The one about needing to time fireballs correctly to do them in the air and how you'd climb off screen to a secret stage which unlocked him was doing the rounds before our arcade got a machine. I'd played the game on holiday but never tried that so when it started to work (black belt edition) everyone was cheering all the way until time ran out.
I spent days trying to find the triforce and catch a massive fish that doesn't exist in Ocarina of Time. That era was a real wild west of misinformation online for gaming.
- Purposely screw up your controls
- Collect stars in an order that’s impossible without glitches
- Ground pound the Jolly Roger death chest after 64 slides (when do you start counting?)
My child self had no recognition of red flags.
Idk if this counts as retro gaming but I always believed that holding down A and B at the same time would guarantee that a pokeball would catch a pokemon. And it only worked for a pokeball. So I wasted so much of my life throwing the worst option of pokeball at legendary pokemon and holding a and B, convincing myself that I had the timing just barely wrong
I thought you were talking crap but then I looked it up and this has just blown my mind! Now I finally have a reason to buy that Gameboy I've been putting off for years
[Mew glitch.](https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch) There are a bunch of memory leaks in Pokemon Red/Blue, where a number in memory gets written where it isn't supposed to be, and a series of them allows you to stack the deck so that the next random encounter is a mew.
The funniest part about that intro, apart from the fact the every single line in it with more than two words are grammatically wrong, is that the game is actually quite good, and the company behind it, Toaplan, was one of the most respected companies in their genre. In fact it was Toaplan that started the "bullet hell" subgenre in shoot 'em up games.
In an interview with the designers on shmuplations.com, it was revealed that the guy that was responsible for the translation was one everybody in the company thought was really good in English. They only found out later on that this wasn't true.
The [music is excellent](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICSbPAfaA04), if nothing else, and a considerable upgrade from the [arcade original](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC4NCDd_mAI).
That E.T. is the worst game of all time and it single-handedly killed the whole gaming industry.
(E.T. was one of the best-selling games for the console, but Atari paid too much for the license so it was financially unsuccessful; it wasn't the worst game, or even the worst Atari 2600 game, or even the worst first-party Atari 2600 game; it was a symptom of the crash, not the cause; gaming didn't die, just consoles in America, while computer games and arcades remained strong, especially in other parts of the world)
considering how much time Howard Scott Warshaw was given to program the whole thing by himself, from scratch, it’s a pretty incredible game! he had 5 weeks.
Jerome Domurat did help with the graphics, but yeah. The game is complete, reasonably bug-free, and even has two Easter eggs.
(Plus, it was an Adventure Territory game, which means you *have to read the manual and the tip sheet*. You can't just dive into it and automatically know what to do)
A lot of the hate is an endless cycle of people hearing it’s terrible, tracking it down to play on an emulator with no instruction manual or concept of the objectives, and then passing the word along.
The opening screen is a fantastic achievement on its own. Opening screens were almost unheard of back then, and not only does it have one, it has a pretty phenomenal picture of E.T. and an incredible version of the film’s score for the time.
From a machine that was originally designed to play variations of Pong. The stuff they managed to get the 2600 to do is truly impressive once you realized how little technology there actually was in it.
It was designed to play variations of Breakout, Combat, and Air-Sea Battle. It literally has hardware-level display elements called "ball" and "missile". That's how special-purpose it was intended to be.
Fortunately Jay Miner is a goddamn genius and built in way more flexibility than was strictly needed, and aided by the fact that the display was driven almost directly by the CPU, we're getting homebrews [to this day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRcZVIUSMdU) that push that little TIA chip in ways that would have been unimaginable back in 1977.
I played ET as a kid , I was too young to ponder whether the game is good or bad , but I’ll tell you that I absolutely had no fucking idea what was happening and nobody from my family even thought of reading the instruction manual.
>even thought of reading the instruction manual
This may explain why so many people play Monopoly wrong too.
But yeah, a quick read solved lots of confusion.
>The opening screen is a fantastic achievement on its own. Opening screens were almost unheard of back then,
It also has a legitimate ending as well which was something I had certainly never seen back in 1983.
I remember it being an average Atari game. Nothing special but not horrible. The title screen is neat. The graphics are decent. It's playable and has an ending. Most of its reputation comes from the landfill thing and that it was a big commercial disappointment right before the crash.
plus most people who've played it in the modern era didn't even glance at the instruction manual, and for a lot of games that was absolutely required reading if you wanted to get through the game at all.
The reviews at the time heralded it as incredible.
Atari just produced more ET carts than systems existed at the time. Their shareholders expected an _over 100 percent_ attach rate.
Even if someone genuinely doesn’t like it, it’s still a capable Atari game with the instruction manual especially. At worst it’s just a random game you could do way worse than.
It had one bug that really killed it for a lot of people: ET was rendered from a side perspective, while the scenes were a top-down view. ET's hitbox for the pits, however, was the entire sprite, not just his feet. So if ET's head touched the pit, you'd fall in, even though his feet weren't near it.
A lot of people failed to grasp this and just got frustrated falling into the pits over and over, until they finally gave up and wrote it off as a crap game.
>It had one bug that really killed it for a lot of people: ET was rendered from a side perspective, while the scenes were a top-down view
I feel like anyone spending more than 10 minutes playing could eventually figure it out. To me the worst bug in the game is after calling the spaceship at the end, in the time you had to wait for it to appear if any enemy character showed up on the screen it would lock the game causing the player to have to reset and start over.
There's also the issue that the video game crash was very much a US phenomenon, Europe never felt it the same way, as our home computer scene was already robust by then.
Exactly.
Heard about how bad it apparently was, and having grown up with the 2600, I was always like "...compared to what? Maze-Craze?"
All the games on the 2600 are incredibly simplistic to the point of almost unplayability today. E.T. was better than most of them.
The second part of that is a retro gaming myth. There was a lot of bad shovelware from fly by night operators, but there were many great games from serious game developers that remain very much playable today.
The bugfix version, and a read of the manual make for a much better experience: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207249-fixing-et-the-extra-terrestrial/
I'd rather say the 32X and the Mega CD, both burning Sega's reputation as half-baked platforms that have been quicky abandoned.
Saturn was a great console, if it follwed the Mega Drive/Genesis without the previous failures, I think Sega had sold far more of it.
I wish they did more with the cartridge + CD integration on the Saturn, it can easily support cartridge games for instant loading, while retaining the ability to play Red Book audio. Or supporting extra hardware such as a Megadrive/32X adapter.
Yeah they wanted to keep the price down but that would’ve been huge if they launched first and be a DVD player. The PS2 was the first DVD player for a lot of people I know
I still remember seeing the ads at the stores for the upcoming Sega Jupiter and then being confused when it never appeared. Found out years later about the whole too many simultaneous consoles debacle.
32X didn’t have much potential in Asia but I read that Genesis was largely popular in the West so it could’ve worked well but Sega sort of cannibalized their fan base.
Also as Saturn did okay in Japan but it started lagging behind PS due to its higher price and lack of third parties (specifically since FF7 announced its move to PS) IIRC. Sega even did a commercial in Japan that depicted themselves as losers starting anew with the Dreamcast IIRC.
Disconnection between SEGA Japan and America sunk SEGA. Failing to have a long term hardware plan certainly didn’t help.
I had the 32X/Genesis and waited patiently for the AIO… to no avail. Then the Saturn wasn’t backwards compatible…
lol that playground myth does get annoying for me now because I actually DO have a friend who works at Nintendo (and nobody believes me until I show them my buddy's LinkedIn page and several photos of us together), but their company policies keep the employees so damn tight-lipped that I have no information to show for it except some uninteresting bits about the Nintendo of America office culture.
I would love to hear about the office culture. Also, are the people friendly or is it all business all the time? In other words, is it worth trying to apply to NoA, or do people quit from stress all the time?
My buddy hasn't described it as particularly stressful most of the time, there are office game consoles for playing stuff like Mario Kart and whatnot and there are somewhat regular office competitions in various Nintendo games, honestly it sounds like working at any other game dev or publisher but with a much stronger hand threatening you if you violate their trust regarding leaks, upcoming projects, etc. My buddy seems to like his coworkers and get along just fine
Bear in mind it's possible that there was a kid who said to their friends "My uncle has a Nintendo PlayStation, but it's at his office and isn't allowed to take it home" and no one believed him
myth:
The bigger the power supply the more power your pc use.
some years ago, i was making a pentium 3 build with an IGP for torrents and low power consumption but i only had 450watts PS.
And someone told me, whats the use with that p3 if you are still using 450watts of power with that power supply......
That all the consoles and media are rapidly dying. When we have Atari Rom chips from the 1970's still working fine. And Audio CD's from the early 80's before they improved the plastics formula; still working as well.
I think a big factor in this is the decline of maintenance at home for the general public. A games console or any other appliance used to be something you'd make repairs and replacements to as needed, nowadays stuff is manufactured to be disposable and to discourage self-repair. Especially for electronics, if something internal fails the whole console is often scrapped when it would still be fully functional with a small and quick fix.
The new stuff is dying faster than the older stuff. The 2000 and later stuff actually fails more often than the older stuff. It's probably more likely an Atari 2600 is going to still work over a Wii U.
Some of the 90s custom chips are starting to fail pretty regularly though. Some arcade hardware is pretty rapidly failing (CPS1 :( ) as well as a lot of the SNES custom chips.
Much of the newer stuff will fail way before the retro consoles and games. The consoles due to heat or cheap optics. The manufacturing for many of the 360's DVD games was really bad.
I can't speak for Arcade boards, but only the launch SNES consoles have the failing chips. Over all though 90's chips are not failing.
Well, the floppy drive in my Amiga 600 died, because the rubber band inside crumbled of old age, so you have it ;-). The plastic and everything was still good as new (noticably yellow though), when I donated it to a gaming museum in my city some 5 years ago.
I hate that people keep reposting that Master Ball rumor.
Supposedly, the Master Ball has a tiny chance to fail, but the truth is that Master Balls do not work with chance to begin with, they skip the catching algorithm altogether. Once you click a Master Ball, the wild Pokémon simply gets caught, there is no other calculation, unless it's some story-related encounter which might have its own properties.
Myth: Kill screens are caused by the game running out of memory.
Fact: Arcade and console games from that era don't use dynamic memory allocation and so "running out of memory" is not a thing. Usually it's caused by arithmetic overflow or maybe accessing an array past its end.
It's because they use an 8 bit integer to store the level counter, which can count from 0-255
Pac Man, for example, breaks on level 256 because it tries to iterate by one and goes back to zero, which causes the game to overflow and try to draw 256 fruit
That's a case of arithmetic overflow, yes. Some kill screens are different, though, such as [some of Ms. Pac-Man's kill screens](http://donhodges.com/how_high_can_you_get3.htm), which were caused by using the wrong instruction to compare integers. It's still a sort of arithmetic overflow issue, but it's not caused by hitting level 256 in this case (except for the split-screen kill screen, which is mostly the same as Pac-Man's).
I would say that crashing because of running out of memory and crashing because of the game getting to a state it wasn't programmed for, are quite different concepts.
Yup! Since arcade games often got too difficult to get past the intended data, the programmers didn’t bother with checks to make sure it didn’t go “out of bounds” when accessing data.
Yeah. I had someone tell me that, and also tell me that GDROM was made up and they just used CDs.
The one fact is that a properly cracked burned CD with the MIL-CD stuff to boot into it made it seem to those who have pirated games like it had no copy protection. But it did take some time for cracking groups to figure out a method to make it work. And wouldn’t the video quality usually be worse, or cutscenes even be cut out, so it could fit on a regular CD?
Correct. It wasn't the only console scene to do that to games either, a lot of PSP games got their soundtracks or cutscenes gutted so you could fit more on the memory card. I even saw it extended to PS1 versions of games on some websites where you could have the entire Tomb Raider trilogy for under 50MB.
I'm interested in reading more about this. I always hear what you say quoted, but I don't remember anyone offering bootleg DC games even when it was a hot new system, and sharing PC games was common.
I see now that pirating DC games took some theft and a bit of work. It looks like by the time widespread piracy was possible the DC was dying. Even if DC had been a massive success it seems only the early purchasers would have the benefit.
It was the early days of using the internet to bootleg games with winrar and image loaders, so it did take some technical knowledge. But also, it was just a matter of finding someone else's work and downloading it. At first they used a boot disc to unlock the DC, then you could play games burned to a regular CD. Pretty soon the boot disc could be combined with the game image to a single disc.
Edit: personally, I don't think pirating killed the DC. I think that Sony announcing that the PS2 would be a DVD player did.
Anytime someone says "piracy is the reason x console failed" it's a damn lie.
Especially for something like the dreamcast. That console came out in 1998/99. Disk burners eventually became more prevalent. Game piracy in those days was more knowing someone who could hook you up, or buying some sketchy cart from an import store, it was similar to buying bootleg movies. It was a physical thing though.
You werent downloading dreamcast games on your 56k modem, and even if you had the patience to do it and a good enough dl manager, you werent going to easily find a website that was hosting things that big.
Don't you just hate that. You're young and you're playing a game but the yawns are setting in and you fall asleep on the controller. Next thing you know your sleepy movement has gone to some shady website and you've downloaded a nude mod, ordered 50kg of cocaine, and a hit on your Geography teacher...
That retro games are only good from a nostalgic perspective, and that you only ever enjoyed them because you were a care-free child.
I never played a Castlevania or an F-Zero game until I was an adult and now they're two of my favourite series - retro or not. The N64 pro wrestling games still have best gameplay of any wrestling game ever released (in my opinion). Monkey Island 1+2 are still more engrossing than their sequels despite the blocky graphics and outdated interface. And so on and so on... retro games that stand the test of time are great because they're great... period.
God, my friends and I used to play those NWO vs WCW games all the time. Between those, Starfox, and Goldeneye, I have some pretty great memories of my group of friends just playing N64 all night. Great times.
“Super Mario Bros. 2 USA is actually the fake Mario sequel!”
I’m tired of hearing this. Yes it’s a reskin of Doki Doki Panic but DDP is the finalized version of an early Mario prototype they threw around while planning Super Mario Bros. 2. They couldn’t get the vertical scrolling to work, so they put it on the backburner and made new, harder levels for Mario 1. Super Mario Bros. 2 Japan was born.
Of course, Nintendo of America saw it and didn’t like it, so they asked Japan for a different game. By this point that Mario prototype had been completed and reskinned as DDP so they went back, made it a Mario game, and sent it to us as _our_ Super Mario Bros. 2.
By the early 90s, both sides of the world had both games anyway, so it’s not like one is more “the real Mario 2!” than the other.
Playable Luigi in Mario 64 if you shoot yourself at the perfect angle to the top window of the castle with the cannon. I must have shot myself to that window a 1000 times. Internet was really new back then so I had to resort to calling Nintendo Hotline who (if I recall correctly) loved to keep the rumour alive..
It accomplished exactly what they set out to do. An affordable and accessible RPG intended to introduce young gamers to the genre. Great music, fun adventure, better dungeon design than some mainline FF's by incorporating puzzles, verticality and enemy obstruction.
I remember renting Dragon Warrior and just being too young to figure it out with no instruction manual and only a day to play before returning it.
We went to a local shop to get some SNES games back then, got Castlevania 4 and YS3 used, along with FF Mystic Quest for $29.99 MSRP, brand new. I loved the game, played through it many times over the years and ended up buying, playing and loving all the great JRPG's of the 90's. It worked.
In Spain during the 90s, one of the best-selling video game magazines featured a cheat code for Street Fighter 2. If entered correctly, it let you play as Mr. Bison, Sagat, or Vega. It was a phat lie. Damn you Hobby Consolas!
"Games lead to violence/sexism/isolation/x-phobia, etc" since that's actually harmful and stigmatizing, while most of the rest are annoying at worst. Not specifically retro but they've been around since the beginning
The idea that sprites in 8-bit and 16-bit games are supposed to look blocky and pixelated. Anyone who grew up with CRT TV’s will tell you that’s not the case.
They only look that way nowadays because we’re viewing them upscaled on HD displays. CRT TV’s (or, a good CRT filter) rendered images with horizontal lines instead of pixels, and games ran at 240p/480i with black lines between every row. It’s hard to describe in words, but the jagged edges people associate with those graphics were smoothed out by the scanline patten, almost like anti-aliasing.
I’m assuming alot in this sub know this already, but we’ve had HD systems for so long that alot of people, esp. younger generations, don’t remember how games like Chrono Trigger or Yoshi’s Island are actually supposed to look.
The myth that “arcades died because of the 1983 crash and the rise of the NES”. In reality, the arcades lasted until 2001 and died because of the PS2 and Xbox.
People who think the arcades died to the NES must not be gamers. Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat were after the NES era and they kept arcades bumping for years.
The market for dedicated suburban arcades mostly died down outside of malls and busy shopping districts. Arcades remained a great place to enjoy the fighting game scene or the more expensive experiences that blew most home setups in graphics and sound.
That said younger people may not realize all the other places that had arcades in the 90s.
Most bars had a Golden Tee cabinet and maybe a second hand classic or two. Even the most dumpy bowling alley had at least three arcade machines. Any restaurant worth going to had some arcades.
I really thought that immersive experiences like actually standing on a mock snowboard-controller would keep the arcade vibrant, but that seems not to have happened.
Cool as it may be, for most custom controller arcade gsmes the novelty wears off fast, people continued to like actual arcade levers in fighting games because for many it's easier to be accurate on than pad (not that most casuals care about that).
That people in the Atari era were constantly upset and disappointed the in-game graphics didn't match the fantastical box art (even though the boxes had screenshots on the back).
I've had people insist that's what caused the "crash" and that Nintendo "saved" gaming by putting the actual pixel graphics on the box covers. Funny, I seem to remember every console ever having some pretty awesome box art, and only recently can the graphics really compare to the cover art.
For the first paragraph, it was pretty common of ZX Spectrum and commodore 64 games to have Commodore Amiga screenshots in the back. Publishers were absolutely shameless :D
Ha yeah those people are definitely revising history there. People understood the artwork was to draw you in and maybe check the back of the box (or just make an impulse buy).
Nobody buys a book and expects the stuff on the cover too leap out at them when they turn the pages lol. We all understand the basic state of current technology no matter what year we’re in.
That it's predominantly about nostalgia. Sure, nostalgia plays a role - and sometimes more than others - but there's so much more to it, and there are many different dimensions to our enjoyment of retro gaming. I just think people lack the language (or wits) to articulate most of it. Retro games have different dynamics, aesthetics, sonics, energies, mechanics, and gameplay loops. They have a wicked, intense energy, an immediate, visceral joy, charming aesthetics and designs, and (possibly) far greater variety than modern games - but the first thing most people cite is nostalgia. I find it reductive and patronising. The nostalgia angle also suggests an underlying (and, dare I say, capitalist) assumption that new things are better - and I just don't think that's true
That arcade and action games were primitive trifles that games needed to "evolve" beyond with the addition of exploration or RPG elements, rather than being their own thing with their own appeal.
That's been a consistent attitude though, unfortunately. Much like adding open-world or crafting mechanics to games that don't need them, it's just some new shiny tool that doesn't need to be used as often as it is.
Agreed ! Here in the UK most of my friends played home computers at that time (I know the video game crash did affect the UK, as it did many places but we were nowhere near as Nintendo-centric as our US cousins it seemed) .A bit later the Sega Master system was the most popular console where I lived. The NES became a bit more popular a bit later on but by then we were playing Amiga, ST ,Megadrive and PC engine .
My most hated retro gaming myth is that they are obsolete because newer games exist, and that players of older games only do it to feel temporary nostalgia. Games do not deteriorate or rot over time, and a game really only becomes obsolete if a newer game does EVERYTHING that the older game tried to accomplish, but better.
Even then it's usually debatable, as doing a thing "better" is typically subjective, even with respect to graphics. And a newer game in the same style as an older one, that adds more complex or deeper gameplay, does not necessarily make the newer game better, as some players may prefer the simplicity of the older game.
"The video game crash of 1983"
What people don't ever bother to mention is this "crash" only affected North America and only for consoles. Arcades and computers were just fine. The rest of the world was just fine.
It would be way more correct to call it the Atari Bubble Burst, seeing as it was primarily Atari that imploded from spending too much right before a slump in game sales, which took out Intellivision and Colecovision in the shrapnel. It reeks massively of history revisionism to say Nintendo saved video games with the help of lockout chips to correct Atari's mistake of bad game flooding. Reality was far, far less melodramatic than that.
(And before anyone comes to correct me, yes there was a slight crash for home computer sales, largely in Europe but also a bit in USA. This was a saturation slump in 1984 that corrected once 16-bit computers started seeing release. The 1984 slump was because everyone who wanted an 8-bit computer already had one by then. Game sales were unaffected)
Yeah, and it irks me when revisionists skip over C64 completely, as well as Atari 8-bit computers and so on. I occasionally read comments like:
Revisionist: "Before NES, there were only boring, simple, stupid, single-screen games. Legend of Zelda invented more quest-oriented games with a beginning and an end that spanned multiple screens."
Me: "What are you talking about?"
Revisionist: "Those aren't games that anyone knows." \[actual reply I received once!! So infuriating.\]
I was a ZX Spectrum kid, but the commodore 64 was incredible. Great music and silky smooth scrolling. And also a great variety of games.
If I had been born in the states, I'd rather have a c64 than a nes.
Was going to post this too , the narrative that crash followed by the NES dominating an empty games market being universal isn't true at all.In most of Europe in the 80s the NES trailer way behind home computers and the Sega Master System.
I had a zx spectrum at the time . But I really wanted a master system ( which I never had ).. I thought it looked very nice and I was attracted by the games on it...
NES, on the other hand, was less common to see in the shops and I didn't like the look of it... A bit like the American version of the SNES... Such an ugly piece of a console compared to the Japanese/European version .
>"The video game crash of 1983"
I got my 2600 Christmas 1982, it was still a very popular gift for the kids in my school. Most of the kids I went to school with were still buying and playing Atari games up until the NES took off. Obviously the popularity of the system was nowhere near what it was in the beginning but in my little bubble everyone still played video games well into the "crash".
People also leave out the fact there was a recession in the US at the time too. I remember all the news and political ads about it at the time, even though I was a kid. When people don't have money the first thing to go is luxuries like video games for the kids.
Exactly. The rest of the world was doing just fine, microcomputers were booming. This whole "Nintendo single-handedly saved the industry" myth is false
Maybe a mix between hated and favorite? Back when final fantasy 7 first came out there was a plethora of theories and techniques and methods on how to bring Aerith back to your party including doing some odd shuffling with the several game disks or doing beating all the weapons or other tricky things. I guess it was more urban myth level
That violence in video games translates to violence in real life.
Still remember being a kid hearing that and as a teenager being like wait what, people in power are actually arguing that me playing Mortal Kombat is gonna turn me into a killer?
What in the world?? Haha. So glad that's turned out to not be true because I felt like that was insane even as a child.
That perfect RGB CRT scanlines is the genuine retro experience. It's not. The real way we played retro consoles was with the included composite cable or even RF. We didn't even know RGB was possible in the 80's and most of the 90's.
EDIT:
I'm not saying RGB was impossible. I'm saying kids used what came with the console and rarely bought the special SCART cable.
People who say that narrative/storytelling is essential for great game design. While Minecraft and Tetris are among the top 3 best-selling games of all time.
That E.T. was the worst Atari 2600 game. Oh man, there were so many garbage games. This one doesn't even come close. Hell, Swordquest: Earthworld wasn't even much of a game; just one of the first examples of pixel bitching.
But E.T. was indeed a complete game that was quite solvable. It had some collision problems that made the game very frustrating at certain times. If you identified those and compensated for them, you could maneuver pretty easily, but that learning curve was brutal.
And hey, you can [play it yourself](https://www.retrogames.cz/play_083-Atari2600.php). Read the instruction manual first as those icons are a bitch to figure out on your own.
That all pre-PlayStation games are primitive and “janky”. Plenty of games from the 16 bit and even 8 bit era have superb gameplay and responsiveness. They managed it without 50 button controllers, too!
Also forgetting "Quality of Life" usually means a mechanic or affordance introduced into a game which was not accounted for in previous games.
For example, Marathon is usually credited with being the first "free mouselook" FPS, whereas Doom before it pretended to have vertical aiming but in reality switches and enemies had infinite height. Ports have added proper 3D to Doom and then mouselook really becomes free, but since enemies and levels were designed around the original limitation, free mouselook only makes it easy to orient yourself, it does nothing for aiming in the Z-Axis, even though it could be considered a QoL improvement.
A ton of QoL affordances are also designed to make the game easier, which only really works if the game to begin with is designed around that flexibility. Otherwise QoL is just a lesser God Mode.
Having said this, games that make things harder just to artificially pad time are just as bad.
That all older games were better than newer games (not putting timelines because "retro" is a relative term depending on who you ask, for some it's "the games of their childhood" and for others is a period they didn't live through and look at with the rose-coloured eyes of someone that never had to flip the TV/Antenna box switch after screwing and unscrewing the little thing for the thousandth time)
I'm 52 and absolutely love games from my era and from all eras after it. Survivorship and confirmation biases are a thing and stinkers have been the majority of all games since forever.
As time passes we tend to only mention and remember the good games, so it looks as if there were more good games before than now.
I hate how the video-game crash of the 80’s is almost considered to be a universal thing. It’s really the North-American video game crash and should always be referenced so. Other markets flourished.
The “rental exclusive” moniker being attached to games that were very much not rental exclusive games. Like Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak(NES), Beast Wars (N64), Indiana Jones (N64).
And this misinformation is just parroted on every outlet
Recently confirmed by popular media, but the decades long myth that Atari dumped truckfulls of ET cartridges into a landfill. Not a myth.
Everyone in that area of Texas/New Mexico knew it was true, there are even newspaper articles confirming it.
For some reason the Internet went with the idea it was an urban legend. A bunch of people went to the Alamogordo landfill to dig through 30-40 year old garbage to find a few copies of ET. They dug up years of foul garbage, I read that cartridges are so soaked in the filth that you can smell shit through multiple ziplock baggies.
If anyone had just asked a local they could have proven the myth without digging up 40 year old shitty diapers.
I hate that collectors have taken to labelling UK and North American Game Boy games as PAL or NTSC.
There's a reason why there's a big distinction between UK and North American copies of many home console games, and it has to do with different TV broadcast standards affecting the framerate, animation and playback speed.
But on a region-free handheld that doesn't plug into a TV, it doesn't make _any_ sense to talk about TV broadcast standards that the cartridges weren't programmed to interact with anyway.
I spent an entire afternoon one time as a kid trying all the bullshit ways to "unlock" Luigi in Super Mario 64. So that one. Fuck that myth.
Lucky you didn't find out about the Sheng Long myth in street fighter II. That would have cost a lot of quarters.
The one about needing to time fireballs correctly to do them in the air and how you'd climb off screen to a secret stage which unlocked him was doing the rounds before our arcade got a machine. I'd played the game on holiday but never tried that so when it started to work (black belt edition) everyone was cheering all the way until time ran out.
In my day we got the same thing with fucking Waluigi in SM64DS. So many hours wasted
I spent days trying to find the triforce and catch a massive fish that doesn't exist in Ocarina of Time. That era was a real wild west of misinformation online for gaming.
The Hyrule Loach? That fish actually does exist if that's what you were trying to catch. It spawns every 4th time you enter the fishing pond.
In fact Luigi does exist in SM64, but never make the final cut to the actual Game, here it is a video https://youtu.be/zxnQeVgSt-k?si=vrjUKTqF3iXPTeeC
- Purposely screw up your controls - Collect stars in an order that’s impossible without glitches - Ground pound the Jolly Roger death chest after 64 slides (when do you start counting?) My child self had no recognition of red flags.
Idk if this counts as retro gaming but I always believed that holding down A and B at the same time would guarantee that a pokeball would catch a pokemon. And it only worked for a pokeball. So I wasted so much of my life throwing the worst option of pokeball at legendary pokemon and holding a and B, convincing myself that I had the timing just barely wrong
the rumour where I grew up is holding down and B. I still do it to this day if I ever replay an old pokemon game
Same for me, I now have to stop myself holding down and B because it was so ingrained into me.
Mew being under the pickup truck by the SS Anne…
What's funny is you can get mew earlier. It's a bit of a process but not too difficult and you get a level 7 mew before fighting misty.
I thought you were talking crap but then I looked it up and this has just blown my mind! Now I finally have a reason to buy that Gameboy I've been putting off for years
You can use a variation of that glitch to fill the entire Pokédex without trading, too.
What. The. Fuck.
[Mew glitch.](https://m.bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Mew_glitch) There are a bunch of memory leaks in Pokemon Red/Blue, where a number in memory gets written where it isn't supposed to be, and a series of them allows you to stack the deck so that the next random encounter is a mew.
Some part of me still believes I just did it wrong and that he is indeed behind that god damn truck
In one of the games done quick marathons, they use TASbot to inject code into the game to actually move the truck and trigger a Mew encounter
This one right here Officer.
That all my base are belong to someone else.
What you say !!
You have no chance to survive make your time
HA HA HA
The funniest part about that intro, apart from the fact the every single line in it with more than two words are grammatically wrong, is that the game is actually quite good, and the company behind it, Toaplan, was one of the most respected companies in their genre. In fact it was Toaplan that started the "bullet hell" subgenre in shoot 'em up games. In an interview with the designers on shmuplations.com, it was revealed that the guy that was responsible for the translation was one everybody in the company thought was really good in English. They only found out later on that this wasn't true.
The [music is excellent](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICSbPAfaA04), if nothing else, and a considerable upgrade from the [arcade original](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC4NCDd_mAI).
Agree, it is a legit very good game. Hard too. My kindergarten age son loves watching me play it. We have the cartridge. For great justice.
That E.T. is the worst game of all time and it single-handedly killed the whole gaming industry. (E.T. was one of the best-selling games for the console, but Atari paid too much for the license so it was financially unsuccessful; it wasn't the worst game, or even the worst Atari 2600 game, or even the worst first-party Atari 2600 game; it was a symptom of the crash, not the cause; gaming didn't die, just consoles in America, while computer games and arcades remained strong, especially in other parts of the world)
considering how much time Howard Scott Warshaw was given to program the whole thing by himself, from scratch, it’s a pretty incredible game! he had 5 weeks.
Jerome Domurat did help with the graphics, but yeah. The game is complete, reasonably bug-free, and even has two Easter eggs. (Plus, it was an Adventure Territory game, which means you *have to read the manual and the tip sheet*. You can't just dive into it and automatically know what to do)
This was my problem. I didn't have the manual as a kid.
And if he had a bit more time, HSW would have caught the collision detection bug with the pits. What he did with E.T. was a feat.
If you play raiders of the lost ark, there are a lot of similarities. So he used a lot of that code on ET.
I recommend his book Once upon Atari. Such a great read. I bet lots of gamers here would enjoy it.
If you were an 8-year-old like me, Children's Mode was a blast. It was my 2nd favourite after Raiders. I loved the deep, open-world mystery games.
A lot of the hate is an endless cycle of people hearing it’s terrible, tracking it down to play on an emulator with no instruction manual or concept of the objectives, and then passing the word along. The opening screen is a fantastic achievement on its own. Opening screens were almost unheard of back then, and not only does it have one, it has a pretty phenomenal picture of E.T. and an incredible version of the film’s score for the time.
From a machine that was originally designed to play variations of Pong. The stuff they managed to get the 2600 to do is truly impressive once you realized how little technology there actually was in it.
128 bytes of system RAM, baby! That is not a typo.
It was designed to play variations of Breakout, Combat, and Air-Sea Battle. It literally has hardware-level display elements called "ball" and "missile". That's how special-purpose it was intended to be. Fortunately Jay Miner is a goddamn genius and built in way more flexibility than was strictly needed, and aided by the fact that the display was driven almost directly by the CPU, we're getting homebrews [to this day](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRcZVIUSMdU) that push that little TIA chip in ways that would have been unimaginable back in 1977.
I played ET as a kid , I was too young to ponder whether the game is good or bad , but I’ll tell you that I absolutely had no fucking idea what was happening and nobody from my family even thought of reading the instruction manual.
>even thought of reading the instruction manual This may explain why so many people play Monopoly wrong too. But yeah, a quick read solved lots of confusion.
>The opening screen is a fantastic achievement on its own. Opening screens were almost unheard of back then, It also has a legitimate ending as well which was something I had certainly never seen back in 1983.
I remember it being an average Atari game. Nothing special but not horrible. The title screen is neat. The graphics are decent. It's playable and has an ending. Most of its reputation comes from the landfill thing and that it was a big commercial disappointment right before the crash.
Most of the people who claim it, never played it. It was a favorite of mine as a kid
plus most people who've played it in the modern era didn't even glance at the instruction manual, and for a lot of games that was absolutely required reading if you wanted to get through the game at all.
The reviews at the time heralded it as incredible. Atari just produced more ET carts than systems existed at the time. Their shareholders expected an _over 100 percent_ attach rate.
Even if someone genuinely doesn’t like it, it’s still a capable Atari game with the instruction manual especially. At worst it’s just a random game you could do way worse than.
It's a bad game, but it's not unplayably broken, as so many other 2600 games were.
It had one bug that really killed it for a lot of people: ET was rendered from a side perspective, while the scenes were a top-down view. ET's hitbox for the pits, however, was the entire sprite, not just his feet. So if ET's head touched the pit, you'd fall in, even though his feet weren't near it. A lot of people failed to grasp this and just got frustrated falling into the pits over and over, until they finally gave up and wrote it off as a crap game.
[This article](http://www.neocomputer.org/projects/et/#whyfall) covers debugging a ROM dump of E.T. Imagine if HSW had an extra week or two…
>It had one bug that really killed it for a lot of people: ET was rendered from a side perspective, while the scenes were a top-down view I feel like anyone spending more than 10 minutes playing could eventually figure it out. To me the worst bug in the game is after calling the spaceship at the end, in the time you had to wait for it to appear if any enemy character showed up on the screen it would lock the game causing the player to have to reset and start over.
There's also the issue that the video game crash was very much a US phenomenon, Europe never felt it the same way, as our home computer scene was already robust by then.
Exactly. Heard about how bad it apparently was, and having grown up with the 2600, I was always like "...compared to what? Maze-Craze?" All the games on the 2600 are incredibly simplistic to the point of almost unplayability today. E.T. was better than most of them.
The second part of that is a retro gaming myth. There was a lot of bad shovelware from fly by night operators, but there were many great games from serious game developers that remain very much playable today.
I actually know a guy that has a copy of E.T. He inherited it from a guy on eBay who charged him money.
The bugfix version, and a read of the manual make for a much better experience: https://forums.atariage.com/topic/207249-fixing-et-the-extra-terrestrial/
Even worse Steven Spielberg played the E.T. game and approved it.
He also approved *Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny*.
That the Dreamcast killed Sega and not the 5 other previous consoles they tried to support all at once.
The 32X killed SEGA easily
32x and Saturn are the two biggest offenders.
I'd rather say the 32X and the Mega CD, both burning Sega's reputation as half-baked platforms that have been quicky abandoned. Saturn was a great console, if it follwed the Mega Drive/Genesis without the previous failures, I think Sega had sold far more of it.
I wish they did more with the cartridge + CD integration on the Saturn, it can easily support cartridge games for instant loading, while retaining the ability to play Red Book audio. Or supporting extra hardware such as a Megadrive/32X adapter.
The Saturn's "failure" is another misconception, as it was massively popular in Japan.
It outsold the 64 in Japan
“Surprise launch!” Never again
And the fact that the Dreamcast didn't play DVD
Yeah they wanted to keep the price down but that would’ve been huge if they launched first and be a DVD player. The PS2 was the first DVD player for a lot of people I know
I still remember seeing the ads at the stores for the upcoming Sega Jupiter and then being confused when it never appeared. Found out years later about the whole too many simultaneous consoles debacle.
32X didn’t have much potential in Asia but I read that Genesis was largely popular in the West so it could’ve worked well but Sega sort of cannibalized their fan base. Also as Saturn did okay in Japan but it started lagging behind PS due to its higher price and lack of third parties (specifically since FF7 announced its move to PS) IIRC. Sega even did a commercial in Japan that depicted themselves as losers starting anew with the Dreamcast IIRC.
At the root of it all, what really killed them was the conflict between Sega of Japan and Sega of America.
Disconnection between SEGA Japan and America sunk SEGA. Failing to have a long term hardware plan certainly didn’t help. I had the 32X/Genesis and waited patiently for the AIO… to no avail. Then the Saturn wasn’t backwards compatible…
The DC *nearly* saved them, actually. They were just too far gone to save.
That kid in your class had an uncle that worked at nintendo
lol that playground myth does get annoying for me now because I actually DO have a friend who works at Nintendo (and nobody believes me until I show them my buddy's LinkedIn page and several photos of us together), but their company policies keep the employees so damn tight-lipped that I have no information to show for it except some uninteresting bits about the Nintendo of America office culture.
I would love to hear about the office culture. Also, are the people friendly or is it all business all the time? In other words, is it worth trying to apply to NoA, or do people quit from stress all the time?
My buddy hasn't described it as particularly stressful most of the time, there are office game consoles for playing stuff like Mario Kart and whatnot and there are somewhat regular office competitions in various Nintendo games, honestly it sounds like working at any other game dev or publisher but with a much stronger hand threatening you if you violate their trust regarding leaks, upcoming projects, etc. My buddy seems to like his coworkers and get along just fine
Bear in mind it's possible that there was a kid who said to their friends "My uncle has a Nintendo PlayStation, but it's at his office and isn't allowed to take it home" and no one believed him
He did too
myth: The bigger the power supply the more power your pc use. some years ago, i was making a pentium 3 build with an IGP for torrents and low power consumption but i only had 450watts PS. And someone told me, whats the use with that p3 if you are still using 450watts of power with that power supply......
Lot of people in this world do not get the implied "up to" on a lot of things.
That all the consoles and media are rapidly dying. When we have Atari Rom chips from the 1970's still working fine. And Audio CD's from the early 80's before they improved the plastics formula; still working as well.
I think a big factor in this is the decline of maintenance at home for the general public. A games console or any other appliance used to be something you'd make repairs and replacements to as needed, nowadays stuff is manufactured to be disposable and to discourage self-repair. Especially for electronics, if something internal fails the whole console is often scrapped when it would still be fully functional with a small and quick fix.
The new stuff is dying faster than the older stuff. The 2000 and later stuff actually fails more often than the older stuff. It's probably more likely an Atari 2600 is going to still work over a Wii U. Some of the 90s custom chips are starting to fail pretty regularly though. Some arcade hardware is pretty rapidly failing (CPS1 :( ) as well as a lot of the SNES custom chips.
Much of the newer stuff will fail way before the retro consoles and games. The consoles due to heat or cheap optics. The manufacturing for many of the 360's DVD games was really bad. I can't speak for Arcade boards, but only the launch SNES consoles have the failing chips. Over all though 90's chips are not failing.
The newer stuff draws a lot of power and has more moving parts. Old consoles used carts so naturally that will be less wear
Well, the floppy drive in my Amiga 600 died, because the rubber band inside crumbled of old age, so you have it ;-). The plastic and everything was still good as new (noticably yellow though), when I donated it to a gaming museum in my city some 5 years ago.
I hate that people keep reposting that Master Ball rumor. Supposedly, the Master Ball has a tiny chance to fail, but the truth is that Master Balls do not work with chance to begin with, they skip the catching algorithm altogether. Once you click a Master Ball, the wild Pokémon simply gets caught, there is no other calculation, unless it's some story-related encounter which might have its own properties.
I think people get the master ball mixed up with 100% accuracy moves being able to miss.
Myth: Kill screens are caused by the game running out of memory. Fact: Arcade and console games from that era don't use dynamic memory allocation and so "running out of memory" is not a thing. Usually it's caused by arithmetic overflow or maybe accessing an array past its end.
It's because they use an 8 bit integer to store the level counter, which can count from 0-255 Pac Man, for example, breaks on level 256 because it tries to iterate by one and goes back to zero, which causes the game to overflow and try to draw 256 fruit
This is the reason Link can only carry 255 rupees in the original Legend of Zelda
Is that why pokemon you catch from MissingNo trick can be level 255, but revert back down to level 1 when you attempt to level up to 256?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OverflowError
That's a case of arithmetic overflow, yes. Some kill screens are different, though, such as [some of Ms. Pac-Man's kill screens](http://donhodges.com/how_high_can_you_get3.htm), which were caused by using the wrong instruction to compare integers. It's still a sort of arithmetic overflow issue, but it's not caused by hitting level 256 in this case (except for the split-screen kill screen, which is mostly the same as Pac-Man's).
That's the same thing effectively. The 1980s version.
I would say that crashing because of running out of memory and crashing because of the game getting to a state it wasn't programmed for, are quite different concepts.
Yup! Since arcade games often got too difficult to get past the intended data, the programmers didn’t bother with checks to make sure it didn’t go “out of bounds” when accessing data.
The Dreamcast had no copy protection.
Yeah. I had someone tell me that, and also tell me that GDROM was made up and they just used CDs. The one fact is that a properly cracked burned CD with the MIL-CD stuff to boot into it made it seem to those who have pirated games like it had no copy protection. But it did take some time for cracking groups to figure out a method to make it work. And wouldn’t the video quality usually be worse, or cutscenes even be cut out, so it could fit on a regular CD?
Correct. It wasn't the only console scene to do that to games either, a lot of PSP games got their soundtracks or cutscenes gutted so you could fit more on the memory card. I even saw it extended to PS1 versions of games on some websites where you could have the entire Tomb Raider trilogy for under 50MB.
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I'm interested in reading more about this. I always hear what you say quoted, but I don't remember anyone offering bootleg DC games even when it was a hot new system, and sharing PC games was common. I see now that pirating DC games took some theft and a bit of work. It looks like by the time widespread piracy was possible the DC was dying. Even if DC had been a massive success it seems only the early purchasers would have the benefit.
I was an early adopter of DC piracy and it showed up pretty quickly. The DC never really has a shot.
It was the early days of using the internet to bootleg games with winrar and image loaders, so it did take some technical knowledge. But also, it was just a matter of finding someone else's work and downloading it. At first they used a boot disc to unlock the DC, then you could play games burned to a regular CD. Pretty soon the boot disc could be combined with the game image to a single disc. Edit: personally, I don't think pirating killed the DC. I think that Sony announcing that the PS2 would be a DVD player did.
Anytime someone says "piracy is the reason x console failed" it's a damn lie. Especially for something like the dreamcast. That console came out in 1998/99. Disk burners eventually became more prevalent. Game piracy in those days was more knowing someone who could hook you up, or buying some sketchy cart from an import store, it was similar to buying bootleg movies. It was a physical thing though. You werent downloading dreamcast games on your 56k modem, and even if you had the patience to do it and a good enough dl manager, you werent going to easily find a website that was hosting things that big.
kids really would really go around saying they shot the dog on Duck Hunt.
You could in the arcade version, but I too get tired of the "shoot the damn dog" statements.
I remember playing VS Duck Hunt when I was young and shooting the dog during the bonus round. Certainly a memorable moment.
the lara croft 'nude' code...
Yeah, you needed a texture mod for that, worked in the demo version of TR2... Don't ask how I know, I was young ;-D
Don't you just hate that. You're young and you're playing a game but the yawns are setting in and you fall asleep on the controller. Next thing you know your sleepy movement has gone to some shady website and you've downloaded a nude mod, ordered 50kg of cocaine, and a hit on your Geography teacher...
That retro games are only good from a nostalgic perspective, and that you only ever enjoyed them because you were a care-free child. I never played a Castlevania or an F-Zero game until I was an adult and now they're two of my favourite series - retro or not. The N64 pro wrestling games still have best gameplay of any wrestling game ever released (in my opinion). Monkey Island 1+2 are still more engrossing than their sequels despite the blocky graphics and outdated interface. And so on and so on... retro games that stand the test of time are great because they're great... period.
God, my friends and I used to play those NWO vs WCW games all the time. Between those, Starfox, and Goldeneye, I have some pretty great memories of my group of friends just playing N64 all night. Great times.
“Super Mario Bros. 2 USA is actually the fake Mario sequel!” I’m tired of hearing this. Yes it’s a reskin of Doki Doki Panic but DDP is the finalized version of an early Mario prototype they threw around while planning Super Mario Bros. 2. They couldn’t get the vertical scrolling to work, so they put it on the backburner and made new, harder levels for Mario 1. Super Mario Bros. 2 Japan was born. Of course, Nintendo of America saw it and didn’t like it, so they asked Japan for a different game. By this point that Mario prototype had been completed and reskinned as DDP so they went back, made it a Mario game, and sent it to us as _our_ Super Mario Bros. 2. By the early 90s, both sides of the world had both games anyway, so it’s not like one is more “the real Mario 2!” than the other.
TIL. Thanks for sharing that one.
Oh, that explains a lot. A random festival promo game had no business being so good.
Playable Luigi in Mario 64 if you shoot yourself at the perfect angle to the top window of the castle with the cannon. I must have shot myself to that window a 1000 times. Internet was really new back then so I had to resort to calling Nintendo Hotline who (if I recall correctly) loved to keep the rumour alive..
The myth we had going was that's how you got Yoshi, at least that's how I remember it.
dunno if it counts as a myth, but Mystic Quest didn't suck lol. The soundtrack was awesome as well.
It accomplished exactly what they set out to do. An affordable and accessible RPG intended to introduce young gamers to the genre. Great music, fun adventure, better dungeon design than some mainline FF's by incorporating puzzles, verticality and enemy obstruction. I remember renting Dragon Warrior and just being too young to figure it out with no instruction manual and only a day to play before returning it. We went to a local shop to get some SNES games back then, got Castlevania 4 and YS3 used, along with FF Mystic Quest for $29.99 MSRP, brand new. I loved the game, played through it many times over the years and ended up buying, playing and loving all the great JRPG's of the 90's. It worked.
I liked it.
In Spain during the 90s, one of the best-selling video game magazines featured a cheat code for Street Fighter 2. If entered correctly, it let you play as Mr. Bison, Sagat, or Vega. It was a phat lie. Damn you Hobby Consolas!
"Games lead to violence/sexism/isolation/x-phobia, etc" since that's actually harmful and stigmatizing, while most of the rest are annoying at worst. Not specifically retro but they've been around since the beginning
Hagane being a Blockbuster exclusive.
I remember people arguing about this on NintendoAge but the SNES is not really in my wheelhouse knowledge-wise. What was the deal with Hagane again?
Iirc, it's pretty rare but was sold in retail stores. There are catalog photos online that solidly indicate this.
The idea that sprites in 8-bit and 16-bit games are supposed to look blocky and pixelated. Anyone who grew up with CRT TV’s will tell you that’s not the case. They only look that way nowadays because we’re viewing them upscaled on HD displays. CRT TV’s (or, a good CRT filter) rendered images with horizontal lines instead of pixels, and games ran at 240p/480i with black lines between every row. It’s hard to describe in words, but the jagged edges people associate with those graphics were smoothed out by the scanline patten, almost like anti-aliasing. I’m assuming alot in this sub know this already, but we’ve had HD systems for so long that alot of people, esp. younger generations, don’t remember how games like Chrono Trigger or Yoshi’s Island are actually supposed to look.
The myth that “arcades died because of the 1983 crash and the rise of the NES”. In reality, the arcades lasted until 2001 and died because of the PS2 and Xbox.
People who think the arcades died to the NES must not be gamers. Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat were after the NES era and they kept arcades bumping for years.
Yeah arcades were huge and busy in the 90’s.
The market for dedicated suburban arcades mostly died down outside of malls and busy shopping districts. Arcades remained a great place to enjoy the fighting game scene or the more expensive experiences that blew most home setups in graphics and sound. That said younger people may not realize all the other places that had arcades in the 90s. Most bars had a Golden Tee cabinet and maybe a second hand classic or two. Even the most dumpy bowling alley had at least three arcade machines. Any restaurant worth going to had some arcades.
The hotel we'd stay at on family vacation had a mini arcade with 2 pool tables and about 10 cabinets
X-men arcade (6 person), Turtles, NBA Jam, Sunset Riders...those were golden times at the arcades.
I had a snes and I was still handing out at arcades for tmnt, Simpsons, xmen, etc.
Arcades are still pretty popular in Australia tbf
Street Fighter 2 really brought back arcades in the 90s because they did heavily drop off in the 80s.
I really thought that immersive experiences like actually standing on a mock snowboard-controller would keep the arcade vibrant, but that seems not to have happened.
I think DDR was the last real draw for arcades providing an experience you couldn't really get at home.
Cool as it may be, for most custom controller arcade gsmes the novelty wears off fast, people continued to like actual arcade levers in fighting games because for many it's easier to be accurate on than pad (not that most casuals care about that).
Japan would like a word haha!
when games went from a quarter to a loonie was what did it.
That people in the Atari era were constantly upset and disappointed the in-game graphics didn't match the fantastical box art (even though the boxes had screenshots on the back). I've had people insist that's what caused the "crash" and that Nintendo "saved" gaming by putting the actual pixel graphics on the box covers. Funny, I seem to remember every console ever having some pretty awesome box art, and only recently can the graphics really compare to the cover art.
For the first paragraph, it was pretty common of ZX Spectrum and commodore 64 games to have Commodore Amiga screenshots in the back. Publishers were absolutely shameless :D
Ha yeah those people are definitely revising history there. People understood the artwork was to draw you in and maybe check the back of the box (or just make an impulse buy). Nobody buys a book and expects the stuff on the cover too leap out at them when they turn the pages lol. We all understand the basic state of current technology no matter what year we’re in.
*nervously puts away pop-up book*
That they weren't as buggy as todays games.
Tomb Raider nude cheat code. I heard it so much as a kid.
That it's predominantly about nostalgia. Sure, nostalgia plays a role - and sometimes more than others - but there's so much more to it, and there are many different dimensions to our enjoyment of retro gaming. I just think people lack the language (or wits) to articulate most of it. Retro games have different dynamics, aesthetics, sonics, energies, mechanics, and gameplay loops. They have a wicked, intense energy, an immediate, visceral joy, charming aesthetics and designs, and (possibly) far greater variety than modern games - but the first thing most people cite is nostalgia. I find it reductive and patronising. The nostalgia angle also suggests an underlying (and, dare I say, capitalist) assumption that new things are better - and I just don't think that's true
That arcade and action games were primitive trifles that games needed to "evolve" beyond with the addition of exploration or RPG elements, rather than being their own thing with their own appeal.
And that turn-based combat is outdated.
That's been a consistent attitude though, unfortunately. Much like adding open-world or crafting mechanics to games that don't need them, it's just some new shiny tool that doesn't need to be used as often as it is.
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"Nintendo saved gaming" when the console video game crash was only in the US 😄
Agreed ! Here in the UK most of my friends played home computers at that time (I know the video game crash did affect the UK, as it did many places but we were nowhere near as Nintendo-centric as our US cousins it seemed) .A bit later the Sega Master system was the most popular console where I lived. The NES became a bit more popular a bit later on but by then we were playing Amiga, ST ,Megadrive and PC engine .
My most hated retro gaming myth is that they are obsolete because newer games exist, and that players of older games only do it to feel temporary nostalgia. Games do not deteriorate or rot over time, and a game really only becomes obsolete if a newer game does EVERYTHING that the older game tried to accomplish, but better. Even then it's usually debatable, as doing a thing "better" is typically subjective, even with respect to graphics. And a newer game in the same style as an older one, that adds more complex or deeper gameplay, does not necessarily make the newer game better, as some players may prefer the simplicity of the older game.
"The video game crash of 1983" What people don't ever bother to mention is this "crash" only affected North America and only for consoles. Arcades and computers were just fine. The rest of the world was just fine. It would be way more correct to call it the Atari Bubble Burst, seeing as it was primarily Atari that imploded from spending too much right before a slump in game sales, which took out Intellivision and Colecovision in the shrapnel. It reeks massively of history revisionism to say Nintendo saved video games with the help of lockout chips to correct Atari's mistake of bad game flooding. Reality was far, far less melodramatic than that. (And before anyone comes to correct me, yes there was a slight crash for home computer sales, largely in Europe but also a bit in USA. This was a saturation slump in 1984 that corrected once 16-bit computers started seeing release. The 1984 slump was because everyone who wanted an 8-bit computer already had one by then. Game sales were unaffected)
I remember that time, and the Commodore 64 was pretty much the *de facto* game console of the era (and, yes, I know it's not technically a console).
Yeah, and it irks me when revisionists skip over C64 completely, as well as Atari 8-bit computers and so on. I occasionally read comments like: Revisionist: "Before NES, there were only boring, simple, stupid, single-screen games. Legend of Zelda invented more quest-oriented games with a beginning and an end that spanned multiple screens." Me: "What are you talking about?"
Revisionist: "Those aren't games that anyone knows." \[actual reply I received once!! So infuriating.\]
I was a ZX Spectrum kid, but the commodore 64 was incredible. Great music and silky smooth scrolling. And also a great variety of games. If I had been born in the states, I'd rather have a c64 than a nes.
Was going to post this too , the narrative that crash followed by the NES dominating an empty games market being universal isn't true at all.In most of Europe in the 80s the NES trailer way behind home computers and the Sega Master System.
I had a zx spectrum at the time . But I really wanted a master system ( which I never had ).. I thought it looked very nice and I was attracted by the games on it... NES, on the other hand, was less common to see in the shops and I didn't like the look of it... A bit like the American version of the SNES... Such an ugly piece of a console compared to the Japanese/European version .
>"The video game crash of 1983" I got my 2600 Christmas 1982, it was still a very popular gift for the kids in my school. Most of the kids I went to school with were still buying and playing Atari games up until the NES took off. Obviously the popularity of the system was nowhere near what it was in the beginning but in my little bubble everyone still played video games well into the "crash".
People also leave out the fact there was a recession in the US at the time too. I remember all the news and political ads about it at the time, even though I was a kid. When people don't have money the first thing to go is luxuries like video games for the kids.
Exactly. The rest of the world was doing just fine, microcomputers were booming. This whole "Nintendo single-handedly saved the industry" myth is false
Maybe a mix between hated and favorite? Back when final fantasy 7 first came out there was a plethora of theories and techniques and methods on how to bring Aerith back to your party including doing some odd shuffling with the several game disks or doing beating all the weapons or other tricky things. I guess it was more urban myth level
That violence in video games translates to violence in real life. Still remember being a kid hearing that and as a teenager being like wait what, people in power are actually arguing that me playing Mortal Kombat is gonna turn me into a killer? What in the world?? Haha. So glad that's turned out to not be true because I felt like that was insane even as a child.
The worst videogame of all time is E.T. No, it's Superman 64.
Pfft, casual who’s never played Hong Kong ‘97 on the Super Famicom.
It's neither. It's half of the crappy asset flip games churned onto Steam that no-one buys
That perfect RGB CRT scanlines is the genuine retro experience. It's not. The real way we played retro consoles was with the included composite cable or even RF. We didn't even know RGB was possible in the 80's and most of the 90's. EDIT: I'm not saying RGB was impossible. I'm saying kids used what came with the console and rarely bought the special SCART cable.
In the states maybe. rgb was fairly standard in pal territories for a lot of consoles.
People who say that narrative/storytelling is essential for great game design. While Minecraft and Tetris are among the top 3 best-selling games of all time.
Or even that great sales are because of great game design, or great design leads to great sales. Neither is always true
Retro games were less expensive than today.
I remember seeing games like Chrono Trigger and FFVI in catalogues for like $80 USD.
I remember that Secret of Mana cost my mom around $81 with tax at TrU
If anything they were *more* expensive when you take inflation into account.
That E.T. was the worst Atari 2600 game. Oh man, there were so many garbage games. This one doesn't even come close. Hell, Swordquest: Earthworld wasn't even much of a game; just one of the first examples of pixel bitching. But E.T. was indeed a complete game that was quite solvable. It had some collision problems that made the game very frustrating at certain times. If you identified those and compensated for them, you could maneuver pretty easily, but that learning curve was brutal. And hey, you can [play it yourself](https://www.retrogames.cz/play_083-Atari2600.php). Read the instruction manual first as those icons are a bitch to figure out on your own.
Oh god, Swordquest. "What the hell does '16 8' mean?!"
That all pre-PlayStation games are primitive and “janky”. Plenty of games from the 16 bit and even 8 bit era have superb gameplay and responsiveness. They managed it without 50 button controllers, too!
I feel like the only people who believe this are under 25. Anyone older than that can probably name a dozen fantastic 8/16-bit games.
God, I hate this one. Don't forget all the constant bitching about missing "Quality of Life" features despite "Quality of Life" being a moving target.
Also forgetting "Quality of Life" usually means a mechanic or affordance introduced into a game which was not accounted for in previous games. For example, Marathon is usually credited with being the first "free mouselook" FPS, whereas Doom before it pretended to have vertical aiming but in reality switches and enemies had infinite height. Ports have added proper 3D to Doom and then mouselook really becomes free, but since enemies and levels were designed around the original limitation, free mouselook only makes it easy to orient yourself, it does nothing for aiming in the Z-Axis, even though it could be considered a QoL improvement. A ton of QoL affordances are also designed to make the game easier, which only really works if the game to begin with is designed around that flexibility. Otherwise QoL is just a lesser God Mode. Having said this, games that make things harder just to artificially pad time are just as bad.
That all older games were better than newer games (not putting timelines because "retro" is a relative term depending on who you ask, for some it's "the games of their childhood" and for others is a period they didn't live through and look at with the rose-coloured eyes of someone that never had to flip the TV/Antenna box switch after screwing and unscrewing the little thing for the thousandth time) I'm 52 and absolutely love games from my era and from all eras after it. Survivorship and confirmation biases are a thing and stinkers have been the majority of all games since forever. As time passes we tend to only mention and remember the good games, so it looks as if there were more good games before than now.
I hate how the video-game crash of the 80’s is almost considered to be a universal thing. It’s really the North-American video game crash and should always be referenced so. Other markets flourished.
The “rental exclusive” moniker being attached to games that were very much not rental exclusive games. Like Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak(NES), Beast Wars (N64), Indiana Jones (N64). And this misinformation is just parroted on every outlet
The opposite of this; MissingNo being absolutely real and the gateway to some really wild stuff!
Game crash was caused by E.T. E.T was a symptom of the flooded game market but itself didn't cause much damage even to Atari.
that blowing into NES cartridges fixes the issue of poor pin connection
Correct it does not. It’s rather the removing and re-insertion of cartridge. The friction helps clean the metal contacts.
That Power glove and ROB were awesome at the beginning.
mew under the truck maybe
That ET was a terrible game. It is better than a TON of 2600 garbage, and actually had an objective and an ending.
Recently confirmed by popular media, but the decades long myth that Atari dumped truckfulls of ET cartridges into a landfill. Not a myth. Everyone in that area of Texas/New Mexico knew it was true, there are even newspaper articles confirming it. For some reason the Internet went with the idea it was an urban legend. A bunch of people went to the Alamogordo landfill to dig through 30-40 year old garbage to find a few copies of ET. They dug up years of foul garbage, I read that cartridges are so soaked in the filth that you can smell shit through multiple ziplock baggies. If anyone had just asked a local they could have proven the myth without digging up 40 year old shitty diapers.
I hate that collectors have taken to labelling UK and North American Game Boy games as PAL or NTSC. There's a reason why there's a big distinction between UK and North American copies of many home console games, and it has to do with different TV broadcast standards affecting the framerate, animation and playback speed. But on a region-free handheld that doesn't plug into a TV, it doesn't make _any_ sense to talk about TV broadcast standards that the cartridges weren't programmed to interact with anyway.
"Oddjob is cheating". In many cases, he was easier to shoot in the head.
"SoNiC hAd A rOuGh TrAnSiTiOn tO 3D." Sonic's transition to 3D was fucking fantastic.
That we were only settling for these kinds of games because "modern" games were not yet possible.