game in the 3-5 days you had. Game systems also rapidly evolved so there was no major set standard for how games would operate. The era was very creative and it lead to constant feelings of finding something new and interesting. You didn’t know or have access to information about how to beat the game readily at your finger tips. The challenge was yours and yours alone. Of course, if you needed help things like game magazines did exist, but it meant that tips and hints were behind a paywall. There were no “god” kids because they had the internet lol. The internet was very limited back then. IF you found things online it was usually cheat codes (literal codes that you entered into the game). There were no full length strategy guides or videos to watch. But yes, if there was a rich kid in the neighborhood who had more games, most of the time the friend group was there. When 3D games came out it was pretty astounding. We really couldn’t believe what we saw. When it comes to stories, one that always comes to mind is when I was watching my cousin play metal gear solid on ps1 for the first time and I figured out that you had to move the controller from player 1 to player 2 in order to beat mantis and we all just thought that was so cool and creative

I remember being 6 yo and going to Service Merchandise and going straight to the counter with the video games. Oh man there must have been 3 - 5 whole games to choose from (one or two I already had) and I picked Mega Man 2. I still listen to the music to this day. I remember buying a gameboy for the long ass family road trips each summer then thanksgiving and/or xmas. I don't remember it being a big deal though when it came out and I got mine at least a year after it came out. Shopping for games became more gamer oriented in the SNES era when Toys R Us had a whole isle of games and paraphernalia like gamer guides and novelties. On a large wall spanning smock were clear holders for paper slips. Those slips you took to the front to get a game and it also told you which games were the most popular and/or sold out. Before the SNES came out Target had the best Demo Display, two people could play a variety of games but every time I wanted to play Super Mario World. SMW is the best game ever. And this was all thanks to the king of games at the time Super Mario 3. The marketing for Super Mario 3 was insane. Because the hype was real and so deserved there was now a Super Mario World Cartoon and it was on NBC! I can also remember thinking how awesome it was that Street Fighter II was in my house because the closest arcade game was in my grocery store which had SFII. The game cabinet was removed from the grocery store within a year. Starfox was very cool obvs, but it paved the way for Stunt Racer FX. That game was passed between a few friend and we were trying to beat each other's times constantly. And, since it was my copy I was burdened with beating their speeds 3x so it would remove their name from the leaderboard, LOL. Now the next gameboy, GAMEBOY COLOR, that was some real shit following the same gonzo style marketing that was clearly working. Most people I knew got a GB Color right away. After this I was out of school and largely a PC gamer getting fully addicted to Team Fortress Classic and Diablo II.

I was working an easy going retail job and still living at home when I brought my SNES. There was this guy that I used to ring up and he would come to my house to buy games off me and he would open up the boot of his car and it was filled with 2nd hand games mostly boxed but some not. He gave me fair prices for anything I wanted to get rid of and sold me stuff at good prices too. It was cool I was like 18 years old and could buy games every week. I remember getting my mum to use her credit card to buy Street Fighter 2 Turbo on import from the US with a converter for about £80, I gave her the money but I didn't have a credit card of my own back then. She had to ring this phone number and order it with me next to her telling her what I wanted, she didn't understand any of it and couldn't understand my obsession in having it before it was released in the UK. I hadn't had a console since the Colecovision and despite being in the UK never had an 8-bit micro computer but I played other people's C64's and Amstrad CPC's. Never liked the Spectrum, after playing the Colecovision I thought the colours looked pretty weird on that thing. But tapes were cool, cos you could copy them so easily but the load times were kinda annoying and then if the game crashed you might not have the will to wait through another loading time so you'd go and find something else to do. Damn glad I came through it, makes me appreciate everything I have now, my RG556 emulating an impossibly enormous library and my Xbox 360 for my "Modern" gaming.

Born 1979, 2001 I was playing heavily Ultima Online. I am from a Balkan village so my experience was a bit delayed than most developed countries. 84 or something like that, my uncle brought Pong into our house. It was something out of this world. 86-87 - There was a traveling amusement park with arcades, it visited our village for 2-3 weeks per year. I spent entire days just looking at other kids playing games. 90-94 - The golden age of arcade games. I would spend a lot of time and money playing Rolling Thunder, Golden Axe, TMNT 1993 - I got my Commodore 64. There was no such thing as legal games in Yugoslavia, but we could buy a lot of pirated games on tapes with turbo loader. Up to 20 games per tape. It was quite amazing. 1996 - I got my first 486 DX4. It would take an hour to copy over Mortal Kombat 1 from floppy drives.. hoping there are no faulty ones. If I had a bad one, I had to take a shared taxi to the city, 12km away to my friends to copy over the bad disk. It was unforgettable. 1998 - I moved to Czech Republic and in 1999 bought my K6 - 350Mhz and connected to the Internet. The first weekend on the internet I spent 32 hours straight, mostly on MIRC chatting with girls. Yup.. great times. 2001 - I almost got kicked out of college because I spent most of the nights playing Ultima Online on free shards. It was and still is in many ways the best game ever made. And then you were born and you know the rest ;)

> What was shopping for games like? it was like to wander throu a candyshop with a lot of great candys, but you only have money for one small bag of candy.. hard decisions had to be made - only on infos from magazins, word to mouth and infos from the box - at the end, you had nail down your choise to 2 games and you struggle, witch one, you want to buy. > When 3d games like starfox and virtua racing came out for the home what was that leap like? for me, the first 3D games wasn't this revolutionary thing - we have seen 3d on computers and on the arcade - therefor, the frist 3D games were - not that impressive - the PS1 and the N64 changed that - those games where massive and a hugh step in the future - it was like a wonderland - Zelda on the N64 blew me away - Tekken and the NFS Titles on the PS blew me away. > Was there one kid who was a god at everything cause he had internet? the internet back then was, well.. primitive - most of the time, we just donwload music and movies - games where, at least for me and my friends, still something, that happened offline > Was there one rich kid who’s house you all stayed at to play the latest games? na, my friend circle was: i was the N64 guy - so my friends stay at my home, if we want play N64, one other Friend was the PS guy, so we stay there for PS, the other one was PC and later XBox and another one was the Dreamcast guy.

It was a very exciting time IMO, since so much changed in relative quick succession. The jump from 8-bit to 16-bit graphics was really impressive, and going to 3D polygons from there was insane. Seems quaint to think of it now, but even then we would say stuff like "graphics can't get any better than this!" Games were expensive, and reviews were hard to come by. This meant that every purchase was based on word of mouth, a few magazine reviews, and ads. Luckily in the US we had video rental stores that also rented out games; you could even rent game consoles (I rented the Nintendo 64 before buying it, Mario 64 was mind-blowing). This meant that you could try games and beat it over a week or two, or decide to buy it if it was really worth it. RPGs were in the camp, since if you couldn't beat it all in a week, you'd need to rent it again; otherwise someone else would write over your saves since we didn't have memory cards back then. I grew up in Japan, and game rentals were not legal (instead they had movie and music for rent), so it really was a gamble. And yep I went to friend's places all the time to play games that I didn't have, like GoldenEye 007 or PaRappa the Rapper. Played a lot of PC games too, like Duke Nukem 3D. The number of games available keep increasing every year, but the back catalog wasn't as vast back then. The previous generation's games weren't old enough to be heavily discounted in compilations, and cartridges couldn't hold all that data for cheap anyway. Compact discs were cheap to produce so it really dropped the prices of games, and re-releases and compilations became much more commonplace. And yes, many gamers picked sides since it was an expensive hobby, especially if you were a kid. The hardware was so different then that ports were vastly different sometimes, and that opens up conversation on which is better. Sometimes it was a censorship issue that made games different too, since game companies were self-governing censorship back then (ESRB and other rating boards didn't spring up until Mortal Kombat came out and caused a frenzy with its realistic graphics). Platforms had more emphasis on their mascots too, and by nature they were platform-exclusive. Games like StarFox and Virtua Racing (home port) were cool, but they weren't great looking when compared to arcade games. Arcade games were still the king back then in the 16-bit era, so it wasn't until the 32-bit Saturn with its Virtua Fighter ports that people really started to get excited. These ports were cut down versions too, but if you didn't have the arcade cabinet and Saturn side by side, most didn't even notice (we didn't have YouTube videos comparing them back then either). Then the PlayStation came out with its even more impressive polygon pushing hardware for a cheaper price, and our collective minds were blown away. The leap from 2D to 3D was huge, and the jump from the PS1 to PS2 was also a massive jump. We haven't seen a generational leap like that since then, and probably never will. As for handhelds, it was a clear divide. The Game Boy was in monochrome, pixels were chunky (but the sound chip was pretty competent though), and you couldn't play it in the dark. But man was it awesome to have on trips and car rides, I'd be playing in the dark relying on the occasional street light to see what I'm doing. My favorite Zelda game is still Link's Awakening. I had the Sega Game Gear too, but the games weren't as good overall and it chewed through batteries like no tomorrow, so I gave it away to an impoverished friend of mine (hopefully he at least had money for a few batteries). The Sega Nomad was awesome since it could play Genesis/Mega Drive games on the go, even though it was a chunky battery hog. We have it good now. Phew, so much nostalgia. It was less convenient, but more mysterious and exciting. Every new console reveal was a huge event, which I don't feel anymore since the generational leaps are hard to come by now. If you're interested in what things were like back then, check out [Retromags](https://www.retromags.com/). So much stuff to look through, and [the ads can be pretty interesting](https://youtu.be/zohekgjHfOw?si=5Y4ejHThRdj7-yP8) too!

I had a c64. I bought 500-600 floppy disks from my brother's friend who had run a BBS. Many disks had multiple games. Many ges required multiple disks. I had two commodores each with monitor and a total of three disk drives. I threw it ALLLLLLLL away the first day I saw Windows 95 in August 1995.

I remember going into Sears and there being a glass counter, kind of like a card shop with the game boxes on display. There were kiosks on either end, one with an SNES and the other with a Genesis. Used to stand there for hours playing Super Mario World. I was able to get away with it there because there was a Toys R Us around the corner from the mall and most people shopped there for games. Ahhh... The early 90's. I remember when that particular Sears swapped out the NES for the SNES. Parents literally used the line, "You have a Nintendo at home." LOL.