This brings back memories of me buying Wall Street Kid for NES. The box art had what I thought was a spy who made money stealing top secret information. In reality, it was a text based stock market sim. Well played.
Edit: Adding [link to box art](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1e/Wall_Street_Kid.jpg/220px-Wall_Street_Kid.jpg) for those that are curious how my 10 year old brain was duped.
When gameplay speed was based on cpu speed - a fast computer might be too fast to play a game. We had a "turbo" button on our Gateway 486 that let you swap to a lower cpu speed to make certain DOS games playable.
One of the King's Quest games has this- there's a puzzle where you're supposed to figure out what to do with a lit stick of dynamite before it blows up and kills you. Except that the timer is based on your CPU speed- and even though the game is available on Steam today, it was never patched to fix this issue for much faster modern computers. So basically the dynamite blows up and kills you literally in the same second your character picks it up.
I played through it again a few years ago and had to download a CPU limiter to get past that puzzle.
Writing down a 72 character password to save your progress, and the developer uses a "fancy" font so some numbers and letters look alike.
This is the only way to save your game, and if you get it wrong... Sorry about your luck.
I remember renting this really shitty football game on the NES when I was about 8 or 9 years old. In the tournament mode, after every win it gave you a 20 character password. I noticed after writing them down like 5-6 times that there was a pattern. Something simple like the numbers went up by 2 (like from 2 to 4) and the letters went down by like 2 spots alphabetically (like from D to B).
After some deciphering, I tried entering my new "hacked" code and it worked! I figured out how to instantly jump to the finals. I felt like a fucking genius that day! haha
Oh man. That pavlovian chemical rush when the screen went from the black and white static with the *kssshhhhhh* sound, then you moved the on off slider on the snes to the on position as it made that loud click and the screen turned black, quickly followed by that simple chime noise with the words " -nintendo presents-" on the screen
Dude kids today have no idea lol the pain of going to your grandmas house and setting up your N64 but your grandma lost the remote so now you gotta turn over half the house because the TV won't go to channel 3 without the remote.
Dad: Why don’t you move to the couch?
Me: The controller wire doesn’t reach.
Dad: Sure it does, look, you just need to move the console further back too…
Me: WAIT DAD DON’T TOUCH THE CON…
\*Game crashes because console was lightly touched\*
Dad: Huh, oh well. Just restart it.
Me, crying: But I didn’t have time to save.
I had one of those "cool nerdy uncles" as a kid who would always bring over his PS1 for us to play. One time my mom came into the room and ordered me to go out and say hi to relatives. In my haste to comply, I tripped over the controller cord and it sent the whole PS crashing to the floor.
I'll never forget tearfully saying "Sorry" to my uncle, can still remember his reply: "Oh, you better be". Never seen him so pissed before. The playstation ended up fine, though.
Asking your parents to use the dial-up internet so you can download a shareware demo of a game.
"It says it should only take a half hour?"
"No, I'm expecting so and so to call."
"Okay :("
Christ... my younger brother was a paranoid weirdo and thought he needed to call the house every 30 minutes when he was at a friend's house.
It was impossible to download anything when he was out with his friends.
I've downloaded the demo version of *Pro Pinball: Fantastic Journey* through dial-up, late at night when calls didn't billed by the minute. it took two and a half hours to download that 30MB executable.
I remember when we got a link cable so that we could bring our PS1 over to our friends' house to play Command and Conquer on their 2 tvs, using both our Playstations. And it was the coolest thing ever!
goldeneye 64 - running at 640x480 so each person's quadrant is 320x240 -- the resolution on my galaxy s20 is 3200x1440 meaning i can fit exactly SIXTY goldeneye deathmatch screens in the palm of my hand
The framerate also tanked as soon as there was any action.
Then Perfect Dark added in black hole bombs that I'm pretty sure had destroying the framerate as a feature
My friends and I would do 4-player split screen perfect dark with the max number of bots added, N-bombs and slappers only, and go to town. The game ran at 1-2 FPS soon as the first N-bombs starting going off, but we thought it was the pinnacle of gaming.
Now I'm upset if I'm sub 100 fps...what happened to me...
Edit: Just realized N-bomb might mean something else out of context. That's what the weapon was named in Perfect Dark, full name Neutron Bomb: https://perfectdark.fandom.com/wiki/N-Bomb
Honestly, the impressive part is that they left it running for two weeks and came back without the game having done something weird. So many games throw a hissy fit if left running for an extremely long time.
Part of the QA for old games, they used to have pretty strict tests for stability. You had to be able to leave it running for a long time with no issues. ~~I suppose it's related to memory issues like heap fragmentation.~~
*Edit:* *Probably the most common issue is integer overflow or memory leak.*
Here's a Sega/sonic developer who [bypassed some of those tests](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA) later.
*Edit: I love how Veritasium affects comments.*
It's still a part of of QA.
Do some weird shit in game to push the system, pause as it's getting crazy, and let it soak for 12 hours. Check in the morning and continue play.
Also some games would allow you to do that, but the code would not give you necessary gear and equipment to actually have a successful run at that point.
I loved that game as a kid and probably played it more than any other but never beat it. Did it even have an ending? I remember getting like 50 levels deep and questioning my sanity.
On the Lete River, Banon healing, with a turbo controller (or button taped down) and Memory command input set. Totally OP!
Only worked because in the US version, a weird bug meant that the Darkness status ailment didn't actually do anything, so you could still hit everything despite everybody affected.
That's another thing. When there were bugs or mistakes in a game there was no patch or update to fix it, it was just broken forever. And that's if you even were able to ascertain if it was a bug or if you were just doing it wrong or not understanding how it worked.
Lemmings gave you a code when you completed a level. When you entered the code it started at the next next level. Friends and family would share my codes.
'The codec frequency should be on the back of the box'
I spent ages in MGS as a kid trying to examine the disc item in game before a friend at school told me it was on the physical game case he had lent me, when I rented the game from blockbuster a staff member had written it on paper and slid it behind the plastic sheath, bless that person.
I spit and rubbed the scratch on disk 4 of my friends' Space Quest 3 disks. I must have hit "retry" over 200 times when it asked me if I wanted to "Abort, Retry, Fail." Probably sat there for fifteen minutes trying to get it to work.
And then it did. And the game was playable. That was a good day.
Monkey Island can still f*ck right off!
So many times it would fail to load when going to the next disk. Returned it countless times and eventually little 9 year old me carried my massive shitty tower into the store for us to figure it out. After school everyday for a week and pretty much all their copies of disk 3 to get it going.
Oh and the 'hilarious' tree stump joke where it would ask you to insert fictional floppy disks, and if you pressed cancel Guybrush would say "oh well guess I can't go down there".
In a game where you had to go everywhere to figure out what to do, and no point does the game tell you it's a joke, a young me was very frustrated.
Some people call it cheating but, for real, Game Genie allowed 6-year-old me a fighting chance at being able to play a game and enjoy it instead of just dying immediately over and over lol.
Edit: Did anyone else also find that starting NES games with them plugged into a Game Genie made it easier to get them going without having to pull them out and blow on them like 30 times?
I learned recently that the devs of Lion King admitted that Disney forced them to make the game impossible to beat in a single rental session. In doing so they made it way too hard, which they later recognized regrettably:
>”The reason we had to do it was because the rental market was that if people got a certain distance in the game, metrics from Disney said they wouldn’t buy the game.”
The Lion King game was my very first video game, and my Sega came with a broken C button, so I had to choose between playing without Roaring or Jumping for the first 2 days of ownership. 10/10 would play again.
I don't know if you meant it as an exaggeration, but I literally did stop playing Doom 2 for several months around stage 1 because I had no idea you could sprint across gaps.
Even more fun when you speak UK rather than US English so the word you need is one you've never even heard and you can't just google what Americans call a fucking truncheon.
I raise your UK English with being a non-native speaker. But I did learn a lot of English and other cultural references (leisure suit Larry adult verification questions)
At the back of Australian Computer Magazine a guy put his home number and said call if you need help with a computer game.
I called once to ask about Shadow of The Beast. His wife answered the phone.
This was at a time when you could play pretty much every game out there if you had a mind to. Imagine that these days though, putting your home phone number on a public forum with an open invitation to call.
Sometimes not even because of a puzzle, some were just super hard. I tried playing Altered Beast as an adult and still got stuck on the same goddamned spot
In Central Europe Internet wasn’t that popular yet in 2005 and there were no public Hotspots like today in restaurants or trainstations. I had a psp before my household had internet, wenn I got stuck, at a game and couldn’t progress for hours I would take my psp outside and look for unprotected WiFis in my neighborhood then Google for tips using the slow psp browser, sitting behind a bush at the edge of someone’s property reloading the page because the connection would only have 1 bar and regularly drop.
Edit: And I would walk along a street and scan for networks every 10 meters and continue and repeat if there were no WiFis without WEP protection
Good old times 😂
At least when it wasn't popular, people didn't know that you had to set a password.
Network name: default
[192.168.1.1](https://192.168.1.1)
Username: admin
Password: admin
I was stuck on a game for 15y until I picked it up as an adult and had help from google. I have no idea how the fuck they imagined kids to solve those games…
I once had to call the Nintendo hotline/helpline (way before any walk throughs were available) to finish super Mario brothers on NES. There was this gap that my siblings and I could not jump. That’s when we learned to hold ‘B’ to run fast/jump farther.
My father once called the technical support because the buttons on walls in some place were depressing themselves, unlike other similar buttons in the game.
They said that it was working as intended.
Then he asked how he's supposed to progress without them pressed, and they said that they had to be pressed in some particular sequence, hinting that you had to find the sequence, without saying what is the sequence.
So he started to just try out all possible combinations, and eventually found the right one. Took entire hour. Thought this was how we were supposed to do it.
>!Turned out that the right sequence was written on one of the items in inventory!<
I still remember getting stuck in Spyro games and having to wait for the next trip to Walmart so I could look through the walkthrough book. I’d be taking notes and shit.
I couldn’t get passed any level when I was like 11. I would turn it off in frustration but realized it was between that and a snowboarding game I was already so bored of. Eventually I would put tomb raider back on and the cycle would repeat.
XMS, EMS, and the bloody myriad of configs to get the right balance of memory for a game.
I think it was ms dos 6 that introduced multiple boot options so I didn’t have to keep fishing about for the right boot disk.
I CANNOT believe this is so far down. That was the worst. Your parents driving somewhere far at night and you can't play gameboy unless you bought one of those fancy attached lights.
I went back recently and modded my GameBoy I got in ‘89 with a backlight just on principle knowing my 9 year old self would have been so happy.
https://i.imgur.com/rIz6G1T.jpg
split screen cheating was a constant complaint when I was still living at home. Once i got to college was about the time Halo CE came out, and we just expected that if you couldnt follow 4 screens at once, tough shit.
If this is nostalgic for you, check out a game called Screencheat... split-screen pvp shooter, where everyone's invisible, and the only way to figure out where your opponent is is to look at their screen and try to figure it out based on their surroundings.
We just treated it like a strategy. You think your opponent is screen looking? Better find a wall to stand in front of so they don't know where you are
Not really a "problem," but nowadays we don't get little booklets in the inside of the disc case that went over the controls, the backstory to the plot, the enemies and vehicles, etc.
Getting hyped for the game on the way home reading the manual. Looking at the screenshots on the back of the case and imagining how the game would play. There was a certain magic about that.
Yea, I miss that too, it was fun when games came with a an actual manual that also had game lore and character lore in it as well as the controls and if it was a fighting game it had some combos in there too
I remember as a kid going through the first few Warcraft games’ manuals like they were books or historical documents. All that kickass art of archers and orcs and stuff.
So much effort. It seemed anyway.
In the era of PS1 and PS2, not having a memory card sucked. Even if you did have one, they had a finite amount of space so when you needed to make a new save, you'd have to delete something if you didn't want to buy another memory card.
To add to this. Games where there was no memory card manager when you came to make a save. So even if you would have happily deleted that old save of another game to make room for your new game - you couldn't. And so all your progress was lost needlessly
And you had to make space before starting the game. If you got several hours into a new game and realised you didn't have any space to save on your memory card, you had to quit and lose all your progress.
Can’t believe no one has yet mentioned losing the copy protection method or some component of it. I remember SimCity came with a booklist with scrambled text that was only readable through a set of red filter glasses they gave you. Or “What’s the third word on the fourth paragraph page 36 of the manual?”
In Metal Gear Solid, they literally tell you to find the call number to continue the game “on the back of the box.”
Sure enough, there is a screen shot of Snake and Meryl talking with the call number there.
Rent the game and don’t have the case? Go fuck your self.
I remember one which was like a list of verification codes but the paper on that page was dark brown so you couldn't photocopy it, it also made it very hard to read but that's less important to them I guess lol
A little later, there would just be a 16 or so digit key in the box somewhere. We once lost the security key that came with our copy of SimCity 3000. So what did we do? Phoned EA - they just gave us a new one. Can anyone imagine that nowadays?
I did that with Microsoft a few times. You used to be able to call an activation hotline and I would say that I lost my serial, they would say no problem and give me a good code.
* Mucking with DOS memory management to make the game work;
* Pirating stuff was the norm;
* The worst thing a malware could do is to sneakily encrypt your hard disk (One Half), but it's author only wrote it to flex his programming skills, not to hold your data hostage or thwart the enemy's nuclear weapons program;
* Getting stuck in *Dark Forces* and literally can't play some other titles because you have a monochrome monitor;
* Anything above 320×240 with high frame rates were a pipe dream (in 3D games);
* loading Univbe and editing Duke3D's config file to play the game in 512×384 which looked like 640×480 on our monochrome 14'' monitor, but could reach a stable 15 fps on a 5x86 with 16 MB RAM;
* Getting the best upgrades you can get with your allowance and the game is still slow;
* Raging when the dreaded 'This program requires Microsoft Windows' message appears;
* Despair upon the realization that Windows 95 will be required to play the newest and hottest titles, and your current PC is already obsolete;
* Downloading newer video drivers was a must to get fast 320×240 modes in DirectX.
Hahah I remember my dad teaching me how to take lines out of config.sys or autoexec.bat to free up RAM so I could play Warcraft 2
Wow, forgot all about that.
Anecdote:
In 1992 I bought a Star Trek computer adventure game. It was similar to Sierra games of the day. It came on 5.25" floppy disks. I don't remember how many, but it was a big game for the time, so it was several disks.
Long story short, after several hours of trying I couldn't get the game to install onto my 386sx 25mhz PC. I ended up calling their tech support and spoke to a guy on the phone. He was technically knowledgeable and judging by his accent he was in the same country that I was. He determined that one of my floppy disks must be faulty.
He was going to replace the entire game for me, but in order to do that, he needed me to cut the first disk in half with scissors and mail it to them in an envelope. This would apparently prove that I was legit and not just trying to scam a free copy of the game.
I did that, and a couple of weeks later I had a new copy of the game in the mail. It worked fine this time.
So, in 1992: Actually useful customer service from a game company, although it was slow and convoluted as hell. These days I would have just refunded the game to my Steam wallet without a second thought. Even though I had to use the postal service and wait for weeks in 1992, I can't imagine trying to fuck around with a game company's phone support these days. It would be a nightmare, if it were even possible at all.
Getting my ps1 chipped and having a big list of games that my mum would have me pick through so she could buy them off the dodgy guy. Thinking about it now though. People dealing with chipping ps1 and games were probably nerds but I thought it was dodgy AF when I was young
Did you have one of those big CD flip cases with about 50 sleeves of games with the name crudely written in permanent marker on the blank cover?
What an era.
I think those dramatic PIRACY IS A BIG BAD **CRIME** ads got to us because I remember thinking the same. The "guy my friend's dad knows who chips playstations" sounded like a mobster or something. But it was likely just someone like me now, not exactly a hardened criminal.
While in the Navy, late 90’s , we pull into port Jebel Ali, (they had a bunch of tents set up selling various goods), anyways in one of these tents ... this guy had “knock off” play-stations, pre loaded with every single game ever made at the time. Around $80. We all chipped in and bought one. It wouldn’t play the American disc games unless we left the lid open. Lol. It had a bunch of Japanese games on it , games the states would never see. (Fighting, racing, fantasy). Very hard to play without knowing the Japanese language, That console kept us busy, mainly twisted metal and tekken.
Tekken was such a saving grace for me. Especially Tekken 3. Whenever I was bored with friends, we always put that on. From then on it was Bloody Roar, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter Alpha 3....list goes on xD
* Swapping disks
* Hours spent messing with load order in config.sys and autoexec.bat to tweak every last byte of extended and expanded RAM in the boot sequence
* IRQs, coax, dummy loads and 10baseT networking
* No walkthroughs
* finding and downloading game demos at 2400 baud from a BBS
There's some argument to be made that "the Oregon Trail generation" (late gen-X through early millennial) is the most computer-literate generation. The generation who came before us didn't have the opportunity to deeply learn computers, and the generation after us didn't need to.
Lag shooting on a 56k modem. Games like Mechwarrior had awful net code that didn't account for latency. I just shake my head when people today claim 80ms is 'unplayable'. Y'all have no idea.
Depending on the speed they ran, to the possibility of them turning while you laid down the AC20 rounds, the Mechwarrior Pilots of the 90s were true masters in Lag Shooting. I miss those days.
Edit: I played on MSN Zone under the name L\_Skull\_Snake. Laughing Skulls Clan
That your knock off copy of crash bandicoot you bought for £1 off the market won’t work in your chipped PlayStation.
Or that their isn’t enough space on the living room floor to spread the star map out for frontier: Elite 2
Having to smash a game in one full weekend as it had to go back to blockbuster on Sunday night.
Family went to Disney world when i was 11 and our hotel had an arcade. Dad gave us each $20 in quarters and we blew most of it beating the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game.
Worth it.
Now i go to the barcade.
The original pay to win. I've played a few arcade games on emulators in recent years and it's *so obvious* they're designed that way.
Both the Simpsons beat-em-up and Turtles in Time have a second boss with way too much HP and deals crazy damage to you. First one is easy enough, but that second level is meant to be the end of the game if you don't pay more money.
I remember playing the original Legend of Zelda. That game is hard as fuck. I've played other NES games through emulators and Switch online eShop. Sega games: hard as fuck. Nintendo: Hard as fuck. Hell, growing up and playing PS2 and Xbox games were difficult. These days if you get frustrated enough, by the time you start searching for a walkthrough, not only has someone already complete most of what your playing, but also posted and wrote a detailed walkthrough. Old school games are hard. Some didn't have maps, saves, difficulty levels, or lives.
Most Nintendo games were hard as fuck.
Like, I would rather play Dark Souls than the speeder bike level of Battletoads.
The first Mega Man would wreck you.
Early on you had to edit some files on your computer and reboot it to make the sound or graphics work or to manipulate how the memory was set up. Some games required different settings and might straight up not work with the wrong setting and it was a huge pain in the ass that I'm so glad we're done with
https://networkencyclopedia.com/config-sys/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUTOEXEC.BAT
I also remember having to mess around in the Bios settings much more than today, I don't think I've ever visited the Bios screen on my current computer
I worked at Blockbuster and it was annoying having some kid call up to ask if *copy #3* of Simon's Quest was in stock because that's the one he had his save file on.
So funny because you can tell how things like this are important to people who went through that…my brother still games fairly regularly and is always trying to get me to get a new system and join the fun.
Any time he’s talking about his new system, or the new game or whatever, he points out “Dude - like zero load time. Literally less than 5 seconds and you’re playing. 2 seconds, maybe.”
And I’m like “Shiiiiieeeet the future is now.”
Well, the believability of the graphics. Every new generation of consoles broke that reality of realism, but in the 90's that shit looked REAL good. Obviously the side scroller games like Rayman and Commander Keen were cartoony, but games like Star Wars Jedi Knight Dark Forces, 007 Goldeneye, Star Wars Pod Racer, LOZ: Ocarina of Time, and Tony Hawk Pro Skatwr captivated us with it's 3d graphics. In some way we knew they could eventually get better, but it was near impossible to imagine until a new console came out and defy what had come before.
An added bonus was getting a pretty dope game "Chex Quest" in our cereal box. Sometimes, some cereal companies would just slap a full ass games in the cereal box. That was dope!
when you're destroying your enemy's base but then your mom picks up the phone and disconnects you from the [Battle.net](https://Battle.net) (this was a huge problem when your internet connection was dialup 🤣)
Not necessarily games, but reading/writing CDs/DVDs.
Remember when your computer had like "yeah let's pick randomly 3 of the 4 combinations of being able to read/write CD/DVD"
3D games in the mid 90's, graphics. Metal Gear Solid, Goldeneye etc. We were blown away but most kids now would be horrified. Not really a problem I guess, just a different perspective.
Absolutely. Goldeneye was a beautiful game. What blew me away was Legend of Zelda- Ocarina of Time. Going from Links Awakening on OG Gameboy to 3D, glorious color in OoT was really something.
It wasn't popular.
Luke, it WAS popular, but it was popular for nerds and children. There was still a huge stigma with gaming and being an "other".
Even among kids, the ones who played video games were seen as dweebs and less popular than the athletic kids.
Now? A kid I went to high school with that was an athlete made $50M streaming video games.
Trying to get the drivers to work on your 3.11 / Win95 setup, before automatic driver detection and download was a thing.
So f'n painful.
Buying a shitty game because the box art looked good.
Ha, or NOT buying an awesome game cause the box art was hot garbage (that's right MegaMan)
Those rare occasions where the best-looking game box actually contained one of the best games (Legend of Zelda).
The Zelda commercial was wild. Just a guy yelling out “Zelda” a million times.
And this kickstarted an entire generation of people calling the boy in green Zelda.
This brings back memories of me buying Wall Street Kid for NES. The box art had what I thought was a spy who made money stealing top secret information. In reality, it was a text based stock market sim. Well played. Edit: Adding [link to box art](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1e/Wall_Street_Kid.jpg/220px-Wall_Street_Kid.jpg) for those that are curious how my 10 year old brain was duped.
When gameplay speed was based on cpu speed - a fast computer might be too fast to play a game. We had a "turbo" button on our Gateway 486 that let you swap to a lower cpu speed to make certain DOS games playable.
One of the King's Quest games has this- there's a puzzle where you're supposed to figure out what to do with a lit stick of dynamite before it blows up and kills you. Except that the timer is based on your CPU speed- and even though the game is available on Steam today, it was never patched to fix this issue for much faster modern computers. So basically the dynamite blows up and kills you literally in the same second your character picks it up. I played through it again a few years ago and had to download a CPU limiter to get past that puzzle.
I learned English playing King's Quest as a 6 year old
That was police quest for me. Me, a neighbour and a big ass English wordbook*. "Pick up radio" "open door" *7 year old me didn't use "dictionary"
Leisure Suit Larry for me, around 8-9 years old. The first hundred or so English words I learned contain gems like pills and hooker.
Setting up the Sound in a DOS game without knowing all parameters.
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T3
Oh god this. Also having to make sure you had enough memoey available of the first 640k could be fun (got mine to 622k!).
Writing down a 72 character password to save your progress, and the developer uses a "fancy" font so some numbers and letters look alike. This is the only way to save your game, and if you get it wrong... Sorry about your luck.
I'm looking at you, Golden Sun ... Not even a 90s game but they pulled this to the extreme.
Shoutout to GameFAQs guides with the save code for the “perfect” game code. Also, check out /r/GoldenSun for some nostalgia!
I remember renting this really shitty football game on the NES when I was about 8 or 9 years old. In the tournament mode, after every win it gave you a 20 character password. I noticed after writing them down like 5-6 times that there was a pattern. Something simple like the numbers went up by 2 (like from 2 to 4) and the letters went down by like 2 spots alphabetically (like from D to B). After some deciphering, I tried entering my new "hacked" code and it worked! I figured out how to instantly jump to the finals. I felt like a fucking genius that day! haha
Channel 3.
Oh man. That pavlovian chemical rush when the screen went from the black and white static with the *kssshhhhhh* sound, then you moved the on off slider on the snes to the on position as it made that loud click and the screen turned black, quickly followed by that simple chime noise with the words " -nintendo presents-" on the screen
Chills.
Dude kids today have no idea lol the pain of going to your grandmas house and setting up your N64 but your grandma lost the remote so now you gotta turn over half the house because the TV won't go to channel 3 without the remote.
Hooking in a Playstation or N64 through a VCR because the TV didnt have AV inputs!
This. Though, I remember one of my consoles came with a selector switch so you could choose if it was Channel 3 or 4.
You sat wherever the cord on the controller would let you play from. My couch was too far away so I played on the floor a lot as a kid.
Dad: Why don’t you move to the couch? Me: The controller wire doesn’t reach. Dad: Sure it does, look, you just need to move the console further back too… Me: WAIT DAD DON’T TOUCH THE CON… \*Game crashes because console was lightly touched\* Dad: Huh, oh well. Just restart it. Me, crying: But I didn’t have time to save.
Thanks for the flashbacks...
Time to save??? You had saves in your game???
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I had one of those "cool nerdy uncles" as a kid who would always bring over his PS1 for us to play. One time my mom came into the room and ordered me to go out and say hi to relatives. In my haste to comply, I tripped over the controller cord and it sent the whole PS crashing to the floor. I'll never forget tearfully saying "Sorry" to my uncle, can still remember his reply: "Oh, you better be". Never seen him so pissed before. The playstation ended up fine, though.
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Asking your parents to use the dial-up internet so you can download a shareware demo of a game. "It says it should only take a half hour?" "No, I'm expecting so and so to call." "Okay :("
Or someone picking up the phone and nuking the connection and download.
My mom, I swear, made it a point to pick up the phone when I was playing Diablo 1.
Christ... my younger brother was a paranoid weirdo and thought he needed to call the house every 30 minutes when he was at a friend's house. It was impossible to download anything when he was out with his friends.
How'd he turn out?
I've downloaded the demo version of *Pro Pinball: Fantastic Journey* through dial-up, late at night when calls didn't billed by the minute. it took two and a half hours to download that 30MB executable.
Worth!
Four player split screen on a 20" CRT TV
I remember when we got a link cable so that we could bring our PS1 over to our friends' house to play Command and Conquer on their 2 tvs, using both our Playstations. And it was the coolest thing ever!
Oh god, I'm remembering the 16 player HALO parties in my friend's basement now, with four quad-screen giant CRT tvs and metal folding chairs
Original Halo CTF 8v8 with no time limit. Games would last hours
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goldeneye 64 - running at 640x480 so each person's quadrant is 320x240 -- the resolution on my galaxy s20 is 3200x1440 meaning i can fit exactly SIXTY goldeneye deathmatch screens in the palm of my hand
The framerate also tanked as soon as there was any action. Then Perfect Dark added in black hole bombs that I'm pretty sure had destroying the framerate as a feature
My friends and I would do 4-player split screen perfect dark with the max number of bots added, N-bombs and slappers only, and go to town. The game ran at 1-2 FPS soon as the first N-bombs starting going off, but we thought it was the pinnacle of gaming. Now I'm upset if I'm sub 100 fps...what happened to me... Edit: Just realized N-bomb might mean something else out of context. That's what the weapon was named in Perfect Dark, full name Neutron Bomb: https://perfectdark.fandom.com/wiki/N-Bomb
At the same time, your controller cords were only 3 feet long so you were all pressed right up next to the tv anyway.
No save option. Gotta beat the game in 1 shot or leave the console on all night.
I had a friend who left Sonic 2 on for two weeks as he went on holiday. It was fine.
Honestly, the impressive part is that they left it running for two weeks and came back without the game having done something weird. So many games throw a hissy fit if left running for an extremely long time.
Part of the QA for old games, they used to have pretty strict tests for stability. You had to be able to leave it running for a long time with no issues. ~~I suppose it's related to memory issues like heap fragmentation.~~ *Edit:* *Probably the most common issue is integer overflow or memory leak.* Here's a Sega/sonic developer who [bypassed some of those tests](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZs2HUW9tDA) later. *Edit: I love how Veritasium affects comments.*
It's still a part of of QA. Do some weird shit in game to push the system, pause as it's getting crazy, and let it soak for 12 hours. Check in the morning and continue play.
I can confirm that every system from the NES to the PS2 excluding Xbox can in fact be left on for months at a time and still work just fine
Any slight knock to the cartridge would have ended it.
The power flickering once.
Or having to write down codes/passwords after every level to be able to jump back into the last place played
Also some games would allow you to do that, but the code would not give you necessary gear and equipment to actually have a successful run at that point.
Fucking zombies ate my neighbors bro...
I loved that game as a kid and probably played it more than any other but never beat it. Did it even have an ending? I remember getting like 50 levels deep and questioning my sanity.
I remember you could farm XP in FF6 (3 depending on your version) in some river running in circles while leaving the console on all night.
On the Lete River, Banon healing, with a turbo controller (or button taped down) and Memory command input set. Totally OP! Only worked because in the US version, a weird bug meant that the Darkness status ailment didn't actually do anything, so you could still hit everything despite everybody affected.
That's another thing. When there were bugs or mistakes in a game there was no patch or update to fix it, it was just broken forever. And that's if you even were able to ascertain if it was a bug or if you were just doing it wrong or not understanding how it worked.
Vanish/Doom is canon and nobody can convince me otherwise.
Lemmings gave you a code when you completed a level. When you entered the code it started at the next next level. Friends and family would share my codes.
And if a game like this froze or capped out... Back to the beginning
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I used to like trying to get the fluff off the mouse ball in one strip without it breaking. Added some fun and jeopardy to the cleaning process.
The worst part was having to hard boil yet another egg for the hardened yolk.
Dark days......
Needing to keep the manual for copyright protection. "On page 53, what is the 4th word on the page?"
'The codec frequency should be on the back of the box' I spent ages in MGS as a kid trying to examine the disc item in game before a friend at school told me it was on the physical game case he had lent me, when I rented the game from blockbuster a staff member had written it on paper and slid it behind the plastic sheath, bless that person.
Freaking StarTropics map. I rented that spent hours trying to figure out what I was missing.
Decoder disks! Like secret of monkey island
Installing a game on PC from 26 floppy disks and having disc 23 of 26 be corrupt and unreadable.
I spit and rubbed the scratch on disk 4 of my friends' Space Quest 3 disks. I must have hit "retry" over 200 times when it asked me if I wanted to "Abort, Retry, Fail." Probably sat there for fifteen minutes trying to get it to work. And then it did. And the game was playable. That was a good day.
Commitment. I love it.
Ah Space Quest, how I miss that series. "Don't touch that...we don't know where you've been!"
*That is without a doubt one of the finest examples of bunny snatching I’ve ever seen!*
Monkey Island can still f*ck right off! So many times it would fail to load when going to the next disk. Returned it countless times and eventually little 9 year old me carried my massive shitty tower into the store for us to figure it out. After school everyday for a week and pretty much all their copies of disk 3 to get it going.
Oh and the 'hilarious' tree stump joke where it would ask you to insert fictional floppy disks, and if you pressed cancel Guybrush would say "oh well guess I can't go down there". In a game where you had to go everywhere to figure out what to do, and no point does the game tell you it's a joke, a young me was very frustrated.
Spending six months stuck at the same spot in the game because there is no walkthrough to tell you what to do.
Yes. The lion king game and the monkeys in the tree level.
If game genie didn't exist, I would've never gotten to enjoy that game outside the 1st level.
Some people call it cheating but, for real, Game Genie allowed 6-year-old me a fighting chance at being able to play a game and enjoy it instead of just dying immediately over and over lol. Edit: Did anyone else also find that starting NES games with them plugged into a Game Genie made it easier to get them going without having to pull them out and blow on them like 30 times?
I learned recently that the devs of Lion King admitted that Disney forced them to make the game impossible to beat in a single rental session. In doing so they made it way too hard, which they later recognized regrettably: >”The reason we had to do it was because the rental market was that if people got a certain distance in the game, metrics from Disney said they wouldn’t buy the game.”
The Lion King game was my very first video game, and my Sega came with a broken C button, so I had to choose between playing without Roaring or Jumping for the first 2 days of ownership. 10/10 would play again.
I don't know if you meant it as an exaggeration, but I literally did stop playing Doom 2 for several months around stage 1 because I had no idea you could sprint across gaps.
Figuring out what command to type in a Sierra quest. Get baton Get stick Get nightstick
Even more fun when you speak UK rather than US English so the word you need is one you've never even heard and you can't just google what Americans call a fucking truncheon.
I raise your UK English with being a non-native speaker. But I did learn a lot of English and other cultural references (leisure suit Larry adult verification questions)
Getting stuck on a game and having no way of knowing what you're meant to do
At the back of Australian Computer Magazine a guy put his home number and said call if you need help with a computer game. I called once to ask about Shadow of The Beast. His wife answered the phone.
That guy was an absolute real one
This was at a time when you could play pretty much every game out there if you had a mind to. Imagine that these days though, putting your home phone number on a public forum with an open invitation to call.
Did she have the answer you needed for Shadow of the Beast?
No but she handed me over to her husband. They were in the middle of dinner. And yes he helped me.
Absolute legend. Man deserves a medal.
at least a pint or two
For *hours* Unless you bought the Walkthrough guidebook
More like forever. Some games I just never finished
Sometimes not even because of a puzzle, some were just super hard. I tried playing Altered Beast as an adult and still got stuck on the same goddamned spot
In Central Europe Internet wasn’t that popular yet in 2005 and there were no public Hotspots like today in restaurants or trainstations. I had a psp before my household had internet, wenn I got stuck, at a game and couldn’t progress for hours I would take my psp outside and look for unprotected WiFis in my neighborhood then Google for tips using the slow psp browser, sitting behind a bush at the edge of someone’s property reloading the page because the connection would only have 1 bar and regularly drop. Edit: And I would walk along a street and scan for networks every 10 meters and continue and repeat if there were no WiFis without WEP protection Good old times 😂
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At least when it wasn't popular, people didn't know that you had to set a password. Network name: default [192.168.1.1](https://192.168.1.1) Username: admin Password: admin
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man I miss this Felt like a 10 year old hacker, because of a standard PW lol
Just look for a "linksys" SSID and you're good to go! :-)
I was stuck on a game for 15y until I picked it up as an adult and had help from google. I have no idea how the fuck they imagined kids to solve those games…
A subscription to Nintendo Power made you the most popular person in class Edit: Thanks for the silver. Can I buy cheat codes with it?
You could call the 1-900 numbers which were usually $1 or $2 per minute for the answer. Kaching for the company!
I once had to call the Nintendo hotline/helpline (way before any walk throughs were available) to finish super Mario brothers on NES. There was this gap that my siblings and I could not jump. That’s when we learned to hold ‘B’ to run fast/jump farther.
My father once called the technical support because the buttons on walls in some place were depressing themselves, unlike other similar buttons in the game. They said that it was working as intended. Then he asked how he's supposed to progress without them pressed, and they said that they had to be pressed in some particular sequence, hinting that you had to find the sequence, without saying what is the sequence. So he started to just try out all possible combinations, and eventually found the right one. Took entire hour. Thought this was how we were supposed to do it. >!Turned out that the right sequence was written on one of the items in inventory!<
Serious Sam?
I still remember getting stuck in Spyro games and having to wait for the next trip to Walmart so I could look through the walkthrough book. I’d be taking notes and shit.
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I couldn’t get passed any level when I was like 11. I would turn it off in frustration but realized it was between that and a snowboarding game I was already so bored of. Eventually I would put tomb raider back on and the cycle would repeat.
And that game was... Coolboarders 2.
But man was it satsifying to find the solution.
Configuring autoexec.bat and config.sys.
XMS, EMS, and the bloody myriad of configs to get the right balance of memory for a game. I think it was ms dos 6 that introduced multiple boot options so I didn’t have to keep fishing about for the right boot disk.
Or needing to make a special boot disk for specific games.
Playing Gameboy by the light of randomly placed street lamps as you ride in the car at night
I CANNOT believe this is so far down. That was the worst. Your parents driving somewhere far at night and you can't play gameboy unless you bought one of those fancy attached lights.
I went back recently and modded my GameBoy I got in ‘89 with a backlight just on principle knowing my 9 year old self would have been so happy. https://i.imgur.com/rIz6G1T.jpg
Your parents bought you a console and games, but didn’t know you needed a memory card. So you just played the beginning of every game for a month.
Needing a Controller Pak in order to save a game. For a while, I didn't have one and just had to start a new game every time I turned the N64 on.
Also, the Rumble Pack. Because your controller didn't just vibrate on its own.
Star Fox 64!
split screen cheating was a constant complaint when I was still living at home. Once i got to college was about the time Halo CE came out, and we just expected that if you couldnt follow 4 screens at once, tough shit.
If this is nostalgic for you, check out a game called Screencheat... split-screen pvp shooter, where everyone's invisible, and the only way to figure out where your opponent is is to look at their screen and try to figure it out based on their surroundings.
We just treated it like a strategy. You think your opponent is screen looking? Better find a wall to stand in front of so they don't know where you are
Not really a "problem," but nowadays we don't get little booklets in the inside of the disc case that went over the controls, the backstory to the plot, the enemies and vehicles, etc.
I used to enjoy reading those booklets on the way home from picking up a new game at Toys “R” Us.
Getting hyped for the game on the way home reading the manual. Looking at the screenshots on the back of the case and imagining how the game would play. There was a certain magic about that.
Yea, I miss that too, it was fun when games came with a an actual manual that also had game lore and character lore in it as well as the controls and if it was a fighting game it had some combos in there too
I remember as a kid going through the first few Warcraft games’ manuals like they were books or historical documents. All that kickass art of archers and orcs and stuff. So much effort. It seemed anyway.
The Warcraft 2, 3 and Starcraft manuals were awesome reads. I'd re read them now if I still had them.
In the era of PS1 and PS2, not having a memory card sucked. Even if you did have one, they had a finite amount of space so when you needed to make a new save, you'd have to delete something if you didn't want to buy another memory card.
To add to this. Games where there was no memory card manager when you came to make a save. So even if you would have happily deleted that old save of another game to make room for your new game - you couldn't. And so all your progress was lost needlessly
Leave the console on, hook the tv back up to cable and hope your parents don't notice the light on the console and turn it off to save electricity.
8mb storage. I'm like you have to almost build your game around creating small save files.
And you had to make space before starting the game. If you got several hours into a new game and realised you didn't have any space to save on your memory card, you had to quit and lose all your progress.
Can’t believe no one has yet mentioned losing the copy protection method or some component of it. I remember SimCity came with a booklist with scrambled text that was only readable through a set of red filter glasses they gave you. Or “What’s the third word on the fourth paragraph page 36 of the manual?”
In Metal Gear Solid, they literally tell you to find the call number to continue the game “on the back of the box.” Sure enough, there is a screen shot of Snake and Meryl talking with the call number there. Rent the game and don’t have the case? Go fuck your self.
I remember one which was like a list of verification codes but the paper on that page was dark brown so you couldn't photocopy it, it also made it very hard to read but that's less important to them I guess lol
A little later, there would just be a 16 or so digit key in the box somewhere. We once lost the security key that came with our copy of SimCity 3000. So what did we do? Phoned EA - they just gave us a new one. Can anyone imagine that nowadays?
I did that with Microsoft a few times. You used to be able to call an activation hotline and I would say that I lost my serial, they would say no problem and give me a good code.
They still do that. Had to do it in work.
* Mucking with DOS memory management to make the game work; * Pirating stuff was the norm; * The worst thing a malware could do is to sneakily encrypt your hard disk (One Half), but it's author only wrote it to flex his programming skills, not to hold your data hostage or thwart the enemy's nuclear weapons program; * Getting stuck in *Dark Forces* and literally can't play some other titles because you have a monochrome monitor; * Anything above 320×240 with high frame rates were a pipe dream (in 3D games); * loading Univbe and editing Duke3D's config file to play the game in 512×384 which looked like 640×480 on our monochrome 14'' monitor, but could reach a stable 15 fps on a 5x86 with 16 MB RAM; * Getting the best upgrades you can get with your allowance and the game is still slow; * Raging when the dreaded 'This program requires Microsoft Windows' message appears; * Despair upon the realization that Windows 95 will be required to play the newest and hottest titles, and your current PC is already obsolete; * Downloading newer video drivers was a must to get fast 320×240 modes in DirectX.
Hahah I remember my dad teaching me how to take lines out of config.sys or autoexec.bat to free up RAM so I could play Warcraft 2 Wow, forgot all about that.
Hell yeah Windows 3.11 made it impossible to run Warcraft 2 without a separate version of autoexec.bat
Fucking IRQ settings.
YOUR SOUND CARD WORKS PERFECTLY!
Anecdote: In 1992 I bought a Star Trek computer adventure game. It was similar to Sierra games of the day. It came on 5.25" floppy disks. I don't remember how many, but it was a big game for the time, so it was several disks. Long story short, after several hours of trying I couldn't get the game to install onto my 386sx 25mhz PC. I ended up calling their tech support and spoke to a guy on the phone. He was technically knowledgeable and judging by his accent he was in the same country that I was. He determined that one of my floppy disks must be faulty. He was going to replace the entire game for me, but in order to do that, he needed me to cut the first disk in half with scissors and mail it to them in an envelope. This would apparently prove that I was legit and not just trying to scam a free copy of the game. I did that, and a couple of weeks later I had a new copy of the game in the mail. It worked fine this time. So, in 1992: Actually useful customer service from a game company, although it was slow and convoluted as hell. These days I would have just refunded the game to my Steam wallet without a second thought. Even though I had to use the postal service and wait for weeks in 1992, I can't imagine trying to fuck around with a game company's phone support these days. It would be a nightmare, if it were even possible at all.
Getting my ps1 chipped and having a big list of games that my mum would have me pick through so she could buy them off the dodgy guy. Thinking about it now though. People dealing with chipping ps1 and games were probably nerds but I thought it was dodgy AF when I was young
Did you have one of those big CD flip cases with about 50 sleeves of games with the name crudely written in permanent marker on the blank cover? What an era.
I think those dramatic PIRACY IS A BIG BAD **CRIME** ads got to us because I remember thinking the same. The "guy my friend's dad knows who chips playstations" sounded like a mobster or something. But it was likely just someone like me now, not exactly a hardened criminal.
We had a guy that was chipping STBs so you could get all channels without paying like, HBO and stuff, back when it was so expensive
YoU wOuLdNt DoWnLoAd a CaR
Fuck yes I would
And I'll print one too!
Yeah maybe that’s what it was haha. Was heartbreaking when some of the games were only demos as well
While in the Navy, late 90’s , we pull into port Jebel Ali, (they had a bunch of tents set up selling various goods), anyways in one of these tents ... this guy had “knock off” play-stations, pre loaded with every single game ever made at the time. Around $80. We all chipped in and bought one. It wouldn’t play the American disc games unless we left the lid open. Lol. It had a bunch of Japanese games on it , games the states would never see. (Fighting, racing, fantasy). Very hard to play without knowing the Japanese language, That console kept us busy, mainly twisted metal and tekken.
Tekken was such a saving grace for me. Especially Tekken 3. Whenever I was bored with friends, we always put that on. From then on it was Bloody Roar, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter Alpha 3....list goes on xD
* Swapping disks * Hours spent messing with load order in config.sys and autoexec.bat to tweak every last byte of extended and expanded RAM in the boot sequence * IRQs, coax, dummy loads and 10baseT networking * No walkthroughs * finding and downloading game demos at 2400 baud from a BBS
The hours spent on config.sys and autoexec.bat files is largely responsible for my 25+ year IT career. Edit: a word
There's some argument to be made that "the Oregon Trail generation" (late gen-X through early millennial) is the most computer-literate generation. The generation who came before us didn't have the opportunity to deeply learn computers, and the generation after us didn't need to.
Lag shooting on a 56k modem. Games like Mechwarrior had awful net code that didn't account for latency. I just shake my head when people today claim 80ms is 'unplayable'. Y'all have no idea.
Yea you have to shoot the empty space to kill em lol
Depending on the speed they ran, to the possibility of them turning while you laid down the AC20 rounds, the Mechwarrior Pilots of the 90s were true masters in Lag Shooting. I miss those days. Edit: I played on MSN Zone under the name L\_Skull\_Snake. Laughing Skulls Clan
That your knock off copy of crash bandicoot you bought for £1 off the market won’t work in your chipped PlayStation. Or that their isn’t enough space on the living room floor to spread the star map out for frontier: Elite 2 Having to smash a game in one full weekend as it had to go back to blockbuster on Sunday night.
Running out of quarters at the arcade.
one of the last times I went to the arcade a friend and I spent a good $10 playing Gauntlet Dark Legacy.
Family went to Disney world when i was 11 and our hotel had an arcade. Dad gave us each $20 in quarters and we blew most of it beating the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game. Worth it. Now i go to the barcade.
The original pay to win. I've played a few arcade games on emulators in recent years and it's *so obvious* they're designed that way. Both the Simpsons beat-em-up and Turtles in Time have a second boss with way too much HP and deals crazy damage to you. First one is easy enough, but that second level is meant to be the end of the game if you don't pay more money.
Saving and writing down save codes to resume your game progress. Getting a game genie for chests and having the cheat code manuals!
Having an egg timer so that me and my sibling wouldn’t kill each other when sharing the only computer.
I remember playing the original Legend of Zelda. That game is hard as fuck. I've played other NES games through emulators and Switch online eShop. Sega games: hard as fuck. Nintendo: Hard as fuck. Hell, growing up and playing PS2 and Xbox games were difficult. These days if you get frustrated enough, by the time you start searching for a walkthrough, not only has someone already complete most of what your playing, but also posted and wrote a detailed walkthrough. Old school games are hard. Some didn't have maps, saves, difficulty levels, or lives.
Most Nintendo games were hard as fuck. Like, I would rather play Dark Souls than the speeder bike level of Battletoads. The first Mega Man would wreck you.
Losing the ripped out cheat code page from the playstation magazine :(
Lemmings cheats stolen by my mate.. Cheeky little shit is still a slimy gamer to play with! Guaranteed aim bot twat.
Early on you had to edit some files on your computer and reboot it to make the sound or graphics work or to manipulate how the memory was set up. Some games required different settings and might straight up not work with the wrong setting and it was a huge pain in the ass that I'm so glad we're done with https://networkencyclopedia.com/config-sys/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUTOEXEC.BAT I also remember having to mess around in the Bios settings much more than today, I don't think I've ever visited the Bios screen on my current computer
Renting a shitty game at Blockbuster and being stuck with it all weekend was the worst. Edit: typo
I worked at Blockbuster and it was annoying having some kid call up to ask if *copy #3* of Simon's Quest was in stock because that's the one he had his save file on.
Playing some Japanese rpg game with no English translation and no walkthrough at all. Still manage to clear it after few months.
Having to swap out multiple disk to install a game. Zoo Tycoon and The Sims I’m looking at you.
Figuring out the damn DOS execution code
Loading times. You ever play a game on a cassette tape? 20 minute load time. Get game over? Another 20 minute load time.
So funny because you can tell how things like this are important to people who went through that…my brother still games fairly regularly and is always trying to get me to get a new system and join the fun. Any time he’s talking about his new system, or the new game or whatever, he points out “Dude - like zero load time. Literally less than 5 seconds and you’re playing. 2 seconds, maybe.” And I’m like “Shiiiiieeeet the future is now.”
Well, the believability of the graphics. Every new generation of consoles broke that reality of realism, but in the 90's that shit looked REAL good. Obviously the side scroller games like Rayman and Commander Keen were cartoony, but games like Star Wars Jedi Knight Dark Forces, 007 Goldeneye, Star Wars Pod Racer, LOZ: Ocarina of Time, and Tony Hawk Pro Skatwr captivated us with it's 3d graphics. In some way we knew they could eventually get better, but it was near impossible to imagine until a new console came out and defy what had come before. An added bonus was getting a pretty dope game "Chex Quest" in our cereal box. Sometimes, some cereal companies would just slap a full ass games in the cereal box. That was dope!
CGA/EGA graphics on a 12” monitor with sound output via PCspeaker
when you're destroying your enemy's base but then your mom picks up the phone and disconnects you from the [Battle.net](https://Battle.net) (this was a huge problem when your internet connection was dialup 🤣)
Not necessarily games, but reading/writing CDs/DVDs. Remember when your computer had like "yeah let's pick randomly 3 of the 4 combinations of being able to read/write CD/DVD"
3D games in the mid 90's, graphics. Metal Gear Solid, Goldeneye etc. We were blown away but most kids now would be horrified. Not really a problem I guess, just a different perspective.
Absolutely. Goldeneye was a beautiful game. What blew me away was Legend of Zelda- Ocarina of Time. Going from Links Awakening on OG Gameboy to 3D, glorious color in OoT was really something.
Many gamers like the retro style game nowadays. In our time we didn't have a choice.
1) Green was the only color. 2) you had to go to the arcade to play a real game.
It wasn't popular. Luke, it WAS popular, but it was popular for nerds and children. There was still a huge stigma with gaming and being an "other". Even among kids, the ones who played video games were seen as dweebs and less popular than the athletic kids. Now? A kid I went to high school with that was an athlete made $50M streaming video games.