Happy anniversaries to US Dreamcast, Final Fantasy VIII and Mortal Kombat II ("Mortal Friday")! Share your memories/rants here

[Steven]

Today, 9.9.14, marks the 15th year anniversary of the US Dreamcast launch, FF VIII and it also marks the 20th (wow, time flies!) anniversary of Mortal Kombat II hitting game consoles (SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, Game Gear).

Post your memories, nostalgic stories and/or rants here for any of these, or all of 'em if you like!

For me, the big one was MK II, as my bro and I bought it immediately on MORTAL FRIDAY right after school. It's the only game I can recall vividly us buying on the day it came out. It was such a good port at the time, and even today I feel it holds up extremely well. The AI is cheap, but it's a blast going up against a human player. Crazy to think it was 20 years ago today. The forest stage with the growling trees is still one of my most favorite stages in a fighting game even to this day. I can still hear the growls in my mind; it's a sound effect that's been embedded in my gaming heart due to the endless hours my brother and I devoted to MK II in the fall of 1994. Good times.

[ReaXan]

Can't believe its been 20 years since MK Friday.

I got it a day latter on Saturday the 10th and I even though I like the Sega Genesis better overall, I am glad I picked the SNES port of MK2 as it is far superior.

Also that weekend Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead came on Fox TV for the first time. It was my favorite movie growing up and it was the first time I had ever seen it.


Alot of cool stuff happened that weekend, lots of nostalgia for me as a 11 year old boy

[otaku]

I remember lusting after the dreamcast often and playing in stores later had a friend who got one whom I regularly traded my psone with to get some game time with the dreamcast the system we had worked out well as we got to play loads of games on both systems between the two of us. Our teacher though we were strange bringing suitcases to class as did our parents

[Mobius]

I was a launch day Dreamcast owner, and 9.9.99 was probably the last time I got blown away by a new console. New systems up to that point were always so exciting because they did such cool new things that nobody had really seen before. I've bought several launch day consoles since then, and never got the same feeling again. The Wii was the only thing that came remotely close.

Oh, and the built in internet capabilities of the Dreamcast were so much fun, back in the day. The Planetweb Browser and Sonic Adventure both had links to join the Sega IRC server. I spent countless hours on that. Was anyone else here ever a regular there? There was so much drama back then... Yeesh.

[rkotm]

!! Mk2 did come out 20 years ago, didnt it??! I remember playing this endlessly with my brother, too. We rented the SNES version several times during the fall of 94. I remember being a bit disappointed with how the characters weren't as big as the arcade, and that the character names were below the energy bars (to make said small characters look bigger, i remember reading this in an interview about Mk2).
Here's an article about the 15th year anniversary, a recollection by Peter Moore:http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/9/612...re-anniversary

[otaku]

I agree mobius new launches since DC haven't mattered near as much with PSP being the last one that mattered imo. Since then its been incremental improvements and attempts at gameplay innovations. I mean jumping from sprites to polygons 32 to 64 and 128bits thats amazing easily notable stuff its like vhs to dvd as opposed to dvd to bluray. Anyway this article at gamasutra is quite interesting about the DC I had no idea (or forgot) that it was once watercooled

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...ast.php?page=2

[kainemaxwell]

Didn't have a Dreamcast at first until I won a 1st gen DC from the famous DP Survivor some years back. Loved the system ever since.

[ZeroCool]

Man, I can`t believe its been that long. The previous month I got a Playstaion. I got FF7 and beat it in a month So I immediately went 8, man that opening sequence with Seifer and Squall just blew me away. Even the dance scene was crazy good. Unfortunately I didn`t get a Dreamcast...come to think of it I didn`t remember if I knew the thing was coming out didn`t care or what...I worked all summer and had the cash...damn I was stupid, there were a bunch of great games on launch. Oh well.

[SpaceHarrier]

I was a launch day Dreamcast owner, and 9.9.99 was probably the last time I got blown away by a new console.

Same, and my sentiments exactly.

Also, I still have the t-shirt.

[Ponyone]

I was a launch day Dreamcast owner, and 9.9.99 was probably the last time I got blown away by a new console. New systems up to that point were always so exciting because they did such cool new things that nobody had really seen before. I've bought several launch day consoles since then, and never got the same feeling again. The Wii was the only thing that came remotely close.

Oh, and the built in internet capabilities of the Dreamcast were so much fun, back in the day. The Planetweb Browser and Sonic Adventure both had links to join the Sega IRC server. I spent countless hours on that. Was anyone else here ever a regular there? There was so much drama back then... Yeesh.

I was... OMG.. Sapphire?! Baby?! Is that you!?!?

Well, I was on sega irc on the netlink for the saturn. I believe they kept the server around for awhile for dreamcast but then killed it off I believe.

[Tanooki]

Yay for the Dreamcast, it's 15 this year. Next year Destiny will be on its first since it's a 9/9 game too.

[A.C. Sativa]

20 years since MKII came out? God damn that makes me feel old. What makes me feel even older is that when I had that game I knew every characters moves and fatalities by heart (even all the Shang Tsung morphs), played it like a month ago and had to go online to look them up. I still remember all the moves from Street Fighter II though, shows which game I liked more. IMO MKII has not aged very well, and MK3 has REALLY not aged well.

MKII is one of the only 3 games I bought on launch day, the other 2 being the X-Box version of San Andreas and GTAV for the 360.

[SpaceFlea]

Oh, Dreamcast, you were the only console I purchased at launch.

Memories of a better day I have not.

[Berserker]

I remember Final Fantasy 8 being the first console game I followed pre-release hype for on the net. I had just beaten 7 a good while after it had released, and I was looking for the next that. So I'd spend a stupid amount of time downloading on dialup these crappy videos riddled with artifacts that showed off combat and things like that. When it did end up coming out probably a year or so later, I never actually bought it. Can't remember why, but I may have gotten back into PC gaming heavily by that point.

I didn't pick up the Dreamcast on launch day, but I was with my friend when he did. He picked up Soul Calibur and one other game for it (I believe it was Blue Stinger), and we stayed up all night playing SC and the games on the demo disc. I got my own DC a short while later.

Mortal Kombat 2 is interesting for me because I have stronger memories talking about it than I do actually playing it. I didn't pick it up on Genesis until it had been out for a while, and none of my friends had it either, so all we had to go off of was the arcade version. None of us had easy access to an arcade, and we rarely had any money, so we experienced the game only in these really brief glimpses, and then discussed it in the meantime. The possibilities for secrets seemed near-infinite. Secret characters, secret levels, secret fatalities. And none of us had the ability to confirm any of it, so it became this mysterious and almost mythical thing.

Of course, when we finally did get the game a lot of that mystery evaporated, and we had a lot of fun playing it. But for me the time before that was more memorable, wondering and theorizing about what could be hidden away in there, somewhere.

[SegaGT]

After all this time I would have thought my collection would be complete but I am still short a few consoles!
It has been a great 15 years since launch and I still intend to share the collection in a museum type setting some day.
Maybe in a year or so I can start with videos of everything...

[Einzelherz]

I preordered a DC at the mall, or at least put a $10 deposit down on it. I know this because about ten years later while cleaning out a dresser or something I found the receipt.

I'll agree though that it was probably the last impressive new launch, but it also had the benefit of launching with some very strong titles. Also since that generation it seems launch titles are shared between the incoming and outgoing generation so inherently they can't be that breathtaking.

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

I remember discussing Sega consoles in my house. This must have been in 1999 or 2000, because the Dreamcast came out in September 1999 and we moved out of our old trailer in February 2001. I remember my dad pronouncing the "e" in Sega like the e in chest back then, so it was "Seg-ga", not "Say-ga". My dad said that the Dreamcast was Sega's third console, the Genesis being first and Saturn being second. He was born in 1968 and was unaware of the Master System back then. Ironically he had an NES in the early 90s. I remember I wanted a Dreamcast but we couldn't afford one back then. We did good to have a PS1 and several good games.

[celerystalker]

I have habitually hated Mortal Kombat games outside of Shaolin Monks since their inception, but I find the mythos interesting.

For the Dreamcast and Final Fantasy VIII, I was assistant manager of a FuncoLand at the time, so I was very much at work that day. I'd bought a Japanese system some months earlier, and had been playing through Power Stone, Sonic Adventure, Blue Stinger, and Langrisser Milennium at the time. I'm still very fond of those games, but as I'd been playing them, the launch didn't have much surprise for me, but I remember being taken aback at how good NFL 2K was. To my mindn it was the last great football game. I would always bring my import games into the store to let people try them, and it was an awesome time to play. I remember playing a lot of Ready 2 Rumble in the store as well, as well all used to quote Afro Thunder all the time... "It's time to dance, it's time to dance! Dance, sucka!"

FFVIII wasn't particularly interesting to me, but a customer traded one in the next day, so I went ahead and picked it up. I really disliked it quite a bit, as the systems felt obtuse to me, like they were changed for the sake of change instead of as a way to advance the experience. I kept it, hoping that one day I'd come around on it. No dice yet.