gaming Gaming in 80s and 90s.

[CastletonSnob 3,073]

I was born in 1992, so I don't remember much what gaming was like back then. 

For those of you who were old enough to remember, what was gaming like back in the NES and SNES days? How did you survive without internet to look stuff up?

[Mirage 24,747]

We socialized the good old fashioned way - we actually visited our friends at home or at school and talked face to face about games. I really miss the days of a bunch of pals hanging out in the living room taking turns trying to beat Mike Tyson's Knockout, or witness a friend beat Super Mario to watch that amazing ending (it was just a dream!).

Games were short, but very difficult. The Bard's Tale (on PC, Apple IIe) was the first 3D-ish adventure game that almost no one ever completed. In fact, I know only one person who did, and that was me.

The First Final Fantasy was hard too, and the Phantasy Star series had great stories. The Sports Games, like NHL Hockey or Madden Football, were a blast to play with other people in the same room.

It's kinda funny though, because most games were complete crap. Kinda like now I guess - I still don't understand how some ever get published.

Anyway, even further back was Atari. We would get together at a friend's house and play Space Invaders, Asteroids, Bowling, etc. It was a lot of fun!

 

Here's actual 8-bit animation from Atari Bard's Tale. This was amazing for that time. It took about a minute to load.

Back then, there was no 'overhead map'. We had to navigate by memory or make maps. There was no save game anywhere, you had to survive and save back at the starting point in the 'Adventurere's Guild'.  LOL

[CastletonSnob 3,073]

3 minutes ago, Mirage77 said:

We socialized the good old fashioned way - we actually visited our friends at home or at school and talked face to face about games. I really miss the days of a bunch of pals hanging out in the living room taking turns trying to beat Mike Tyson's Knockout, or witness a friend beat Super Mario to watch that amazing ending (it was just a dream!).

Games were short, but very difficult. The Bard's Tale (on PC, Apple IIe) was the first 3D-ish adventure game that almost no one ever completed. In fact, I know only one person who did, and that was me.

The First Final Fantasy was hard too, and the Phantasy Star series had great stories. The Sports Games, like NHL Hockey or Madden Football, were a blast to play with other people in the same room.

It's kinda funny though, because most games were complete crap. Kinda like now I guess - I still don't understand how some ever get published.

Anyway, even further back was Atari. We would get together at a friend's house and play Space Invaders, Asteroids, Bowling, etc. It was a lot of fun!

Isn't that why games in the NES days were so hard, because they were short? They were hard so players would get their money's worth. 

[Fluttershy Friend 25,446]

My favourite games were: Civilization I, Panzer General I, Volfenstein, Prince of Persia, North and South....Uh. Nostalgia

Quote

How did you survive without internet to look stuff up?

It was easy if you don't know about some of technology or it doesn't exist you simply don't think about them.

Edited August 26, 2017 by Fluttershy Friend

[Mirage 24,747]

12 minutes ago, VG_Addict said:

Isn't that why games in the NES days were so hard, because they were short? They were hard so players would get their money's worth. 

That and kids were smarter back then. 

Honestly, yes, that is a good point, but also, there was very limited memory too. Nevertheless, some games took days and days to complete, and some were just hours and hours of fun, like Tetris for example (they didn't need to be complicated).

As far as searching for information - there was the library for one, or once again, the good old fashioned style of calling or visiting people who knew stuff.

[Techno Universal 2,575]

Well I didn't exist back then but because my dad was born in 1970 he was a major gamer in the 80s. He had a Commodore 64 with an old 8inch floppy drive and a cassette tape drive. Plus his favourite game was Impossible Mission and he would borrow that game from his friend all the time plus the game was also on cassette tape so it would literally take 25 minutes to load. Plus my dad was really good at that game back then but because he went to university and got a professional job in the 90s he simply grew out of gaming and he pretty much was never a gamer in the 90s.    

[CypherHoof 26,482]

Some games were simple and repetitive so they would fit - that was particularly true of early consoles, in that they had limited space so had to make do.

Early computer games were on audio tape, and audio tape is cheap - so it wasn't uncommon for complex games such as adventures to require multiple stages of loading, something we see again when we get to (say) the playstation era and it wants you to save a game and switch disks.

but the main thing was the incredibly low grade graphics that were considered acceptable back then. the largest amount of storage for a game tends to be display resources, and back then, they were pretty crude. the crudity was all we knew though, and it had the advantage that it required much less processing (given there weren't dedicated display boards back then, it was all done by the cpu) and of course almost all were either 2d or at best isometric with clearly visible block-based maps.

Gameplay was good though. I think the multiplayer combat in super bomber man 3 (on the snes) is possibly the best party game ever

[Driz 1,552]

21 minutes ago, VG_Addict said:

Isn't that why games in the NES days were so hard, because they were short? They were hard so players would get their money's worth.

That, and I also think that the very first game developers didn't really know how to make video games. Game design didn't exist since there were no older games to base from, so a game would usually just be a bunch of blinking shapes on the screen and you would have to figure out how it worked. Because of that - and the fact that technology didn't allow much room for content -, some games would be either incredibly confusing, or incredibly hard, or both. It was an adventure in and of itself~

Of course there were the instruction booklets that came inside the game box most of the time, but even then it didn't help a ton either. Players would still have to write down their own little "strategy guides" with scribbled out maps and whatnot, and pass it around among friends if they needed the help.

[Oleks 1,993]

No Internet, huh? Oh, the first world problems! I was born in 1992 as well, but I got my first computer only in 2004. And I had no good Internet till 2009. Spent my childhood playing simple NES games and Tetris variations on this thing:

I played Super Mario, Battle City, Chip and Dale, Mortal Kombat and Battletoads with my friends, shot ducks and cowboys with that fancy Nintendo pistol, and never understood a word from the plot because I didn’t know English or Chinese (a lot of pirated games and knock-offs were only available in this language).
Cheat codes were transferred via the word of mouth as some sacred knowledge. Or discovered accidentally. And when we had money, we went to the so called “game rooms” to play PS1 games. Those were the coolest.
 

Spoiler

I don’t miss that horrible time one bit.

 

[Envy 6,127]

Well, I was born around years before you and may have a little perspective, but not much.

I would have been too young to remember anything when the NES was still the only console out, but there was an NES in the family after the release of the SNES that I remember playing. Those memories are very early memories that I hardly remember. I just remember playing games like Mega Man 2 and Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout. Lol

The most annoying thing I remember about early systems were certain aspects of the Gameboy. I didn't really enjoy a single game on that system until Pokemon Red, and once I was playing that game regularly on the system it was a pain-in-the-rear. The worst thing was that there was that the screen had no lighting mechanism whatsoever, so playing in the dark was impossible unless you got one of those lights that plugged into the side of the system. I remember when I was supposed to be sleeping, I would have to rely on the light from my closet (I've never slept in pure darkness lol) to have any chance of being able to play.

That is hands down, one of the worst parts of handheld gaming back in the day, and it is just kind of incomprehensible by today's standards.

Pre-internet, strategy guides were sometimes very necessary, too. The fact that strategy guides still exist and that people still buy them surprises me. Nowadays you can find everything on the internet, but back then, you were in trouble if you sucked at video games (like me) and didn't have a strategy guide.

Edited August 26, 2017 by Envy

[Steve Piranha 29,412]

Was born in 91, but my mom had an NES that I could play afterwards. Later, I was given my aunt's SNES. Never finished any of the NES games, but I could finish Super Mario World. I think I haven't finished any games until Mario 64, and even then, I don't think I've finished any games until years later  . Seriously, my game finishing streak came about in the late 90s and early 2000s. Pure skillz, (yes, with a "z"  ) and paying attention to text afterwards (skipped all text before then  ). Hell, I think the only other SNES game I've finished shortly afterwards was TMNT IV: Turtles in Time, but I think I've finished A Link to the Past and Mario RPG AFTER I've finished Majora's Mask  

[Buttonmash1973 1,026]

When I was a kid in the 1980's I went to the local resturant that had a jukebox, pinball machines and Arcade Games and now that place is gone.

[Mirage 24,747]

2 minutes ago, Buttonmash1973 said:

When I was a kid in the 1980's I went to the local resturant that had a jukebox, pinball machines and Arcade Games and now that place is gone.

 

Yup - first time I went to an Arcade was with my babysitter's boyfriend and I felt SOO DAMN COOL!

btw @Buttonmash1973

Random CUPCAKE spanking!

*Wham!~

[Moony the Cat 3,702]

When i was younger, my dad showed me his old Computer Game Cassette Tapes, like Mutant Camels for example, but he sold his home computer, so i couldnt play them. The first Console i got was a Super Nintendo, with the Game Street Fighter 2, i still remember that my mother didnt liked that game as much and i had to ask her a lot of times, before she decided that i could give it a shot.

But shortly after, i got a fan of Super Mario and played a lot of Super Mario All Stars and Super Mario World. I also played quite a lot of Pac-Attack and Kirbys Dream Course.

The Games were all fun and the Difficulty was really okay for me. Well, except for Street Fighter 2, i never managed to beat that game, unless it was the easiest Difficulty and with the only female character, because she was quick and i could dodge most attacks.

I played with some Friends or my sister. I never really had to look anything up, i even managed to find the Secret Star Levels in Super Mario World on my own.

[Bad Dream 9,509]

I was born in the '90s but I was always behind the times anyway. I played my dad's video games, which are pretty antiquated by most standards now, but I preferred them because they were simpler and in many ways better. I remember playing Eye of the Beholder, a D&D game, and had to draw my own maps on graph paper as I played. The graphics were not sophisticated and the controls were clunky. But to me, controllers today are still clunky and unresponsive, there's always the annoying and pointless updates every other day and the expense. A lot of games now you have to play online to get multiplayer experience whereas it would have been built-in back in the day. There may have been no internet to look stuff up, but it wasn't necessary. People used to talk to other people, read magazines and such. The internet was never necessary to run the world. The most fun I probably ever had playing video games was my dad's (very) old Telstar system that he got in the late '70s. It was just a blip being knocked around by two paddles for a game of Tennis. Simple, effective and fun. 

[GiFTGewEhrSCHutzen-4 8,828]

Memories of playing game back then were awesome! I got to play games like Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers 3, Contra, Mortal Kombat, Spider-Man vs Kingpin for the Sega Master System, and many more. Those were the days, 2D at its finest. Even though I don't have a Famicom, SNES, or even the Sega Master System. I still play those retro games by other means, I don't want to say it because it might be blasphemy to say it. XD

Currently, the game I'm playing right now is Maximum Carnage for the SNES.

[CaptainDoubloon 856]

I was born in 83 and I feel humbled to have seen how video games have changed from the NES days to what we have now. When Nintendo and Sega were competing it would be frustrating because the same video game title would not look the same. Aladdin is a popular example of how on the SNES and Sega Genesis they looked drastically different. It always blows my mind when someone will complain about the graphics of a current video game and to me it's like "you think that's bad, look at what I grew up with".

I even grew up playing some of the obscure Apple II games like Lemonade Stand, Odell Lake, Word Muncher, Mario Teaches Typing, and of course the popular Oregon Trail.

Sometimes Nintendo magazine would publish walkthroughs of games and would have the entire levels or maps layed out screen-by-screen or there was a hotline to call that charged money to use.

Edited September 15, 2017 by Sgamer

[CheeryFox 23,817]

On 8/26/2017 at 8:29 AM, VG_Addict said:

I was born in 1992, so I don't remember much what gaming was like back then. 

For those of you who were old enough to remember, what was gaming like back in the NES and SNES days? How did you survive without internet to look stuff up?

Let's just say...elation.  The Internet didn't exist for me until the mid-'90s --- and I didn't care about it until 2003. Gaming was the one thing you'd look forward to when ya got home from school. 

[Randimaxis 8,652]

*walks onstage, steps up to the mic, taps it*

>thump thump< Is... i-is this thing on?

*clears throat*

I was born in the year 1977 - the year Star Wars (A New Hope) came out, and Elvis Presley (The King of Rock 'N' Roll) died.

Because of such, I happen to have had the opportunity to spend a number of my childhood, teenage AND adult years with some sort of console experience available to me... even if not on a consistent basis, i.e. my buddy down the block with the first NES in the subdivision...

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first console I can remember was seeing my cousin Hubert playing the Magnavox system on one of those monstrous floor TVs - and I recall watching him play Pick-Axe Pete for HOURS.  Granted, I was considered too young to touch it - but I got to watch, and that was good enough for me.  It had a funky little keypad-thingy, with these see-through filmscreens that you placed on the controller to tell you what did what.  It was weird... but as a little tyke, I was just fascinated watching my cousin making the stuff on the television MOVE.

During this time, I DID get to play my Uncle Larry's Intellivision, which he and his wife had gotten for all the nieces and nephews to play on (they were most certainly NOT gamers; they were Protestants).  I fell in love with Burger Time, which became my go-to game whenever we went to visit and the adults shooed the kids into the cool, quiet basement to veg out while they talked their grown-up talk.

Next came the Atari 2600 - the classic gamer's introduction to video games. This was the first system that I was given free reign on, because it belonged to my cousin Ray Ray (I kid you not; none of these names are made-up), and he came to live with my parents and I for a while.  Incidentally, he was also my first introduction to metal, a-la Quiet Riot - but that's a different story.  He had SOOOOOOO many games for it, I played anywhere from five to twenty-five of 'em in the space of a couple of hours.  This was the system that started preparing me for marathon runs, which I got a bit too good at, by one point.

My parents tried to get me an NES when they first came out for Christmas; we didn't have a lot, but they tried to see to it I got some nice things.  However, that particular holiday season saw stores run slap out of NES systems, because folks were RABID to get their mitts on 'em.  So instead, my parents got me a Sega Master System, which was the only thing available in the stores.  I felt a bit put off at first, but I was still happy to finally OWN a system of my very own, so I simply tried it out.  It actually exceeded my expectations, to be frank - I spent days playing Choplifter, just to see if I could get any better at NOT squishing the guys I was supposed to be rescuing.

The aforementioned buddy down the block was the one with the NES, and let me tell you - we kicked SO MUCH ASS in Contra together, it was amazing!  We also played Jackal, Ikari Warriors and numerous other titles... though no sports - except for Arch Rivals, which was hilarious fun.  I ended up finally getting my own NES years later - from a garage sale.  It had been close to $400 on that one Christmas; my Mom got it and twenty-three games for $50.  *chuckle*

The NES trained me, though... I spent ENDLESS hours, happily grinding away in stuff like Crystalis or Blaster Master, or beating the snot out of my personal favorite: MegaMan 2.  THOSE were my golden years of gaming, when I could cross Heatman's lava trench on the vanishing blocks instead of the cheap way out with Item 2.  I could beat it in less than an hour, in my NES prime.  Two hours for Metroid.

At this point, I had begun to hear about the next-gen systems, and wanted one quite badly.  So, with much mewling to my elders, they finally got me a Sega Genesis system.  I fell in love with it from the very beginning, and used to spend hours playing Sonic and Sonic 2.  I am one of the kids from that era who could get ALL the Chaos Emeralds, in BOTH games.  Let me tell you - there's nothing like pounding down Jolt colas while listening to C+C Music Factory while trying to work that last topsy-turvy stage to nab the last C.E., my friends.  Maybe wasted youth, but wasted youth is better by far, dot dot dot.

My younger cousin Steven, whom I occasionally babysat, wanted to borrow my Genesis, and offered up his Super Nintendo for loan; we would exchange them back when we got tired of it.  Agreed on, the trade was made, along with a number of games - including Super Mario World, Ogre Battle and Maximum Carnage, which became fast faves, and the incredible Final Fantasy III (VI in Japan).  I had to clean sticky dried soda and melted taffy off the damn thing, but it played wonderfully.  Later on, Steven tried to make the switch back - but my Genesis had gotten Coca-Cola spilled into it, which pretty much fried it.  One argument, a slight physical altercation (he tried to hit me; I didn't let him, but I didn't swing either), and a phone call to his mother later, and I am the new owner of a used Super NES.

When I joined the workforce in earnest (meaning jobs that had W-2s to fill out), one of my first jobs was at a local game rental store.  It was there that I first discovered the game that would set me off on a new adventure in video gaming... an adventure named Twisted Metal, brought in full, screaming life to my senses by our in-store-demo Playstation.  I worked late on purpose, taking last shift so the boss would let me play it while he counted up the till.  It took me three months, but I bought my own - and it... was... WONDERFUL!  Vigilante 8, I.Q., Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Monster Rancher, Loaded (and ReLoaded), Metal Gear Solid... this list could go on for hours, I promise you!  ALL fantastic... except for some games, but we don't talk about them out of respect for the (please let it stay) dead.

Next came the PlayStation 2, because I'd already gotten invested in Sony, so why not continue? That's where I discovered treasures like Suikoden and Suikoden 2, which were incredibly in-depth RPGs; 2's story could still be considered among some of the best RPG stories to ever interact in.  I couldn't get enough of the kinds of stuff that kept sliding and gliding across my screen as I played the system... and this became the age that I started marveling at how far games had come.

Damn you, XBOX.  Incredible games are what you offered, but your inferior system builds, shoddy customer service and the introduction of the vile Red Ring O' Death will forever haunt me as things I truly wish I hadn't had to experience.  Through three system purchases.  And two factory resets.  And six months of having to wrap a towel around you to get you to work for longer than ten seconds.  And all those songs I worked hard and crafted with MTV Music Generator 3?  yeah, GONE - roughly 90 different remixes of all sorts of tunes... lost forever.  DAMN YOU.

But even though I said I wouldn't do so... I still ended up buying an XBOX 360.  Which actually turned out to be a wonderful investment, as it had few flaws (well, fewer than its' predecessor), yet kept me entertained with Fallout 3, Skyrim, Borderlands and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare.  Spent so much time with those games, I have thousands of stories I could share with you, but I won't because this is long-winded enough, thank you.  Now move along, would you kindly?

Now, I have an XBOX ONE, which I happen to be enjoying quite well... and TitanFall 2 is my current poison, if you must know.  I also dabble in 7 Days To Die and Fallout 4, of course.  There are a few features I could do without, a few I miss, and a few that I certainly feels are improvements.  Whatever the next-gen will be for me?  I have no idea... but I WILL say this:

Bring it. 

No bragging.  No fear.  No holding back. 

Just bring it.

 

[Scavenger Crow 91]

Castlevania III, Demon's Crest, EVO, Spanw, Power Ranger Mighty Morphing, Zombies Eat my Neighbors......and stuff  by the way I'm from the 96 so I'm not from the Old Good Days but I LOVEEEE retro stuff, I completed all Final Fantasy Up to FF10 

[DJ_Bonebraker 183]

While I'm only 1 year younger than Randimaxis, I didn't get into gaming too awfully much during the 1980's due to my parents not even letting me or my brother buy a NES or Atari even with our own money, because "those stupid video games will rot your brains!"

They finally relented a bit around 1991 when they finally let us get an old Atari 2600 (I was a beast at Pac-Man & Asteroids), and I used all the money I'd saved up to that point to buy a 386 PC in the summer of 1994, between my sophomore & Junior years of high school, mainly due to the fact that I needed a computer for doing all the reports I needed to do for school.  Conveniently, it also let me get into all sorts of PC games, like the original Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem II, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Wolfenstein 3d, DooM, etc.  As a matter of fact, Wolfenstein 3d and DooM were the first games I seriously modded, and I still have the modded versions of those games to this day (I also still have my full copy of Raptor: Call of the Shadows that I occasionally fire up DOSbox to play).

I even discovered that I still have the custom intro & credits reel animations I made for my "Funkystein 3d" mod for Wolfenstein 3d.  I even uploaded them to my YouTube channel for posteriority: 
 

I know this might not look that good, but keep in mind this was all created between October 1995 & February 1996 (so well over 21 years ago) on a computer with a 386 20 MHz processor, 2 MB of system memory, basic on-board VGA video card, 8-bit SoundBlaster sound card and an 80 MB Hard drive.  I mean it's practically a miracle it turned out as well as it did.....

[Kaneki 1,072]

Born in 1995 here, but I grew up on some 90's games.

I especially loved SimCity 2000 (the Windows 95 version, not the DOS version, anyone remember that)? I wasn't very good, but it's one of the few 90's games I really remember a lot.

[DJ_Bonebraker 183]

22 hours ago, Cloggedone said:

Born in 1995 here, but I grew up on some 90's games.

I especially loved SimCity 2000 (the Windows 95 version, not the DOS version, anyone remember that)? I wasn't very good, but it's one of the few 90's games I really remember a lot.

I actually not only have the original DOS SimCity 2000 in my DOSbox games folder, but I also have all of the original installation floppy disks floating around somewhere....

As for one of my favorite games from the '90s that I still play sometimes, it's gotta be Raptor: Call of the Shadows.  Loved that game.