Internet Gaming Age

SteadyEvo

SteadyEvo

Banned
Anyone old enough to remember gaming prior to internet?

I remember waiting for the mail man to deliver my monthly Nintendo Power. That was how games were previewed. Reading articles, looking at pictures and using imagination. Even reading a review wouldn't really spoil things. I'd still go in with fresh eyes due to lack of gameplay.

The joy of seeing the N64 kiosk at the mall leading up to launch. Instead of relying on others just going hands on for yourself. Those were the good days.

I'm just wondering if there's a better way to go about things. In store kiosks, demos made available to the public, etc. Anything is better than the current format. Remember demo disc from PlayStation and Dreamcast magazine?

This thread of the product of feeling somewhat salty seeing Halo Infinite campaign being explained to me by a select few while I wait with the rest of the ordinary customers for my opportunity. This whole reviewer/cool kid culture leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyway, I'll end my journal entry there. Goodnight and can't wait for Wednesday!
 
As a teenager in the 90s you just described my childhood. There seemed to be more mystique and anticipation for games back then, when you had to wait for information in magazines or you'd go into a store and there'd be games on sale you had no idea existed. On a tenuously related note, I get irrationally irked seeing kids on YouTube making 'documentaries' about old games and systems when they weren't even born back when they were released. Anyway, I'm off to shake a fist at a cloud 😅
 
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I was born in the 90s, but I definitely remember gaming without internet, having to consult friends at school, grabbing magazines at the grocery, etc.

First time I can remember consulting the internet was going to cheatcc and physically writing down cheat codes in a notebook for games.
 
Most games i bought back then was by looking at the cover and back cover of the game boxes. Bought Resident Evil, Tomb Raider and many more pearls this way. But also alot of crap. Was like opening a kinder surpise egg, you never knew if you would gona like the game or not.

One of the ways i could tell i would probably like a game was by looking at the developer name on the box. I remember bying alot of Sierra and Lucas Art games for PC.
 
Those were the days. Nintendo Power, Electric Gaming Monthly, Game Informer, relying on commercials to spark interest in games, it was all a lot of fun

One of my favorite memories was reading Nintendo Power the night before my first day of middle school, trying to calm my nerves by reading about the new Game Boy Advance and Super Mario Bros. 2 Advance. That, and reading about Animal Crossing in Nintendo Power months before its release, marveling over the way it looked and how great the characters were. I would pull out a Nintendo Power Magazine in class during SSR in middle school 4th period class, and imagine what the game could be like. Then go home and re-read or look over the pictures again and continue to imagine what Animal Crossing was going to play like. At the time, I'm not so sure I even knew what type of game it was going to be, I only knew I had to play it because it looked amazing

Before I started using a computer, I went strictly with my gut. I knew exactly what was going to be pretty fun (for me and my friends to play) almost 100% of the time somehow
 
The time my dad said "let's go to some computer store" in the weekends, where I then picked a game based on a cover or if I was lucky a magazine review, the anticipation on the drive home and while loading the game from tape or disk... it made it all much more valuable than it is today.
 
SteadyEvo said:
Anyone old enough to remember gaming prior to internet?

I remember waiting for the mail man to deliver my monthly Nintendo Power. That was how games were previewed. Reading articles, looking at pictures and using imagination. Even reading a review wouldn't really spoil things. I'd still go in with fresh eyes due to lack of gameplay.

The joy of seeing the N64 kiosk at the mall leading up to launch. Instead of relying on others just going hands on for yourself. Those were the good days.

I'm just wondering if there's a better way to go about things. In store kiosks, demos made available to the public, etc. Anything is better than the current format. Remember demo disc from PlayStation and Dreamcast magazine?

This thread of the product of feeling somewhat salty seeing Halo Infinite campaign being explained to me by a select few while I wait with the rest of the ordinary customers for my opportunity. This whole reviewer/cool kid culture leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyway, I'll end my journal entry there. Goodnight and can't wait for Wednesday!
Click to expand...
Those were the days...
 
PS1 era was golden. I went to my local store and stared at the covers for hours imagining what the games were about. I threw away most of my pocket money then but i also got some wonderful surprises, like Wipeout (i thought it was a shooter)
 
SteadyEvo said:
Anyone old enough to remember gaming prior to internet?

I remember waiting for the mail man to deliver my monthly Nintendo Power. That was how games were previewed. Reading articles, looking at pictures and using imagination. Even reading a review wouldn't really spoil things. I'd still go in with fresh eyes due to lack of gameplay.

The joy of seeing the N64 kiosk at the mall leading up to launch. Instead of relying on others just going hands on for yourself. Those were the good days.

I'm just wondering if there's a better way to go about things. In store kiosks, demos made available to the public, etc. Anything is better than the current format. Remember demo disc from PlayStation and Dreamcast magazine?

This thread of the product of feeling somewhat salty seeing Halo Infinite campaign being explained to me by a select few while I wait with the rest of the ordinary customers for my opportunity. This whole reviewer/cool kid culture leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Anyway, I'll end my journal entry there. Goodnight and can't wait for Wednesday!
Click to expand...

No. Nobody is that old. You are the victim of an elaborate ruse. We are all figments of your imagination. You're secretly paralyzed and being slowly digested by the lurking grue.
 
I miss demos. Shit got really sad once the publishers largely revoked that since it didn't sell the product anymore. Generally, the internet has turned into a stream of information overload. As such the intrigue around discovering a game on your own has mostly become demystified.

Best way to replicate that feeling is to disregard reviewers or the gaming community opinions all around on the web imo. Both opposites have a tendency to hold colored views that can sully or rob you of the experience. Consider going in semi-blind by looking up small chunks of images just to get some inkling what a game is about and then play it. It will likely result in an overall better and more memorable experience than it would the other way around.
 
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I remember printing of walkthroughs from gamefaqs at friends that had the internet, for games like OoT.
I remember there was a kid in my elementary school who said he was stuck on a part of LTTP for like, a year, so I went over to his house and helped him figure it out. So much different when you couldn't just google things.
 
As someone who grew up in the late 70's the internet was just science fiction at that point in fact not even that, nobody could have imagined that you could connect to the entire planet at any time you liked and would eventually be in every home. You pretty much had to rely on magazines for all games info and even back then thousands of games were released for the 8-bit home computers and you had very little chance of finding info on them outside of magazine reviews or sat in a games shop randomly looking through the shelves of speccy cassette tapes and looking on the back at the amiga screenshots that they always put on them to make it look way better than it was when you got it home and loaded it up. There were way more games shops to go hunting for titles assuming you knew what you wanted, but because of no internet back then you had to put the work into finding out about them. sometimes all you had to go on was a name in a list in a magazine with no pics or anything to help.

Console import shops were amazing places in the pre internet era you had literally no idea what was going to be coming in shelves of weird & exotic looking boxes, was waaaaay harder to get hold of titles too you would have to wait months for a special order to come in if you were lucky at all in been able to be allowed to order a title that wasn't in stock. Nowadays i can get pretty much anything from all 4 corners of the planet at the click of a button. Remember importing original gameboy games around the time the internet started to be come available i had to goto the electronics store on the edge of town to use their connection and pay by the minute. Was around the time i started getting into japanese gameboy games i remember getting hold of the pocket monster games way before nintendo decided to release it in the west saw them just sat on the shelf in the import shop i went to. I remember a weird time when you could type pokemon into the internet and get zero hits for anything in english just a couple of geocities blog kind of pages made by japanese fans.
 
First mag was Atari magazine of some kind. Read every letter every month.

Once I was stuck on a game for 3 weeks because there was no internet to consult.
 
Yeah dude lol. I played in arcades for years. It was like microtransactions, but you had to actually walk to a physical location to play, and sometimes even watch other people while waiting in line. Wild stuff.
 
My favorite was getting a VHS tape out of nowhere due to my Nintendo Power subscription with lengthy previews and discussions about the upcoming Jet Force Gemini and Donkey Kong 64. While I didn't get DK at the time, I was instantly hyped for JFG having not heard about it before and it instantly went to the top of my Christmas list. Despite a few flaws (and me occasionally having to control my anxiety due to my mild entomophobia since the enemies are humanoid-shaped ants), it was an incredible experience and I'm so glad I got that tape as I might have not gotten to the game until later if at all.

There we're definitely drawbacks to it all and I do think the positives generally outweigh the negatives when it comes to how game previews are distributed today. I remember seeing on the show X-play Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb talk about the upcoming Beyond Good and Evil and I was so excited, game looked awesome. I figured a promising sci-fi action-adventure title with a great art design and it being on all systems meant it had to do well, right? Well, I got the game on release and loved it but soon became aware of how miserable its sales were. And then thought about how I had barely heard anyone discussing its upcoming release aside from X-play. I feel nowadays the odds would be better that the game would be promoted better and have a better chance of success.
 
Yeah I remember getting Amiga Power and later PC Gamer for all my gaming information. Like for instance I didn't know Max Payne 2 was actually out until I walked by and saw it in the shop window, what a magical time that was haha. Still had the hype building just as big/bad as today, but also with random happiness injections randomly sprinkled like MP2.

Reading previews with these insane screenshots (read: bullshots) of games to come and thinking about it all day at school.

I was only 15 or so and I wasn't super clued up on getting gaming news online. I remember hearing about the controller swap trick from friends for MGS 1 and staring at HIDEO in green in the corner of my 15", silver-bezeled, Sony CRT TV.
 
Autistic as I was, I went to the store kiosk once a day and post office once a day to see if my magazines had arrived. Nintendo Power was the one I received by mail (I stopped my subscription when they switched to the cheap stapled version). EGM and Gamefan were my to go mags, the latter being the best videogames magazines I ever owned. I still read the FFVII reveal issue and still am amazed on how it felt futuristic at the time.
 
I was a longtime Nintendo Power subscriber from issue 1, and I also subscribed to PC Gamer. One picture of Wing Commander was enough to spark my interest and get my parents to buy it, then upgrade the computer with more Ram so I could play it.
 
Videogame world before the internet was something like a portal in another universe which was open just one day a month. You open the portal (magazine) and after you read it, the portal close for 30 days before the next portal. In between, you must read that magazine over and over finding new info you probably missed out.

Imagine to read info on internet one time a month, now.
 
I can barely believe the world could function without the internet now, and I was born early enough that my grandma still had a B&W TV until I started school or so.

I only had mags and friends to learn stuff about games. Mostly mags after elementary school, because consoles were the rich kids' stuff in Italy and most kids who gamed did that on Amiga or other computers. (We weren't even rich, but going to school with many rich kids I couldn't help gravitating towards Nintendo so that's the road I took)

Gaming mags were cool. Reviewers were usually young people who just left their teens behind. They pulled no punches when reviewing games. A game was shit, they could say it, even if it was a highly anticipated game. Some of them were biased, yeah, but you could generally trust them.
With the PlayStation boom new mags sprouted like mushrooms in the space of a few months. And then the press got somewhat less reliable. Too much hype, so many new games and less time to review them. I basically never bought a truly bad game before PlayStation thanks to magazine reviews, but during the PS1 craze I was lulled into buying a few turds.

Strategy books were awesome, too. First thing I did when I first traveled to the US and went into a bookstore was to go straight for the video game books shelf. There I found the real deal - Nintendo Game Secrets, whole books dedicated to a single game. It was paradise. I still have most of those books. Stuff like that only started to appear in Italy after the PlayStation boom. Sony's grey box changed everything about games in my country. And of course when I finally got Internet access, around 1997 or '98, GameFAQs became my daily destination. The amount of guides I printed was insane.

I never called a help hotline for games, but I can imagine those lines were on fire during the NES craze in America.

I didn't have a clue about 50Hz, RGB connections, framerate and all that stuff. Heck, my first NES was bought by my father in the US because it cost so much less. Our old TV couldn't even display the games in color, but I played the shit out of my B&W games. Ignorance really was bliss.
 
Y'all are old...but on a serious note gaming must've been much different back then. I can go back as far as going on gamefaqs for help or reading game informer. Prior to the internet how did you discover hidden gems? if you didnt have other gamers in your life it had to be a fairly lonely hobby.
 
Grew up on a pc commodore here at age 4. Earliest thing we had was this funky old thing called 'Prodigy,' which was an early prototypical AOL-like service on my 56k dial up haha. Otherwise it was all single player games. My dad was with IBM so I never knew consoles until later. I had obscure games like Space Quest, Captain Comic, Apache, Red Storm Rising, Chuck Yeager's Flight Sim. I doubt anyone even knows this shit anymore 😄
 
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I loved how pure and magical it was. Obviously due to being young and knowing jack about how all of this works. But there was also this purity and untainted nature of games being released during that time. It was just a 60$ game that doesn't need to be patched, doesn't need you to log into services or have any other obstacles. Development was more about passion than about monetization.
The only source of news were video game magazines, which were absolutely awesome and probably quite a lot of people here remember looking at and drooling over the same pictures for weeks. Absorbing it all and reading the articles looking for any bits of information that we could get our hands on.

And it was hard to persuade the parents to buy you a new game that you then went to play for months over and over again, because you couldn't download 15 humble bundle games for 20 cents. If you accidentally picked a game simply based on the cover of the game you see on the shelf and the game turned out to be an absolute turd then tough for you.
Thankfully many great games during that time and through video game magazines and friends you still knew roughly how to navigate and what to buy.
 
I still have all my GamePro magazines.

Also, I don't miss having to call 1-900 numbers for cheat codes. Those were the equivalent of today's microtransactions.
 
I remember getting all the MK2 cheats in a paper sheet, all the cheats were written by a typewriter, I miss the good old days
 
Ghost of Johto said:
Y'all are old...but on a serious note gaming must've been much different back then. I can go back as far as going on gamefaqs for help or reading game informer. Prior to the internet how did you discover hidden gems? if you didnt have other gamers in your life it had to be a fairly lonely hobby.
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Gaming was not as ubiquitous as today but it was still really popular among kids (I am talking about Argentina in the mid to late 90s for you to have a reference)
So you would go to school, talk about games, share game cartridges/CDs among friends, trade used games. and so on and so forth.
We bought a lot of gaming magazines back then to get info about games and stuff like cheat codes and secrets. I remember having a few mortal Kombat magazines that were released in a monthly basis.
We would also share magazines among friends and if they were guides, photocopy them. Like I did with a massive GT2 guide that had details on all car unlocks in the game.

Also there were gaming shows on cable TV where they would show the latest games, E3 coverage, cheat codes and more.

Web browsing before broadband was so cumbersome to use you might as well pretend it did not exist until the late 90s. Besides, gaming sites like IGN were just being developed back then! But we would go and search for cheat codes, guides and stuff. I remember asking my dad (in the early 00s) to print me a massive soul reaver guide from a Spanish gaming site at his job

Mass broadband access in the early 00s really changed everything and then you tube of course. Made things a lot easier to get but less "mysterious" if you will.
 
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Ghost of Johto said:
Y'all are old...but on a serious note gaming must've been much different back then. I can go back as far as going on gamefaqs for help or reading game informer. Prior to the internet how did you discover hidden gems? if you didnt have other gamers in your life it had to be a fairly lonely hobby.
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No, kids would come over and play. It was actually more fun than todays online gaming. I remember playing 4 player GoldenEye 007, THQ WCW and WWF, NFL Blitz, Smash Bros. Bunch of kids huddled around the tv having a blast.

1996 me and Chris were playing WCW NWO World Tour on 64. Kenny comes over so we play a triple threat match. Chris and I decide to team up against Kenny. One of us hoisted him on our shoulders and the other climbed to the top turnbuckle and clotheslined that fucker. His character was unconscious. Kenny got pissed and stormed out. One of the funniest moments of my life. Good times
 
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