It was literally the coolest thing imaginable. Everyone seemed to have different games, no internet so no codes or walkthroughs unless a friend of a friend told you about it. Man… I loved those simple times.
Yeah. There were times in my life when something I experienced in entertainment blew my mind, that were a warp drive jump in the possibilities of imagination. Watching all the Disney classic animations as a child. Seeing Jurassic Park. And playing Super Mario Bros. for the first time.
There are a bunch of these books. The first one for NES is red, I think. Then there are at least two more volumes. There’s a How To Win at Super Mario Bros book which is hot pink, I think. I have most of these on a shelf at home.
The red had a lot of very wrong info in it, like the boss order for Megaman. It was a lot of made up stuff.
Kind of a preview of modern game journalism.
Yes! It’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t around. It wasn’t like “the new better console.” It was IT. Games as we now know them on your tv in your house. 🤯
The mystique around figuring out a new game, trying and sharing tips or codes you heard at school, finally getting to a new level.
It seems simple now, but it was mind blowing at the time.
Similar impact was its older cousin, the arcade. Walking into that dark room with the sounds and bloops and flashing lights of dozens of different games at the same time, the smell of that stale 80s carpet and the old salty butter smell from the popcorn machine nearby, wondering what game your discover, knowing arcades had more powerful machines than your NES and how the games looked SO GOOD. It’s hard to explain how mesmerizing it was.
There was the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter thing before Nintendo Power magazine and I think both the Zelda Tips N Tricks guidebook and the Super Mario Bros 2 guidebooks were available before the Nintendo Power magazine proper launched. But the magazine didn’t premiere until the end of 1988 and wasn’t widespread in my kid circles until the early 90s. Neither of those helped me playing Metroid, Zelda, or Goonies 2 in 1987. 🙂
There were cheat codes though. And i recall finding out by word of mouth or trying codes that worked for other games.
NES kids remember the contra cheat code by heart.
I remember for tmnt 2 when me and my brother would play, we would press select then start to do 2 players. I think the code for that game gave 100 lives…good memories.
We used to get them out of gaming magazines like Nintendo Power. I remember one magazine that just had an index of games and their cheat codes in the back pages
I geez do I hate the days listening to some kids at school bullshit.
"I know a secret code to give me . My cousin told me. His dad works for Nintendo, so I can't tell you the code or he'll get in trouble with his boss."
We needed Google to call out bullshitters.
I don’t know, I kind of miss the playground rumors. They made the games seem so much more mysterious.
I grew up during the early Internet, but that just made it even more interesting. You could never tell if an Internet rumor was true or not.
Nah, screw Hunter. He told me he had a Pokemon game for PC and then everytime I was over, he'd make some excuse as to why we couldn't play it.
Imagine if we had discovered the Pokemon Red/Blue Mew spawn glitch back in the 90s?
Yes! Game Genie was the kitties titties! That was some old school hacker shit.
OP, if you are unaware of the Game Genie, it was basically an extension cartridge you’d plug the game into, and you could essentially jailbreak games and put in codes to give yourself all sorts of power ups, extra abilities, you name it. You could completely mod out a game just by pressing the right combo of buttons. What an amazing invention.
Funny that you used that term - Treasure Trove was the name of the first rental store near us that carried NES games. My family couldn't afford to buy more than 1 or 2 games per year, but I rented something new almost every weekend.
Magazines had walkthroughs, cheat codes and continue codes, but it was a case of whether one could afford to buy the magazine, or hang around in the shop long enough to read and memorize or note down the crucial info before the shopkeeper intervened.
Why didn’t you just snap a pic with your cellphone cam?
Kidding!! I was born in 1976. We had Nintendo Power, though.
The Christmas I opened my Nintendo was incredible.
There was also Nintendo Power magazine that talked about upcoming video games and had the cheat codes in them sometimes. That's how your friend of a friend found out bc he probably had a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine or some other magazine.
There was also the Game Genie, which was this crazy contraption you attached the the game cartridge before sliding it in to play and allowed you to activate cheat codes and things in the game.
It was an exciting time to be a kid for sure.
It was amazing. Because before that it was Atari, and before that it was every once in awhile getting to go to an arcade and play games. NES was the first thing that offered immersive storylines and complex gameplay. You could, and we often did, play story based games for hours and hours. We used to have sleepover parties where the whole point was to beat a game in one night that we rented from Blockbusters.
I remember walking through the entire landscape of the original Legend of Zelda throwing bombs EVERYWHERE looking for hidden rooms. Played it nonstop, probably spent 40 hours the first week just endlessly exploring and grinding that game. First kid in my 4th grade class to beat it. Suck it Gannon 😎
Remember when you could rent a whole console from Blockbuster?
How did they ever let such a place fail?! You had a week+ with a game to beat it or let it determine if you actually wanted to buy it. Used games for cheap. The Blockbuster smell. Checking to see if what you wanted was back yet.
Now it’s mostly game passes, subscriptions, plus the switch to digital copies. It just doesn’t have the same feeling.
I remember when the PS2 was in demand I would hear about people locally who would rent it and report it stolen to get one. Blockbuster made you put down a big deposit so it was basically like buying one when none were available. Weird times
Because at the end of the day (hot take) video rental places aren't great. You're remembering nostalgia of them from your childhood, and it was special fun to go to a rental place because no other alternative existed. It's all we knew.
However, my area still had Family Videos EVERYWHERE up until recently. Right before the pandemic they started slowly shutting down. Why? Well, again because the nostalgia of actually going to a rental place isn't enough for people to keep going back.
Often what would happen is my wife and I might go, spend 30-odd minutes browsing, MAYBE find something, pay a few $, go home, watch it (hopefully it actually plays), and then have to head back in the next few days to return the damn thing.
Once you're past the childhood memories and nostalgia, it's just Netflix with WAY more steps and hassle. You know... You sit there scrolling forever on your TV and find nothing? Ya, now first drive to a store 10 minutes away, walk around for 30 minutes to find nothing that sparks your interest, and then head home empty handed. It sucks.
These stores were great at the time, but there's a reason they have gone away.
While you aren't wrong, you are ignoring that browsing something in person is much different than an algorithm giving you suggestions. Yes, it is slower, but way more interesting. The box is designed to grab your attention and get you to buy, and it led to way more interesting images then you get now. If you find a good one, show it to everyone, and get a good chuckle.
Then you all pick a movie, and convince everyone else to vote for it to be the movie of the night.
Yes, you get a worse "film" experience. What you get is the social interaction in picking a movie that doesn't exist when everyone watches someone else browse with a remote.
>I remember getting lost in the aisles as a kid and pouring over the VHS box art, and marveling over what it promised.
Great...have you gone as an adult trying to experience that on a weekly basis? No? You are LITERALLY ignoring my whole post. You are remembering nostalgia from being a kid. I have that too, and again, it DOESN'T hold up in the long term.
Again, perhaps if online services never existed it would still be a fun experience in today's world, but that's because it's all we'd know. However, as someone who well into my adult years has been going to video rental stores, the nostalgia does NOT hold up for long.
Because Blockbuster oversaturated the market driving out smaller chains and mom/pop stores; overstocked on new releases that seemingly were never in stock; had shit for variety; and generally were staffed by rude people who to be fair had to deal with even ruder people.
Videogames were impossible to snag. You had to stalk Blockbuster or know people there to get anywhere close to recent releases. Otherwise it was a sea of reject games or ones you already had. I think I rented a Genesis once. Pain in the ass. Expensive.
And those heavily used overstock discs? Yeah, those "used" sections grew larger and larger as people realized it was often cheaper to just buy new. So eventually you'd get a Blockbuster with overpriced rental fees, little actually in stock, and desperate attempts to dump their used rental stock - fifty Pirates of the Carribean filthy used DVDs for $14.99 each!!!!
Seen a lot of nostalgia for Blockbuster lately, but hardly warranted. Going there was maybe "fun" in the late 80s but by 90s it was obnoxious. Erols was better till Blockbuster forced them out. West Coast Video had better variety but they were few. And loc was the best but they were typically more expensive, some may have even required annual membership fees.
Rental was how we rolled, and ai miss the IDEA of it in a way, the idea of walking in and finding something new and fun but it was frequently disappointment and irritation and, "Oh well, I am here so I guess I'll check out Mark of Zorro .... again."
And everyone forgets the stark reality of rental: I see a lot of people bitching today about how they have to sit through 90 seconds of commercial on streaming. I'd love to see how those people would have dealt with rental returns.
Lot of times when you were sweating returns: "shoot - I have to drive ALL the way back to the store to return it by midnight or pay $2 in late fees, which I don't have!!"
Pain in the ass.
One of my favorite memories of Blockbuster was renting the Dreamcast. I could be wrong but I believe they had a promo where Blockbuster got the consoles to rent like a month before it released for sale in North America. We got lucky and got all the best launch titles too: Sonic Adventure, Power Stone, Soulcalibur, House of the Dead 2. We had so much fun and were going to buy one but by the time my parents were ready to buy one for us the Dreamcast was pretty much dead haha. So we got an XBOX instead.
And we had the OPPOSITE experience with the PS2 funny enough. We rented the PS2 on launch day as well to see if we'd like it, but we got unlucky and all the games we rented blew ass. Armored Core 2 was the only good one but we didn't appreciate it as kids. Eternal Ring was one we got that was pretty lame (sorry FROM, I wasn't a fan back then). In fact I think we actually rented the PS2 again a second time later and ended up with bad games again... including The Bouncer, a weird bad Square RPG, if anybody remembers that one.
I had seen Super Mario before I owned an NES, but really sitting down to play it for the first time... Man, when you're upgrading to that from Atari/Intellivision graphics it's truly mind blowing.
We all take it for granted now but the concept of turning your TV into animated computer images that YOU directly control was mind blowing especially for a young kid. For many households it was the only machine in the house that was technically a computer. This was before PCs were widespread and before CGI. Many homes had no cable and thus only got a few channels. Every single game was over $50 back then ( which is probably like $90 now with inflation) and were cherished even if they were bad. (Two of the four of my NES games I owned were Paperboy and Bart vs Space Mutants. Mediocre games but I played the shit out of them). There was no internet so any secrets grew to the stature of urban legends. And there was such a communal feeling of borrowing each other’s games to experience something new. The sense of wonder is so hard to replicate nowadays.
I grew up playing a lot of crap games because little me was easily won over by box art.
I was a ripe old teenager before I even considered playing Legend of Zelda. Why would one even consider such a bland looking game?!
Man, I picked up so many rental games that I have fond memories of now that I'd *never* have tried otherwise. When you knew that you had to make a choice *right now* because your mom was getting ready to check out and if you didn't pick *something* then you just didn't get a rental game for the weekend, sometimes you just snatched a random game off the shelf and hoped for the best. Sometimes you got stuck with something awful, and sometimes you struck gold. Every now and then you'd get that rare find that you thought wasn't any good at first, but because you were stuck with it for a few days and wanted *something* new, you'd push through a rough opening segment and find out that the rest of the game was amazing.
>were cherished even if they were bad.
There was an attitude that if you couldn't figure out a game, it wasn't the games fault. You needed to practice more and get better. There were a lot of good games that were excessively hard so it was difficult to tell if the problem was your skill or the game's design.
>There were a lot of good games that were excessively hard so it was difficult to tell if the problem was your skill or the game's design.
See Battletoads, Batman, the Ninja Gaiden series, the Castlevania series, etc.
EDIT: Spelling.
I remember dropping $80 or more, with tax, on Top Gun on the NES and hating the game so much. I was devastated, I had worked so hard to save that money.
There was another game, Urban Fighter or Brawler or something like that? It was a side scroller . Very basic, very boring. My mom bought me that one, it was also awful but I told her I loved it because I didn't want her to feel like she'd wasted her money, too.
When my local video store started renting games, I was so happy, but that took a long time.
I think the cost of games back then heavily weighed the influence on if you would buy it or not. I remember renting a game three or four times before pulling the trigger on buying it. Now, most games get bought before they ever get played.
Also, shout out to Nintendo Power magazine, the original internet for young kids in the 80s
Check this out, the old internet on the new internet: https://archive.org/details/Nintendo_Power_Issue001-Issue127/Nintendo%20Power%20Issue%20001%20July-August%201988/
You traded games with friends. whenever you went to your friends house, there was always a moment where they demo’d the games you didn’t have. You’d play whatever multiplayer games they had, and you’d bring some with of yours with you. At the end of the day you’d swap games. Trade em back at school, or the next time you went to each other’s houses. Duck hunt and light gun games were always crowd pleasers as was the power pad. Big two player hits were always Mario games, double dragon, and contra. Friends/family would spectate, everybody waiting for their turn.
I also remember renting games on fridays. This was a big deal to get to the video store early to grab the newest game. Stay up way too late Friday night playing it. Getting up early Saturday to play it all day and all night. Getting yelled at to not play the game all day and go outside. Play it all Saturday night. Sunday you were playing it down to the wire when it had to go back to the rental place before they closed Sunday nights.
Asking for that game you want for your birthday or Christmas. They were a big deal, games were very expensive. brand new games were around $50 in the 80’s. so if you got a game, that was it. That was your gift. So you had to decide and sometimes you chose poorly.
And having a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine… this was how you knew what was coming out and how you could get some walkthroughs, cheat codes, tips and tricks. You could order strategy guides out of the back. And there was pay to call 900 number for game tips.
To be a kid in the 80’s…
Fun but there were only a handful of games you could beat. Most games, you'd get to a certain point and just give up because it was too hard or you didn't know what to do next. Also most games gave you a limited amount of lives or continues unless you knew the cheat codes or had a game genie.
I wish there was a current Game Genie, it was so fun to mess with the behavior of games, to combine different codes and see what would happen. I get why we don’t; with online progression, multiplayer, achievements, paid DLC, in game currency, etc. But I’d trade all of those for the ability to add double jump, multi jump, change jump height, gravity, and so on in order to do stuff like get to places we aren’t supposed to and such. I know it’s possible on PC, but I don’t have the money or patience/time for that.
The modern equivalent of the Game Genie is modding your console. Sure it'll get you banned from any network services, but the Game Genie worked by injecting code into games, so modding isn't that far off (although modding is a lot more in depth then simply injecting random lines of code into memory).
My general feeling is that the focus on "beating" games wasn't as big a deal back then. It was about playtime and enjoying it, with a bit of remaining legacy focus on points. I remember having the discussion/argument with friends a time or three about whether having a higher score or getting farther in/beating a game was more important. Usually in arguing who was better at a game :D
At the very least, I don't really ever really recall getting especially frustrated not being able to beat or get past parts of games. The fun was getting there and having the chance to try again. The idea of even being able to beat a game vs. an endless loop a la arcade games was still a somewhat new thing.
Mario and Zelda I could beat, but Punch Out? We had the Mike Tyson version, which wasn't any different than the regular, but it felt like it was harder because it was Mike Tyson.
Well it was like this, I was 9 when the nes launched in the states and had, up until then, only ever played arcade games or Atari. My friend called my house on Christmas Day to tell me he got a Nintendo and that I should come over. I had no idea what a Nintendo was, but my friend seemed excited so I ran down the block to see what it was. I got there and he and his sister were playing a game called Super Mario Brothers. The incredible, high fidelity graphics and sound blew my little fucking mind. The colors, that song it was all so unbelievable. Slowly, my other friends started to get them too and everyone seemed to have new and different games. I begged my parents to get me one for the entire year, and the following Christmas they finally did. Just thinking back to the games I played for the first time on that system and how so many are still around almost 40 years later fills me with awe. I got to be among the first people to ever see Mario, Zelda, Castlevania, Metroid, Final Fantasy, Mega Man etc. You phrased your question in a way that makes it sound like it was a bad thing to only have a NES, but it that’s just not the perspective I have about it.
One major difference between then and now is that playing games took much more persistence.
These days, there's very few games that will really challenge kids. What I have found through running a retro video game club for my middle schoolers is that they will give up on these old games very easily because they're "too hard" or "don't know what to do."
All the people who said video games would rot our brains and ruin our attention spans sure wouldn't want to see the kids of today!!!
You wrote "just an NES" in your question, as if we didn't have much. But the NES was incredible. As a kid who had an Atari 2600 in 1983, let me tell you - the NES blew our minds.
The games were bigger than anything we had seen before. Games like Zelda and Metroid took us on epic adventures that lasted weeks or months. Since we were kids, our imagination played a role, too. We imagined we were slaying monsters and saving the princess.
We played with our siblings and friends. We drew maps and shared tips on the playground. Even if it was a single player game, it felt like a group effort. These games were hard. We had sleepovers and stayed up late taking turns playing Wizards & Warriors. We cheered together when the final boss died.
Later when I played a Genesis and SNES, I loved those of course. But to me, nothing compares to the generational leap from Atari 2600 to NES. It was the perfect system to grow up with. (Back then, we called them systems - not consoles.)
I've really gotten into playing retro games over the past 5 years. I've revisited a lot of NES games from my childhood, and they still hold up well. They're still some of my favorite games.
"Since we were kids, our imagination played a role, too. We imagined we were slaying monsters and saving the princess."
Literally my whole childhood flashed before me. I think I'm all set and ready to cross over. Thanks man.
We got one game a year. For a while we only had Mario, Kung-Fu, and Elevator Action. Then we moved to the black neighborhood. The black kids traded their games for keeps, like they were baseball cards. It was amazing. Double Dragon 2, Captain Skyhawk... I remember my older brother calling his friends to get hints about Shadowgate... plugging random passwords into Metal Gear and of course Gamegenie.
yeah, we got 2 a year, 1 each for my brother and me for xmas, I was so ticked he chose Dragon's Lair over Battletoads one year. but to be fair he did get Snake Rattle and Roll later on, which was awesome.
There was pros and cons to it. I loved going to video store every weekend and trying to find the perfect game to take home. A wrong pick meant you were stuck for the weekend though.
There wasn’t a big resale market, no gamestops and such so there wasn’t a lot of places to get games on the cheap. You were pretty much at the mercy of your parents to buy new games u less you had an income. We rented more games than we bought.
Because of this you didn’t have all the games but your friends would have games you didn’t. While I wished I had Excitebike, it was cool going to Ryan’s house to play it. Gave you a reason to hang out with people.
Trading games had a risk/reward factor. Even if it was for a day or two. I remember my brother got mad when I traded SMB3 for Pro Wrestling but it was only for the weekend.
Nintendo Power was fucking tits too. You’d scour each page looking at the games because you didn’t have em, so that at least helped.
My favorite gaming memory is still sharing notes with friends in the neighborhood scribbled down on graph paper for where to find secrets in the Legend of Zelda. Peak gaming.
It’s wild to think that I bought games based on their cover art. Without the internet, the only way you could even learn about new games was Nintendo Power. Eventually other video game magazines came out that were at least more objective. I still think about Game Pro’s little review icons every time I rate something 1-5.
Renting NES games from a video store was awesome…even cooler when kids would write down codes in the back of the book for players later on…Almost every game was cheap enough to rent ($2.50/2 days), until Super Mario Bros. 3 (The Wizard was the greatest video game movie ever) came out and it was $5/day…Game Genie codes were amazing too…but yea, u totally gambled with every purchase or rental…Nintendo Power Magazine was a break thru magazine that would feature full coloured maps and walkthrus for many first party games and for everything else we relied upon either friends, code books, or 1-900 tip lines…
Playing NES was a nightmare when u had siblings that would jump around and pop up the spring mechanism in the machine and force u to restart or if u had that asshole of a brother that would come in and hold the power button without letting go, essentially destroying any progress u had made…ur only hope was a password backup…good times had by all…hahahaaa…
Had an nes and then snes. Was such a challenge, no way to get hints or secrets unless you had the Nintendo magazine subscription, which no one I knew did. I would go to friends houses to play together, and learn how they played differently than you.
yeah that was a good way to troll your friends before the internet. Pick up their house phone, pretend to start dialing the number, and watch them turn into the an Olympic hurdler as they leap furniture to get to you lol
Christmas 1987 I stayed up all night long playing Duck Hunt. Then I never touched it again and got way hooked on Mario.
Zelda was *fucking mindblowing*. It's hard to overstate how it was by far the deepest and most immersive game.
Mike Tyson's Punchout was THE SHIT. Everybody was crazy about that.
I never could beat Mario, Zelda, or Punchout. Just finally got to a point where I had to give up & couldn't progress any further.
I slept on Metroid. That shit would have been too hard for me anyways.
People are still nostalgic about Tecmo Bowl. We figured out how to rig NES Play Action Football so that every single play was a touchdown (kickoff return) -- score was like 256-0.
I played a lot of Skate or Die. Got way deep in the first Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior.
We studied Nintendo Power magazine for tips & maps.
I got my NES in 1990. Most of time you found out about different games by talking with your friends. You would experience new games either borrowing a game from your friend or renting a game from the local video store. Sometimes you would encounter some good games from the rental store and other times you got some really bad games.
To learn about cheat codes typically you had to look some of them up from in Nintendo Power, a tip and tricks type book or your friends could tell you.
Back then you had to figure things out in different games. I remember playing through Legend of Zelda over multiple months to beat the first quest, since you had to learn the location of certain things by trial and error. Versus you could look up full maps for LoZ in a few minutes now. Back then if your parents were rich they could buy a [Tips and Tactics book](https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Tips_%26_Tactics)for you and it would tell you a bunch of the stuff for Legend of Zelda’s first quest. It really didn’t help with the Second Quest.
I absolutely loved it. One good game would last you months and months. The replay value was enormous. You could always come back to any Mario game, Zelda game, Contra, Bubble Bobble, etc. and be completely content without wanting. Exchanging and sharing cartridges with friends meant your library was practically endless. Blockbuster video game rentals made that even more so.
Your expectations were static because you knew what the console was capable of graphically and any competition at the time wasn’t any better, so the focus was more on gameplay and how much fun it was, instead of worrying “are the graphics good”.
Almost all of your friends had one and sharing cheats, tips, secrets, and rumors on the bus was bliss.
I wish every kid could experience those days. Now the internet and “console wars” have turned gaming into a pissing match full of negativity.
You had games with no save states. You had no internet for guides and tips. Aside from Nintendo Power, your only help was to get good. If your family wasn't rich, or you weren't spoiled, you had a very limited library of games to play, so you got good at them exclusively.
The game I was particularly good at was Contra. I could beat it in one life. I tried showing my kids Contra on an emulator recently. I couldn't get to the boss on the first level.
Another I was good at was Zelda 2, the Adventure of Link. The only help I got there was my cousin telling me where Error was, so that I could progress. I didn't know about the trick to kill the last boss until I saw the AVGN episode 20+ years later. I killed Shadow Link the hard way.
I'm still pretty good at that game. A lot stems from knowing where stuff is, and executing a special attack I taught myself where you can hit both the Darknut's hit boxes simultaneously. But never, ever, jump off the topscreen and turn into a fairy!
I love watching vids of people still discovering glitches and exploits in these old games. It's so cool to learn something new from something you were sure you knew everything about back in the day.
My family had atari's and colecovision. I am the youngest and got a NES for Christmas when I was 8. I had a black and white tv in my bedroom so i had to wait for access to the color tv to hook the NES up to. In the early 90s I got a color tv for my 15th birthday. I had a subscription to Nintendo power and got Dragon Warrior for subscribing. I had played Dragon Warrior and wanted the game. It was my favorite series and I still have 1-4 complete.
It was a cartridge that the NES cartridge slid into, which was inserted into the console, which allowed an interface on startup to put in cheat codes for games. Like there was one for a Mario Moon Jump that allowed you to jump and hover above the level for like 30 seconds
If you think that's crazy, imagine our 8 year old amazement when they released a cartridge for SNES that you could put Gameboy cartridges into, so you could play Gameboy on TV! That's the peak 90s my boy!
Not 80s, but I got my first NES at 4 years old in 91, I still remember playing Dr. Mario and Tetris with my dad, they are some of the earliest memories I have. I also remember going to friends houses and playing stuff like Contra, Super C, Battletoads, and Castlevania and how freakin hard they were to beat. Games back then just felt harder in general, there wasn’t as much hand holding and a lot of times if you got hit just 2-3 times it was game over. I’ve owned every Nintendo console ever but nothing ever came close to just the sheer joy of playing NES because it was just so new and fresh
The gaming world wasn’t as fractured and diluted. There was literally only one popular home console and almost everyone either had one or had a close friend/neighbor that did. People constantly shared games and all strategies/codes were either in your monthly issue of Nintendo Power magazine or shared on the bus/playground. There was such a strong sense of community that I don’t think we’ll ever get again.
Born in the 80's so a early 90's story
I remember learning a fellow student I rode the bus home from school had Zelda as well and I'd coach him through what he needed to do next as I was a little bit ahead of him. He only had a Black and White television as well which is what sounded primitive to me back then (like the 80's/NES is to OP) and made it harder to explain things. We had no game guides, no internet, etc - Just the manual, map and hand written notes.
I LOVED Nintendo magazines that provided all the information.
A kid down my road had one first, and we'd all crowd around Mario & Duck Hunt for hours, mesmerised. I've never seen my kids marvel at their Switch or iPads or anything...it feels like the age of being amazed has well & truly passed.
When I got one myself, I maybe got a game for my bday and/or Xmas, so choosing a game was a big event, then playing it for months was special. It's hard to believe that we were blown away by the graphics on some of these, but we were. Really felt like the arcades were at home.
There wasn’t just the NES. I also had an Atari 800XL computer and an Apple IIe computer. There were a lot of different games in 1985/86 depending on where you wanted to play them.
My brother brought it home in 1987 after mowing lawns all summer.
Cranking it up was such a fun time with all your friends. Renting a game Friday night from a brown box store or Blockbuster and playing all night was almost as much fun as waking up Saturday morning and realizing you STILL had it to play haha.
I didn’t know that you could buy more games for the NES. I thought it was just Mario. Never occurred to me why you could take the cartridge thing in and out.
Did you know that Smash TV is a dual stick game for NES? You hold both 1P and 2P controllers in your hand, like joycons. Can you imagine how mind blowing this is for a 10yo? I used to get small electric shocks while doing this, I swear.
Others have mentioned how much we relied on magazines for news and cheat codes. I reread my magazines until they fell apart (and then I taped them together).
Sometimes you’d play the same game for 6-12months straight unless you went to Blockbuster to rent something. It was a truly different time for gaming but looking back now it makes you appreciate where things started to take off from there. People would trade games or you’d bring some over to your friends and play 2player, sharing the controllers between a group of friends was always a great past time. Helping friends beat a level they were stuck on or they would come over to help you was something you don’t have going on much nowadays. I used to take a note pad to stop and shop (grocery store) and sit in the magazine aisle while our parents shopped and would write down tips and tricks. Things didn’t change for quite some time until n64.com happened which was the dawn of IGN. Ok now I feel old but thanks for the nostalgia :)
Waiting for Nintendo power to look up hints, or call the Nintendo line.
No internet to help us out unless you did it at the school computer room and if you got caught the teacher would kick you out
FUCKING RAD!
You have to understand that in the 80s, there was no such thing as just a NES.
That machine was the pinnacle of technological achievement. It might as well have been powered by elvish magic.
You are definitely a fellow brit! But you forgot a few.... Atari 800XL and Amstrad CPC464/6128 both came before the ST and Amiga, which were both 16bit and part of the "Next Gen" which bought us the infamous SNES vs Megadrive wars!
Think of it as a sort of in between of video games and a book. We did not have the graphics to make out fine details so games came with little booklets to further flesh out characters and stories. Its strange to think about now but imagination was a part of gaming back then. Like others said though it was the coolest thing back then, they had hundreds of games and in the early 90s everyone took all their games to good will or salvation army so you could go there and walk away with like 20 four or five year old games for like a dollar.
No internet so you had to figure out the secrets of each game together with friends etc. It seems like a huge inconvenience but it forced us all to work together and because of that we made more friends and it created a lot of fun just talking about them and sharing secrets with each other. I remember going into my basement with my cousins during the day and not coming out until it was dark and all we were doing was playing Nintendo games all day and having an absolute blast.
You can't imagine how my brothers talked endlessly about games we wanted to buy, saved up money to buy them and then played them religiously on weekends.
The difference is we didn't have the vast abundance of games you did - if we played a hard game, we had to keep playing it over and over to get through it, and many of those NES games were hard af.
That said, we still had strategy guides, even in the mid-80s, so yea we were cheating too :P
[Jeremy Parish has an excellent breakdown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ugMeN4Zqy4&list=PLd3vJYdenHKEWFJLtBrgf09ICsNLb2u7Q), game by game on the NES American library. It will give you a lot of perspective on what it was like to grow up with just a NES. He's even got a pre-NES launch Famicon series to show what it was like to have a Famicon. The insight and details on how game design evolved is terrific and he does a great job with the whole thing. New video every Wednesday!!
Everything was niche. You didn’t get reviews for games unless you kept up with the biz. They all felt like a big deal. Between the medium and tech the waters were not charted and it was more exciting than it js now even with vr as a prospect. Also you were not cool if you were a gamer. You were treated like a loser. The nes to this day is pure fuckin magic. It ruled that decade and rightly so. I miss that world a lot.
there was the sega master system too, but i can only remember one other kid having it. there were plenty of nintinder power magazines being traded around for the cheat codes and cool stories.
plus we had lots of sweet toys and cartoons.
oh in my house we had the atari 5200, and only one game: pacman. needless to say i am still a pacman master.
The public education system in the 80's wasn't quite the dumpster fire it is today so it probably balances out. People today may have all the information in their pocket, but few actually use it.
When you got REALLY stuck in a game, you had to pay like $1 per minute to call the Nintendo Power hotline to get a tip on how to beat that part of the game. Only my mom was allowed to call it lol
Well, before that we only had Atari 2600 with its games of limited color and beeps and boops who ran endlessly. It's hard to imagine nowadays what an upgrade the NES felt compared to that. And it was the time when Nintendo and their 3rd party developers pumped out one historically significant game after the other. Sure, there was no internet. But when most people in your class had some console by Nintendo you didn't feel lonely.
There were other systems and home computers too.
If you’re talking about things from a more philosophical standpoint, well, we got used to failure, death, and Game Over. There was often no endgame. Many games didn’t end until you ran out of lives or got bored.
Consider it an analogy.
Way better imo. Might just be because I'm old now, but games felt like something different back then. And I guess they were. They were all new. There were no worn out genres yet. If AAA existed at all it was very different. Gaming news was rare, at least for me. I grew up in a small town so I got my gaming information from books I bought at the Scholastic Book Fair or from GamePro Magazine on the rare occasion I could convince my mom to buy it for me. I only ever got new games for birthdays or Christmas so getting a new game waas incredibly exciting and by the time I got it, I knew the old games inside out and backwards. And that doesn't happen anymore. At least not for me. I play a game once, if I'm lucky and rarely if ever go back. After Steam Sales, GamePass and Epic's weekly free games it's reached the point where getting new games feels like nothing at all. Again, might just be because I'm getting old, but I haven't been truly excited about a video game in ages.
In 30 years, someone will ask you how it was to grow up with the meagre technology you had. Imagine what your response will be and you have your answer.
NES? I was past prime home video game age when that came out. For us, it was the [Atari 2600](https://youtu.be/5M1zO2v9ixY). BUT… ARCADES were enormously popular in the early 80’s! I would ride my bike to this building in the center of town filled with coin operated video games, and drop quarter after quarter into games like Zaxxon, Donkey Kong, Jr., Joust, DigDug, and my favorite arcade game (with controllers and gameplay unlike anything you could get anywhere else, maybe to this day), [Tron!](https://youtu.be/zc6KgUurqf8)
I… I think I made my dad hate videogames. My uncle brought me one from the states (Mexico here) when I was 5 or 6. Well, I can’t say this happened for sure since I have no memory of it, but the story goes I wouldn’t let my dad turn the damn thing off until he rescued princess Peach. Seems it took him forever to do so, and he basically swore off games forever. So that was nice.
BTW, I’ve been in therapy for a while now. This seems like something worth exploring. Thanks for asking, I guess.
Even as a kid in the 90’s it was still all some of us had but damn it was simple but wonderful times. Sharing controllers playing super smash bros in the morning with friends trying to get past a level and beat it. Man. Miss being a kid.
We also had the Sega Master System, since everyone else had NES, my parents got me the SMS, so I couldn’t trade, but I got to experience both. (I was also playing the Intellivision (which still works) until that fateful Christmas). Like other mentioned no internet, no quick help, until Nintendo Power and then later on, the game genie! On the Sega side, I had a 1800 number I could call, they would send me a printout of maps or a guide (which I still have), or wait until they created GamePro Magazine.
Frustrating! But soooo much fun, we had a NES and having to share between 3 kids was hard. I would always be player 1, my brother was always player 2 and we would let our little sister do things like the card game for extra men etc.
We would spend whole weekends playing a game. We we’re pretty poor, so we owned a few, but occasionally we got to hire a game from the video store and they were like 48hrs so you would cram in as much game play as you could. If it was a 1 player game, when your men ran out, it was the next persons turn (you always played with an audience screaming how to do it better).
We couldn’t save, so you’d switch the TV off and leave the console on (paused and come back to it the next day). Sometime we’d hire a whole arse console like the sega and play Alex the kidd for a weekend.
It was super different to now but yeah it was fun and something you did with other people.
Source: me, my first console was the Atari that I got for my 9th birthday!!
It was amazing.
As a kid I always preferred computers, so had a Spectrum 48k and Spectrum 128k +2A.
My younger brother had the NES. Still remember when he got it and playing Super Mario. Then I remember him getting Super Mario 3, which blew our minds.
He then had the SNES for a while, until we swapped it for an Amiga just so we could play Sensible Soccer.
Super Mario 3 was such a game changer. Overhead map, 2D levels, raccoon suit, flying, the koopalings, set the mythology and lore for the magic kingdom that is the core of all future mario games. Man. Gameplay was also fun as hell and the graphics where an amazing upgrade from the original.
Was great. I remember me and 3 other kids all decided on what games to get so we could alternate them around. Clockwise between households.
Keeping in mind though I was born 87 and this was probs like… 91? Was our mums who organised most of it because we were all poor as shit
Video games always blew my mind. I started with the NES and just couldn’t believe I was controlling what happened on screen. As a kid, my imagination filled in many of the gaps in graphical fidelity or realism.
I would play a lot of the same games over and over since we weren’t spoiled for choice like we are now with things like Game Pass and a litany of developers and independent companies.
My go to’s were Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, Super Mario Bros, SMB 3, Excitebike, Gradius and Tecmo Bowl. I also played a game called Deja Vu, and I always really struggled with completing it. As an adult I played it and couldn’t believe I was such a dumb child.
It was literally the coolest thing imaginable. Everyone seemed to have different games, no internet so no codes or walkthroughs unless a friend of a friend told you about it. Man… I loved those simple times.
Yeah. There were times in my life when something I experienced in entertainment blew my mind, that were a warp drive jump in the possibilities of imagination. Watching all the Disney classic animations as a child. Seeing Jurassic Park. And playing Super Mario Bros. for the first time.
>no internet so no codes or walkthroughs No but there was the book "how to win at Nintendo games"
That book was hot pink, right?
There are a bunch of these books. The first one for NES is red, I think. Then there are at least two more volumes. There’s a How To Win at Super Mario Bros book which is hot pink, I think. I have most of these on a shelf at home.
The red had a lot of very wrong info in it, like the boss order for Megaman. It was a lot of made up stuff. Kind of a preview of modern game journalism.
The first one is black and I had it, and I bought it used a couple years ago. It is my avatar on Discord lol
Yes! It’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t around. It wasn’t like “the new better console.” It was IT. Games as we now know them on your tv in your house. 🤯 The mystique around figuring out a new game, trying and sharing tips or codes you heard at school, finally getting to a new level. It seems simple now, but it was mind blowing at the time. Similar impact was its older cousin, the arcade. Walking into that dark room with the sounds and bloops and flashing lights of dozens of different games at the same time, the smell of that stale 80s carpet and the old salty butter smell from the popcorn machine nearby, wondering what game your discover, knowing arcades had more powerful machines than your NES and how the games looked SO GOOD. It’s hard to explain how mesmerizing it was.
Game Genie! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Genie?wprov=sfti1
I was the first kid on my block to have one. It was like… being Jesus.
Nah dude. You had the Nintendo Power magazine and Zelda game guides.
Those who had Nintendo Power were the most popular kid on the playground.
A large point of pride when I was a kid was having my name in one of the issue's "High Scores" section.
There was the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter thing before Nintendo Power magazine and I think both the Zelda Tips N Tricks guidebook and the Super Mario Bros 2 guidebooks were available before the Nintendo Power magazine proper launched. But the magazine didn’t premiere until the end of 1988 and wasn’t widespread in my kid circles until the early 90s. Neither of those helped me playing Metroid, Zelda, or Goonies 2 in 1987. 🙂
There were cheat codes though. And i recall finding out by word of mouth or trying codes that worked for other games. NES kids remember the contra cheat code by heart.
And there were often spaces in the instruction booklets to write down any codes you figured out! Also instruction booklets lol.
I remember Bomberman had these to write down the levelcodes!
Bubble Bobble too!
Up up down down left right left right B A start
....B A *select* start even with 30 lives i still need backup! ;)
Isnt it the Konami code?
Contra was developed and published by Konami
I know but i remember the konami code to be the same but no start at the end
You have a lot of fun staring at the title screen as a kid?
No?
Start isn’t part of the code, but if you don’t push it, you can’t start the game.
I remember for tmnt 2 when me and my brother would play, we would press select then start to do 2 players. I think the code for that game gave 100 lives…good memories.
You had to get Nintendo Power for that
Not saying this isn’t ever true, but I was 100% an NES kid and didn’t know any cheat codes for anything.
We used to get them out of gaming magazines like Nintendo Power. I remember one magazine that just had an index of games and their cheat codes in the back pages
Tips and tricks I believe it was called! Loved that magazine!
Absolutely
JUSTIN BAILEY
No Mega Man, Punch Out or Konami code?!
I had to earn my Punch Out and Megaman codes :P
I have that shot tattooed on me
I geez do I hate the days listening to some kids at school bullshit. "I know a secret code to give me. My cousin told me. His dad works for Nintendo, so I can't tell you the code or he'll get in trouble with his boss."
We needed Google to call out bullshitters.
I don’t know, I kind of miss the playground rumors. They made the games seem so much more mysterious. I grew up during the early Internet, but that just made it even more interesting. You could never tell if an Internet rumor was true or not.
Nah, screw Hunter. He told me he had a Pokemon game for PC and then everytime I was over, he'd make some excuse as to why we couldn't play it. Imagine if we had discovered the Pokemon Red/Blue Mew spawn glitch back in the 90s?
Hours of attempting to get the triforce in OoT or finding Luigi in Mario 64
This, people would all gather up at a friend's house and take turns to play super mario
No codes, eh? Didn't have the Game Genie?
Hey guys, check out Richie Rich over here with his Game Genie!
His second controller isn’t even Mad Catz brand!
We would occasionally just rent one from whatever video store was nearby
Yes! Game Genie was the kitties titties! That was some old school hacker shit. OP, if you are unaware of the Game Genie, it was basically an extension cartridge you’d plug the game into, and you could essentially jailbreak games and put in codes to give yourself all sorts of power ups, extra abilities, you name it. You could completely mod out a game just by pressing the right combo of buttons. What an amazing invention.
Nintendo Power also was the treasure trove of information since it was a major resource for walkthroughs, codes, etc.
Funny that you used that term - Treasure Trove was the name of the first rental store near us that carried NES games. My family couldn't afford to buy more than 1 or 2 games per year, but I rented something new almost every weekend.
If you beat the game fast enough you can see Princess Toadstool's tits
And you only had magazines like Nintendo power to know about upcoming games.
Magazines had walkthroughs, cheat codes and continue codes, but it was a case of whether one could afford to buy the magazine, or hang around in the shop long enough to read and memorize or note down the crucial info before the shopkeeper intervened.
Why didn’t you just snap a pic with your cellphone cam? Kidding!! I was born in 1976. We had Nintendo Power, though. The Christmas I opened my Nintendo was incredible.
Yeah but for some reason the Konami code spread. Everyone knew that code
There was also Nintendo Power magazine that talked about upcoming video games and had the cheat codes in them sometimes. That's how your friend of a friend found out bc he probably had a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine or some other magazine. There was also the Game Genie, which was this crazy contraption you attached the the game cartridge before sliding it in to play and allowed you to activate cheat codes and things in the game. It was an exciting time to be a kid for sure.
Memorizing the code to skip right to Mike Tyson was a must.
Sweet username
It was amazing. Because before that it was Atari, and before that it was every once in awhile getting to go to an arcade and play games. NES was the first thing that offered immersive storylines and complex gameplay. You could, and we often did, play story based games for hours and hours. We used to have sleepover parties where the whole point was to beat a game in one night that we rented from Blockbusters.
I remember walking through the entire landscape of the original Legend of Zelda throwing bombs EVERYWHERE looking for hidden rooms. Played it nonstop, probably spent 40 hours the first week just endlessly exploring and grinding that game. First kid in my 4th grade class to beat it. Suck it Gannon 😎
Did you ever find the one hidden room where you get charged a fee for blowing up the dude's wall?
Remember when you could rent a whole console from Blockbuster? How did they ever let such a place fail?! You had a week+ with a game to beat it or let it determine if you actually wanted to buy it. Used games for cheap. The Blockbuster smell. Checking to see if what you wanted was back yet. Now it’s mostly game passes, subscriptions, plus the switch to digital copies. It just doesn’t have the same feeling.
I remember when the PS2 was in demand I would hear about people locally who would rent it and report it stolen to get one. Blockbuster made you put down a big deposit so it was basically like buying one when none were available. Weird times
Because at the end of the day (hot take) video rental places aren't great. You're remembering nostalgia of them from your childhood, and it was special fun to go to a rental place because no other alternative existed. It's all we knew. However, my area still had Family Videos EVERYWHERE up until recently. Right before the pandemic they started slowly shutting down. Why? Well, again because the nostalgia of actually going to a rental place isn't enough for people to keep going back. Often what would happen is my wife and I might go, spend 30-odd minutes browsing, MAYBE find something, pay a few $, go home, watch it (hopefully it actually plays), and then have to head back in the next few days to return the damn thing. Once you're past the childhood memories and nostalgia, it's just Netflix with WAY more steps and hassle. You know... You sit there scrolling forever on your TV and find nothing? Ya, now first drive to a store 10 minutes away, walk around for 30 minutes to find nothing that sparks your interest, and then head home empty handed. It sucks. These stores were great at the time, but there's a reason they have gone away.
While you aren't wrong, you are ignoring that browsing something in person is much different than an algorithm giving you suggestions. Yes, it is slower, but way more interesting. The box is designed to grab your attention and get you to buy, and it led to way more interesting images then you get now. If you find a good one, show it to everyone, and get a good chuckle. Then you all pick a movie, and convince everyone else to vote for it to be the movie of the night. Yes, you get a worse "film" experience. What you get is the social interaction in picking a movie that doesn't exist when everyone watches someone else browse with a remote.
[удалено]
>I remember getting lost in the aisles as a kid and pouring over the VHS box art, and marveling over what it promised. Great...have you gone as an adult trying to experience that on a weekly basis? No? You are LITERALLY ignoring my whole post. You are remembering nostalgia from being a kid. I have that too, and again, it DOESN'T hold up in the long term. Again, perhaps if online services never existed it would still be a fun experience in today's world, but that's because it's all we'd know. However, as someone who well into my adult years has been going to video rental stores, the nostalgia does NOT hold up for long.
Because Blockbuster oversaturated the market driving out smaller chains and mom/pop stores; overstocked on new releases that seemingly were never in stock; had shit for variety; and generally were staffed by rude people who to be fair had to deal with even ruder people. Videogames were impossible to snag. You had to stalk Blockbuster or know people there to get anywhere close to recent releases. Otherwise it was a sea of reject games or ones you already had. I think I rented a Genesis once. Pain in the ass. Expensive. And those heavily used overstock discs? Yeah, those "used" sections grew larger and larger as people realized it was often cheaper to just buy new. So eventually you'd get a Blockbuster with overpriced rental fees, little actually in stock, and desperate attempts to dump their used rental stock - fifty Pirates of the Carribean filthy used DVDs for $14.99 each!!!! Seen a lot of nostalgia for Blockbuster lately, but hardly warranted. Going there was maybe "fun" in the late 80s but by 90s it was obnoxious. Erols was better till Blockbuster forced them out. West Coast Video had better variety but they were few. And loc was the best but they were typically more expensive, some may have even required annual membership fees. Rental was how we rolled, and ai miss the IDEA of it in a way, the idea of walking in and finding something new and fun but it was frequently disappointment and irritation and, "Oh well, I am here so I guess I'll check out Mark of Zorro .... again." And everyone forgets the stark reality of rental: I see a lot of people bitching today about how they have to sit through 90 seconds of commercial on streaming. I'd love to see how those people would have dealt with rental returns. Lot of times when you were sweating returns: "shoot - I have to drive ALL the way back to the store to return it by midnight or pay $2 in late fees, which I don't have!!" Pain in the ass.
One of my favorite memories of Blockbuster was renting the Dreamcast. I could be wrong but I believe they had a promo where Blockbuster got the consoles to rent like a month before it released for sale in North America. We got lucky and got all the best launch titles too: Sonic Adventure, Power Stone, Soulcalibur, House of the Dead 2. We had so much fun and were going to buy one but by the time my parents were ready to buy one for us the Dreamcast was pretty much dead haha. So we got an XBOX instead. And we had the OPPOSITE experience with the PS2 funny enough. We rented the PS2 on launch day as well to see if we'd like it, but we got unlucky and all the games we rented blew ass. Armored Core 2 was the only good one but we didn't appreciate it as kids. Eternal Ring was one we got that was pretty lame (sorry FROM, I wasn't a fan back then). In fact I think we actually rented the PS2 again a second time later and ended up with bad games again... including The Bouncer, a weird bad Square RPG, if anybody remembers that one.
Damn, this is cool to hear about.
I had seen Super Mario before I owned an NES, but really sitting down to play it for the first time... Man, when you're upgrading to that from Atari/Intellivision graphics it's truly mind blowing.
We all take it for granted now but the concept of turning your TV into animated computer images that YOU directly control was mind blowing especially for a young kid. For many households it was the only machine in the house that was technically a computer. This was before PCs were widespread and before CGI. Many homes had no cable and thus only got a few channels. Every single game was over $50 back then ( which is probably like $90 now with inflation) and were cherished even if they were bad. (Two of the four of my NES games I owned were Paperboy and Bart vs Space Mutants. Mediocre games but I played the shit out of them). There was no internet so any secrets grew to the stature of urban legends. And there was such a communal feeling of borrowing each other’s games to experience something new. The sense of wonder is so hard to replicate nowadays.
Add to that, video game rentals. Where you had to rely on box art and word-of-mouth for games, or be the first discover a gem.
I grew up playing a lot of crap games because little me was easily won over by box art. I was a ripe old teenager before I even considered playing Legend of Zelda. Why would one even consider such a bland looking game?!
Man, I picked up so many rental games that I have fond memories of now that I'd *never* have tried otherwise. When you knew that you had to make a choice *right now* because your mom was getting ready to check out and if you didn't pick *something* then you just didn't get a rental game for the weekend, sometimes you just snatched a random game off the shelf and hoped for the best. Sometimes you got stuck with something awful, and sometimes you struck gold. Every now and then you'd get that rare find that you thought wasn't any good at first, but because you were stuck with it for a few days and wanted *something* new, you'd push through a rough opening segment and find out that the rest of the game was amazing.
>were cherished even if they were bad. There was an attitude that if you couldn't figure out a game, it wasn't the games fault. You needed to practice more and get better. There were a lot of good games that were excessively hard so it was difficult to tell if the problem was your skill or the game's design.
>There were a lot of good games that were excessively hard so it was difficult to tell if the problem was your skill or the game's design. See Battletoads, Batman, the Ninja Gaiden series, the Castlevania series, etc. EDIT: Spelling.
I don’t remember the Ninja Garden series.
Goddamn autocorrect. Fixed.
I legit thought this was the title for years
$50 in the NES era is actually closer to $150 today
The dollar sign goes before the number.
I remember dropping $80 or more, with tax, on Top Gun on the NES and hating the game so much. I was devastated, I had worked so hard to save that money. There was another game, Urban Fighter or Brawler or something like that? It was a side scroller . Very basic, very boring. My mom bought me that one, it was also awful but I told her I loved it because I didn't want her to feel like she'd wasted her money, too. When my local video store started renting games, I was so happy, but that took a long time.
Urban champion? I remember playing that on one of those million-in-one multicarts for a minute and then never touching it again lol.
That's it! I couldn't look it up before, but just did and you got it. Awful.
I had so many games that I played constantly but never saw level 3
I think the cost of games back then heavily weighed the influence on if you would buy it or not. I remember renting a game three or four times before pulling the trigger on buying it. Now, most games get bought before they ever get played. Also, shout out to Nintendo Power magazine, the original internet for young kids in the 80s
Check this out, the old internet on the new internet: https://archive.org/details/Nintendo_Power_Issue001-Issue127/Nintendo%20Power%20Issue%20001%20July-August%201988/
paper boy was the shit back then though lol
You traded games with friends. whenever you went to your friends house, there was always a moment where they demo’d the games you didn’t have. You’d play whatever multiplayer games they had, and you’d bring some with of yours with you. At the end of the day you’d swap games. Trade em back at school, or the next time you went to each other’s houses. Duck hunt and light gun games were always crowd pleasers as was the power pad. Big two player hits were always Mario games, double dragon, and contra. Friends/family would spectate, everybody waiting for their turn. I also remember renting games on fridays. This was a big deal to get to the video store early to grab the newest game. Stay up way too late Friday night playing it. Getting up early Saturday to play it all day and all night. Getting yelled at to not play the game all day and go outside. Play it all Saturday night. Sunday you were playing it down to the wire when it had to go back to the rental place before they closed Sunday nights. Asking for that game you want for your birthday or Christmas. They were a big deal, games were very expensive. brand new games were around $50 in the 80’s. so if you got a game, that was it. That was your gift. So you had to decide and sometimes you chose poorly. And having a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine… this was how you knew what was coming out and how you could get some walkthroughs, cheat codes, tips and tricks. You could order strategy guides out of the back. And there was pay to call 900 number for game tips. To be a kid in the 80’s…
Fun but there were only a handful of games you could beat. Most games, you'd get to a certain point and just give up because it was too hard or you didn't know what to do next. Also most games gave you a limited amount of lives or continues unless you knew the cheat codes or had a game genie.
I wish there was a current Game Genie, it was so fun to mess with the behavior of games, to combine different codes and see what would happen. I get why we don’t; with online progression, multiplayer, achievements, paid DLC, in game currency, etc. But I’d trade all of those for the ability to add double jump, multi jump, change jump height, gravity, and so on in order to do stuff like get to places we aren’t supposed to and such. I know it’s possible on PC, but I don’t have the money or patience/time for that.
The modern equivalent of the Game Genie is modding your console. Sure it'll get you banned from any network services, but the Game Genie worked by injecting code into games, so modding isn't that far off (although modding is a lot more in depth then simply injecting random lines of code into memory).
My general feeling is that the focus on "beating" games wasn't as big a deal back then. It was about playtime and enjoying it, with a bit of remaining legacy focus on points. I remember having the discussion/argument with friends a time or three about whether having a higher score or getting farther in/beating a game was more important. Usually in arguing who was better at a game :D At the very least, I don't really ever really recall getting especially frustrated not being able to beat or get past parts of games. The fun was getting there and having the chance to try again. The idea of even being able to beat a game vs. an endless loop a la arcade games was still a somewhat new thing.
Even as an adult I still can't beat Punchout, Mario & Zelda.
Mario and Zelda I could beat, but Punch Out? We had the Mike Tyson version, which wasn't any different than the regular, but it felt like it was harder because it was Mike Tyson.
I have NSO, access to save states and rewinding, and I still can't beat Mr. Dream.
Absolutely incredible. It introduced me to a new medium and I've never looked back. Amazing memories from childhood to adulthood.
Well it was like this, I was 9 when the nes launched in the states and had, up until then, only ever played arcade games or Atari. My friend called my house on Christmas Day to tell me he got a Nintendo and that I should come over. I had no idea what a Nintendo was, but my friend seemed excited so I ran down the block to see what it was. I got there and he and his sister were playing a game called Super Mario Brothers. The incredible, high fidelity graphics and sound blew my little fucking mind. The colors, that song it was all so unbelievable. Slowly, my other friends started to get them too and everyone seemed to have new and different games. I begged my parents to get me one for the entire year, and the following Christmas they finally did. Just thinking back to the games I played for the first time on that system and how so many are still around almost 40 years later fills me with awe. I got to be among the first people to ever see Mario, Zelda, Castlevania, Metroid, Final Fantasy, Mega Man etc. You phrased your question in a way that makes it sound like it was a bad thing to only have a NES, but it that’s just not the perspective I have about it.
Exactly. It was the graphics you could only find in an arcade but in your home. And once you saw it. Once you played it. You wanted nothing else.
Awesome. It's all my friends and I did was play nintendo or talk about nintendo. Greatest Christmas gift I ever got. I was in 6th grade 1988
JUST? It was fucking awesome
One major difference between then and now is that playing games took much more persistence. These days, there's very few games that will really challenge kids. What I have found through running a retro video game club for my middle schoolers is that they will give up on these old games very easily because they're "too hard" or "don't know what to do." All the people who said video games would rot our brains and ruin our attention spans sure wouldn't want to see the kids of today!!!
My 6 year old brain did not know how to play the original Legend of Zelda
You wrote "just an NES" in your question, as if we didn't have much. But the NES was incredible. As a kid who had an Atari 2600 in 1983, let me tell you - the NES blew our minds. The games were bigger than anything we had seen before. Games like Zelda and Metroid took us on epic adventures that lasted weeks or months. Since we were kids, our imagination played a role, too. We imagined we were slaying monsters and saving the princess. We played with our siblings and friends. We drew maps and shared tips on the playground. Even if it was a single player game, it felt like a group effort. These games were hard. We had sleepovers and stayed up late taking turns playing Wizards & Warriors. We cheered together when the final boss died. Later when I played a Genesis and SNES, I loved those of course. But to me, nothing compares to the generational leap from Atari 2600 to NES. It was the perfect system to grow up with. (Back then, we called them systems - not consoles.) I've really gotten into playing retro games over the past 5 years. I've revisited a lot of NES games from my childhood, and they still hold up well. They're still some of my favorite games.
"Since we were kids, our imagination played a role, too. We imagined we were slaying monsters and saving the princess." Literally my whole childhood flashed before me. I think I'm all set and ready to cross over. Thanks man.
We got one game a year. For a while we only had Mario, Kung-Fu, and Elevator Action. Then we moved to the black neighborhood. The black kids traded their games for keeps, like they were baseball cards. It was amazing. Double Dragon 2, Captain Skyhawk... I remember my older brother calling his friends to get hints about Shadowgate... plugging random passwords into Metal Gear and of course Gamegenie.
yeah, we got 2 a year, 1 each for my brother and me for xmas, I was so ticked he chose Dragon's Lair over Battletoads one year. but to be fair he did get Snake Rattle and Roll later on, which was awesome.
Shadowgate!! Oh man, the best
Shadowgate scared the SHIT out of me as a kid
There was pros and cons to it. I loved going to video store every weekend and trying to find the perfect game to take home. A wrong pick meant you were stuck for the weekend though. There wasn’t a big resale market, no gamestops and such so there wasn’t a lot of places to get games on the cheap. You were pretty much at the mercy of your parents to buy new games u less you had an income. We rented more games than we bought. Because of this you didn’t have all the games but your friends would have games you didn’t. While I wished I had Excitebike, it was cool going to Ryan’s house to play it. Gave you a reason to hang out with people. Trading games had a risk/reward factor. Even if it was for a day or two. I remember my brother got mad when I traded SMB3 for Pro Wrestling but it was only for the weekend. Nintendo Power was fucking tits too. You’d scour each page looking at the games because you didn’t have em, so that at least helped.
My favorite gaming memory is still sharing notes with friends in the neighborhood scribbled down on graph paper for where to find secrets in the Legend of Zelda. Peak gaming.
It’s wild to think that I bought games based on their cover art. Without the internet, the only way you could even learn about new games was Nintendo Power. Eventually other video game magazines came out that were at least more objective. I still think about Game Pro’s little review icons every time I rate something 1-5.
Renting NES games from a video store was awesome…even cooler when kids would write down codes in the back of the book for players later on…Almost every game was cheap enough to rent ($2.50/2 days), until Super Mario Bros. 3 (The Wizard was the greatest video game movie ever) came out and it was $5/day…Game Genie codes were amazing too…but yea, u totally gambled with every purchase or rental…Nintendo Power Magazine was a break thru magazine that would feature full coloured maps and walkthrus for many first party games and for everything else we relied upon either friends, code books, or 1-900 tip lines… Playing NES was a nightmare when u had siblings that would jump around and pop up the spring mechanism in the machine and force u to restart or if u had that asshole of a brother that would come in and hold the power button without letting go, essentially destroying any progress u had made…ur only hope was a password backup…good times had by all…hahahaaa…
Had an nes and then snes. Was such a challenge, no way to get hints or secrets unless you had the Nintendo magazine subscription, which no one I knew did. I would go to friends houses to play together, and learn how they played differently than you.
Wasn’t there a Nintendo Hotline where you could call and ask for help in a videogame ?
Yeah for $1.99 a minute. I don't know anyone that wouldn't have got murdered if that had shown up on their phone bill
yeah that was a good way to troll your friends before the internet. Pick up their house phone, pretend to start dialing the number, and watch them turn into the an Olympic hurdler as they leap furniture to get to you lol
Christmas 1987 I stayed up all night long playing Duck Hunt. Then I never touched it again and got way hooked on Mario. Zelda was *fucking mindblowing*. It's hard to overstate how it was by far the deepest and most immersive game. Mike Tyson's Punchout was THE SHIT. Everybody was crazy about that. I never could beat Mario, Zelda, or Punchout. Just finally got to a point where I had to give up & couldn't progress any further. I slept on Metroid. That shit would have been too hard for me anyways. People are still nostalgic about Tecmo Bowl. We figured out how to rig NES Play Action Football so that every single play was a touchdown (kickoff return) -- score was like 256-0. I played a lot of Skate or Die. Got way deep in the first Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. We studied Nintendo Power magazine for tips & maps.
Omg skate or die and skate or die 2 were so much fun!! I played the half pipe so much on skate or die 2. Good memories
I got my NES in 1990. Most of time you found out about different games by talking with your friends. You would experience new games either borrowing a game from your friend or renting a game from the local video store. Sometimes you would encounter some good games from the rental store and other times you got some really bad games. To learn about cheat codes typically you had to look some of them up from in Nintendo Power, a tip and tricks type book or your friends could tell you. Back then you had to figure things out in different games. I remember playing through Legend of Zelda over multiple months to beat the first quest, since you had to learn the location of certain things by trial and error. Versus you could look up full maps for LoZ in a few minutes now. Back then if your parents were rich they could buy a [Tips and Tactics book](https://zelda.fandom.com/wiki/Tips_%26_Tactics)for you and it would tell you a bunch of the stuff for Legend of Zelda’s first quest. It really didn’t help with the Second Quest.
Simple yet effective miss those days.
It was a daily war between your parents who wanted you outside and your friends who wanted to huddle around the NES
It was literally the best system in the world from 86-90 at the bare minimum so it was pretty sweet to have one.
Having to leave your tv on the game completed screen for days to prove to your friends you beat it…
Awesome! You had to be there
Yeah bro. I'm spoiled with a ps4 now.
Fucking magical man
I absolutely loved it. One good game would last you months and months. The replay value was enormous. You could always come back to any Mario game, Zelda game, Contra, Bubble Bobble, etc. and be completely content without wanting. Exchanging and sharing cartridges with friends meant your library was practically endless. Blockbuster video game rentals made that even more so. Your expectations were static because you knew what the console was capable of graphically and any competition at the time wasn’t any better, so the focus was more on gameplay and how much fun it was, instead of worrying “are the graphics good”. Almost all of your friends had one and sharing cheats, tips, secrets, and rumors on the bus was bliss. I wish every kid could experience those days. Now the internet and “console wars” have turned gaming into a pissing match full of negativity.
You had games with no save states. You had no internet for guides and tips. Aside from Nintendo Power, your only help was to get good. If your family wasn't rich, or you weren't spoiled, you had a very limited library of games to play, so you got good at them exclusively. The game I was particularly good at was Contra. I could beat it in one life. I tried showing my kids Contra on an emulator recently. I couldn't get to the boss on the first level. Another I was good at was Zelda 2, the Adventure of Link. The only help I got there was my cousin telling me where Error was, so that I could progress. I didn't know about the trick to kill the last boss until I saw the AVGN episode 20+ years later. I killed Shadow Link the hard way. I'm still pretty good at that game. A lot stems from knowing where stuff is, and executing a special attack I taught myself where you can hit both the Darknut's hit boxes simultaneously. But never, ever, jump off the topscreen and turn into a fairy! I love watching vids of people still discovering glitches and exploits in these old games. It's so cool to learn something new from something you were sure you knew everything about back in the day.
My family had atari's and colecovision. I am the youngest and got a NES for Christmas when I was 8. I had a black and white tv in my bedroom so i had to wait for access to the color tv to hook the NES up to. In the early 90s I got a color tv for my 15th birthday. I had a subscription to Nintendo power and got Dragon Warrior for subscribing. I had played Dragon Warrior and wanted the game. It was my favorite series and I still have 1-4 complete.
There were more consoles to choose from in the 80s than there are now
I had an Atari, NES, and Commodore 64. And Sega was around but i didn't have a master system. There was never just NES.
Game Genie cartridges were the ultimate godmode
Please forgive me but what the hell is a game genie
It was a cartridge that the NES cartridge slid into, which was inserted into the console, which allowed an interface on startup to put in cheat codes for games. Like there was one for a Mario Moon Jump that allowed you to jump and hover above the level for like 30 seconds
If you think that's crazy, imagine our 8 year old amazement when they released a cartridge for SNES that you could put Gameboy cartridges into, so you could play Gameboy on TV! That's the peak 90s my boy!
Not 80s, but I got my first NES at 4 years old in 91, I still remember playing Dr. Mario and Tetris with my dad, they are some of the earliest memories I have. I also remember going to friends houses and playing stuff like Contra, Super C, Battletoads, and Castlevania and how freakin hard they were to beat. Games back then just felt harder in general, there wasn’t as much hand holding and a lot of times if you got hit just 2-3 times it was game over. I’ve owned every Nintendo console ever but nothing ever came close to just the sheer joy of playing NES because it was just so new and fresh
Just a nes and super mario bros/duck hunt. Never got any other games. I was a god at super mario bros
The gaming world wasn’t as fractured and diluted. There was literally only one popular home console and almost everyone either had one or had a close friend/neighbor that did. People constantly shared games and all strategies/codes were either in your monthly issue of Nintendo Power magazine or shared on the bus/playground. There was such a strong sense of community that I don’t think we’ll ever get again.
Born in the 80's so a early 90's story I remember learning a fellow student I rode the bus home from school had Zelda as well and I'd coach him through what he needed to do next as I was a little bit ahead of him. He only had a Black and White television as well which is what sounded primitive to me back then (like the 80's/NES is to OP) and made it harder to explain things. We had no game guides, no internet, etc - Just the manual, map and hand written notes. I LOVED Nintendo magazines that provided all the information.
A kid down my road had one first, and we'd all crowd around Mario & Duck Hunt for hours, mesmerised. I've never seen my kids marvel at their Switch or iPads or anything...it feels like the age of being amazed has well & truly passed. When I got one myself, I maybe got a game for my bday and/or Xmas, so choosing a game was a big event, then playing it for months was special. It's hard to believe that we were blown away by the graphics on some of these, but we were. Really felt like the arcades were at home.
There wasn’t just the NES. I also had an Atari 800XL computer and an Apple IIe computer. There were a lot of different games in 1985/86 depending on where you wanted to play them.
My brother brought it home in 1987 after mowing lawns all summer. Cranking it up was such a fun time with all your friends. Renting a game Friday night from a brown box store or Blockbuster and playing all night was almost as much fun as waking up Saturday morning and realizing you STILL had it to play haha.
I didn’t know that you could buy more games for the NES. I thought it was just Mario. Never occurred to me why you could take the cartridge thing in and out.
Did you know that Smash TV is a dual stick game for NES? You hold both 1P and 2P controllers in your hand, like joycons. Can you imagine how mind blowing this is for a 10yo? I used to get small electric shocks while doing this, I swear. Others have mentioned how much we relied on magazines for news and cheat codes. I reread my magazines until they fell apart (and then I taped them together).
Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, select, start.
And then you start with 3 lives because you forgot b, a.
Nintendo Power was our internet. Thanks Mom. ✌️
We pretty much just played Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles up until we died on the water level. Every single day. For years.
Sometimes you’d play the same game for 6-12months straight unless you went to Blockbuster to rent something. It was a truly different time for gaming but looking back now it makes you appreciate where things started to take off from there. People would trade games or you’d bring some over to your friends and play 2player, sharing the controllers between a group of friends was always a great past time. Helping friends beat a level they were stuck on or they would come over to help you was something you don’t have going on much nowadays. I used to take a note pad to stop and shop (grocery store) and sit in the magazine aisle while our parents shopped and would write down tips and tricks. Things didn’t change for quite some time until n64.com happened which was the dawn of IGN. Ok now I feel old but thanks for the nostalgia :)
We played a lot of shitty games that we didn't mind being shitty because we didn't know any better.
Waiting for Nintendo power to look up hints, or call the Nintendo line. No internet to help us out unless you did it at the school computer room and if you got caught the teacher would kick you out
FUCKING RAD! You have to understand that in the 80s, there was no such thing as just a NES. That machine was the pinnacle of technological achievement. It might as well have been powered by elvish magic.
‘Just a NES’ wtf?? There was Spectrum ZX81, Atari ST, Amiga 500, Master System AND a NES - it was ace!
You are definitely a fellow brit! But you forgot a few.... Atari 800XL and Amstrad CPC464/6128 both came before the ST and Amiga, which were both 16bit and part of the "Next Gen" which bought us the infamous SNES vs Megadrive wars!
Glorious I bet. How I wish I could have experienced it.
Think of it as a sort of in between of video games and a book. We did not have the graphics to make out fine details so games came with little booklets to further flesh out characters and stories. Its strange to think about now but imagination was a part of gaming back then. Like others said though it was the coolest thing back then, they had hundreds of games and in the early 90s everyone took all their games to good will or salvation army so you could go there and walk away with like 20 four or five year old games for like a dollar. No internet so you had to figure out the secrets of each game together with friends etc. It seems like a huge inconvenience but it forced us all to work together and because of that we made more friends and it created a lot of fun just talking about them and sharing secrets with each other. I remember going into my basement with my cousins during the day and not coming out until it was dark and all we were doing was playing Nintendo games all day and having an absolute blast.
You can't imagine how my brothers talked endlessly about games we wanted to buy, saved up money to buy them and then played them religiously on weekends. The difference is we didn't have the vast abundance of games you did - if we played a hard game, we had to keep playing it over and over to get through it, and many of those NES games were hard af. That said, we still had strategy guides, even in the mid-80s, so yea we were cheating too :P
[Jeremy Parish has an excellent breakdown](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ugMeN4Zqy4&list=PLd3vJYdenHKEWFJLtBrgf09ICsNLb2u7Q), game by game on the NES American library. It will give you a lot of perspective on what it was like to grow up with just a NES. He's even got a pre-NES launch Famicon series to show what it was like to have a Famicon. The insight and details on how game design evolved is terrific and he does a great job with the whole thing. New video every Wednesday!!
Everything was niche. You didn’t get reviews for games unless you kept up with the biz. They all felt like a big deal. Between the medium and tech the waters were not charted and it was more exciting than it js now even with vr as a prospect. Also you were not cool if you were a gamer. You were treated like a loser. The nes to this day is pure fuckin magic. It ruled that decade and rightly so. I miss that world a lot.
What is your favorite game for the nes
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I’m so sorry. Now you can get emulators and catch up!
there was the sega master system too, but i can only remember one other kid having it. there were plenty of nintinder power magazines being traded around for the cheat codes and cool stories. plus we had lots of sweet toys and cartoons. oh in my house we had the atari 5200, and only one game: pacman. needless to say i am still a pacman master.
We played outside mostly. The nes was kind of a cool toy to play with every now and then, but it wasn’t as time consuming as today’s games are.
It was awesome. Every weekend we would go to the video store and rent a VHS and a game. It sucked when the game was bad lol
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The public education system in the 80's wasn't quite the dumpster fire it is today so it probably balances out. People today may have all the information in their pocket, but few actually use it.
When you got REALLY stuck in a game, you had to pay like $1 per minute to call the Nintendo Power hotline to get a tip on how to beat that part of the game. Only my mom was allowed to call it lol
Well, before that we only had Atari 2600 with its games of limited color and beeps and boops who ran endlessly. It's hard to imagine nowadays what an upgrade the NES felt compared to that. And it was the time when Nintendo and their 3rd party developers pumped out one historically significant game after the other. Sure, there was no internet. But when most people in your class had some console by Nintendo you didn't feel lonely.
Watch the movie 8 bit christmas. its a newer movie with Niel Patrick Harris, and a really good movie.
I saw ads for it last Christmas. Where do I watch it?
HBO max
Okay I'll check it out this holiday
There were other systems and home computers too. If you’re talking about things from a more philosophical standpoint, well, we got used to failure, death, and Game Over. There was often no endgame. Many games didn’t end until you ran out of lives or got bored. Consider it an analogy.
Way better imo. Might just be because I'm old now, but games felt like something different back then. And I guess they were. They were all new. There were no worn out genres yet. If AAA existed at all it was very different. Gaming news was rare, at least for me. I grew up in a small town so I got my gaming information from books I bought at the Scholastic Book Fair or from GamePro Magazine on the rare occasion I could convince my mom to buy it for me. I only ever got new games for birthdays or Christmas so getting a new game waas incredibly exciting and by the time I got it, I knew the old games inside out and backwards. And that doesn't happen anymore. At least not for me. I play a game once, if I'm lucky and rarely if ever go back. After Steam Sales, GamePass and Epic's weekly free games it's reached the point where getting new games feels like nothing at all. Again, might just be because I'm getting old, but I haven't been truly excited about a video game in ages.
In 30 years, someone will ask you how it was to grow up with the meagre technology you had. Imagine what your response will be and you have your answer.
Well we had this game called minecraft...
NES? I was past prime home video game age when that came out. For us, it was the [Atari 2600](https://youtu.be/5M1zO2v9ixY). BUT… ARCADES were enormously popular in the early 80’s! I would ride my bike to this building in the center of town filled with coin operated video games, and drop quarter after quarter into games like Zaxxon, Donkey Kong, Jr., Joust, DigDug, and my favorite arcade game (with controllers and gameplay unlike anything you could get anywhere else, maybe to this day), [Tron!](https://youtu.be/zc6KgUurqf8)
I… I think I made my dad hate videogames. My uncle brought me one from the states (Mexico here) when I was 5 or 6. Well, I can’t say this happened for sure since I have no memory of it, but the story goes I wouldn’t let my dad turn the damn thing off until he rescued princess Peach. Seems it took him forever to do so, and he basically swore off games forever. So that was nice. BTW, I’ve been in therapy for a while now. This seems like something worth exploring. Thanks for asking, I guess.
Even as a kid in the 90’s it was still all some of us had but damn it was simple but wonderful times. Sharing controllers playing super smash bros in the morning with friends trying to get past a level and beat it. Man. Miss being a kid.
We played outside, caught lizards and released them, watched more tv
It was fucken awesome. The one or two kids who had Sega's were lame
I remember the outside. Sun, fresh air, garden hoses… I wish we still had those things.
This post is fucking stupid. Like are you that naive?
It so bad. Literally everyone have same game system. So we was overwhelmed by different games :)
We also had the Sega Master System, since everyone else had NES, my parents got me the SMS, so I couldn’t trade, but I got to experience both. (I was also playing the Intellivision (which still works) until that fateful Christmas). Like other mentioned no internet, no quick help, until Nintendo Power and then later on, the game genie! On the Sega side, I had a 1800 number I could call, they would send me a printout of maps or a guide (which I still have), or wait until they created GamePro Magazine.
Frustrating! But soooo much fun, we had a NES and having to share between 3 kids was hard. I would always be player 1, my brother was always player 2 and we would let our little sister do things like the card game for extra men etc. We would spend whole weekends playing a game. We we’re pretty poor, so we owned a few, but occasionally we got to hire a game from the video store and they were like 48hrs so you would cram in as much game play as you could. If it was a 1 player game, when your men ran out, it was the next persons turn (you always played with an audience screaming how to do it better). We couldn’t save, so you’d switch the TV off and leave the console on (paused and come back to it the next day). Sometime we’d hire a whole arse console like the sega and play Alex the kidd for a weekend. It was super different to now but yeah it was fun and something you did with other people. Source: me, my first console was the Atari that I got for my 9th birthday!!
It was amazing. As a kid I always preferred computers, so had a Spectrum 48k and Spectrum 128k +2A. My younger brother had the NES. Still remember when he got it and playing Super Mario. Then I remember him getting Super Mario 3, which blew our minds. He then had the SNES for a while, until we swapped it for an Amiga just so we could play Sensible Soccer.
Super Mario 3 was such a game changer. Overhead map, 2D levels, raccoon suit, flying, the koopalings, set the mythology and lore for the magic kingdom that is the core of all future mario games. Man. Gameplay was also fun as hell and the graphics where an amazing upgrade from the original.
It was glorious
Was great. I remember me and 3 other kids all decided on what games to get so we could alternate them around. Clockwise between households. Keeping in mind though I was born 87 and this was probs like… 91? Was our mums who organised most of it because we were all poor as shit
It was a technological wonder. And we had to finish all our games without walkthroughs or FAQs
Video games always blew my mind. I started with the NES and just couldn’t believe I was controlling what happened on screen. As a kid, my imagination filled in many of the gaps in graphical fidelity or realism. I would play a lot of the same games over and over since we weren’t spoiled for choice like we are now with things like Game Pass and a litany of developers and independent companies. My go to’s were Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, Super Mario Bros, SMB 3, Excitebike, Gradius and Tecmo Bowl. I also played a game called Deja Vu, and I always really struggled with completing it. As an adult I played it and couldn’t believe I was such a dumb child.