How popular were games in the 90's?

[gbpxl]

For some reference, I was born in 1989, so I would've been 10 years old at the end of the 90's, and I didn't pay any attention to what other people were buying, but here is my take from what little I remember...

In the 90's, I don't remember video games being anywhere near as mainstream as what they are today. The people playing video games were mostly male, they were children or people in their upper teens to mid-30s. It really seemed like it would've been unusual for someone in their 40's to be a gamer back then. The graphics were pretty rudimentary back then, maybe too rudimentary for the average person. It really did seem like most games were predominantly aimed at the youth demographic. There weren't any God of Wars or Grand Theft Auto Vs or anything that resembled real life violence- yeah Doom and Mortal Kombat but they looked like cartoons. It seemed like PC games always were a little more adult-focused than console and handheld titles

Was collecting video games even really a thing back then I mean how many people went "ooh that game is obscure, I should buy that" I was too young to care about rarity.

The other thing I want to say is that it seemed like there weren't as many options for games back then. These days we are bombarded with thousands of mobile games, console, handheld, PC games that one can hardly keep up.

On the schoolyard most my friends had an N64, some had a PS1, almost everyone had played the NES. Turok was popular, Cruisn' USA, Mario obviously. I am too young to remember the heyday of arcades.

What are your thoughts? I'd like to hear from people who are older than me and remember what I view as the Golden Age of video games better than I can.

[jb143]

Take a look at the chart on this page to see how video game revenue in the past compared to now(ok, the chart is 5 years old, but still...)
http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_...d_Revenues.png

Things peaked in 1982. And peaked big time. And then the crash of 1983. The closest it ever got to that again was the mid-90's and again around 2009 or so.

[Gameguy]

Games were mostly aimed at kids back then. I do remember there were a lot more commercials on TV for games than today, the Sega commercials were most memorable. Games were always around in some way or another. Magazines were more popular then too as it was mostly before the internet was commonplace.

[Aussie2B]

I don't recall anybody who thought graphics in the 90s were rudimentary. People are pretty predictable in that they're impressed by whatever is the cutting edge, whatever that may happen to be at the time. Graphics that were interpreted as rudimentary in the 90s were graphics in 80s games. People were very impressed when the 16-bit systems came out and again when they really started pushing the envelope of those systems around 1994. Then when the 3D systems came, people were totally blown away. We didn't have the frame of reference of knowing what games would look like in 2018 to realize how much more detailed and realistic 3D could get. When I first played Ocarina of Time, which was half a year after its launch, I was shocked by its graphics, and I literally thought in my head "I can't imagine video game graphics ever being more realistic than this." I will say, though, that there were many people who thought 2D was passe after the 3D systems were out, so there were some people who thought 2D graphics were rudimentary when they were in PS1 games and such.

Likewise, we didn't have a frame of reference for how much more realistic game violence and gore could look. While games like Mortal Kombat obviously had a sense of humor about them, I don't recall anyone thinking they looked cartoony. Games like those were the peak of realistic violence in games at the time.

Games were perhaps targeted more at kids back then, but there was still tons of marketing to make games look edgy and cool to teenagers and early 20-somethings. You can see this with Nintendo's Play It Loud campaign and especially with Sega and Sony's marketing. I agree that PC games had a reputation of being for older and more hardcore gamers and often offering more cerebral experiences (outside of the first-person shooters and such).

The collecting scene really started to form around the late 90s. Mike Etler's NES Rarity List was like a collecting Bible back then. I don't know when it was first shared online, but version 4.0 was apparently done in 1997. In the late 90s, computers were becoming more and more commonplace in homes, and fan sites were popping up left and right. That's not to say there weren't collectors earlier than that, but they were more of an unusual breed prior to the late 90s, pursuing the hobby more on their own rather than as part of a community. It makes sense since the events leading to and including the crash turned a lot of people off to gaming. On the other hand, people loved the NES, and by the late 90s, NES kids were getting old enough to have some disposable income to blow on recapturing their childhoods. Google and eBay also took off in the late 90s, so that helped tremendously in searching for information and site about retro games and having the ability to buy stuff that may not be easily found in your own area. I can say for myself that I got into collecting old games in 1999. I found out about an independent game store that had NES stuff, but they didn't have any systems at the time. They put me on a wait list, but months went by. I signed up for eBay and the very first thing I ever bought on there was an NES.

[Cornelius]

I was in college '96-'00 and lived in a scholarship hall with 50 other guys who I got to know pretty well. For gaming, there were lots of great options. One roomate of mine had a PS, and we had marathon sessions playing vs. Bushido Blade (winner stays). I totally dominated on that game. That roomate got FFVII, and I'm pretty sure I watched him play damn near the whole game, and then he watched me play it. Need for Speed III was another popular game.

Another room had an N64 and we'd have 10+ guys in there taking turns at Mario Kart or Goldeneye for hours. Playing in a group like that is something I really miss and I just don't think could be duplicated today. We'd have awesome Goldeneye matches where there'd be cheering and jeering, beautiful kills with remote bombs, one shot kills with the .45. Oh man, I forget how fun that was.

Then there was also PC gaming. Every room had ethernet, this was pretty early on for that sort of thing and I don't recall the details of how the network was set up, but it was pretty easy to find someone to play Starcraft with pretty much any time. That was huge, although vs. Starcraft always stressed me out a little too much. I think I was also playing Diablo at that time and we did some coop with that. Hellfire was in there, too, as was rampant cheating. Ah, good times! Let's see, what else. My girlfriend gave me Baldur's Gate for my birthday one year. I remember thinking it was a weird looking game I'd never heard of, and kind of an odd gift. I'd never heard of it because it was a brand new release and I never really read gaming mags. Anyway, that game more than any other hooked me as a lifelong gamer and fan of RPGs. I'd never played D&D, so the world and concepts totally blew me away. Diablo II was just around the corner or maybe came out before I graduated, but that sucked a few years of my gaming life all by itself. That GF was pretty cool!

If you go back a few years to late high school for me, I remember getting hooked on Star Control II on the PC. That's a great game. But the big one was Command and Conquer. Some weekends I'd haul my family's desktop PC with 16 or 17" monitor over to my friend's house and we'd hooke them up with serial(?) cables and play against each other all night long. Those matches would last for hours upon hours.

One other gaming memory from HS... a bunch of us went over to a friend of a friend's house, only time I'd ever been there. We were mostly playing You Don't Know Jack on the PC, but he got permission to turn on the 3DO his dad had. He fired up StarConII (we played the melee mode) and I was completely blown away. It didn't hurt that they had a projection TV with the crazy big concave screen.

So, gaming was really popular, but all those things were more like phases for me, or just stuff we did sometimes. It wasn't a primary form of entertainment for me, excepting those obsessive stretches, until shortly after graduating, at which point I always had some game I was working on (Diablo II for a long long time).

Collecting didn't cross my mind until more like 2006, though obviously some people were already at it. I mean, the original Paper form of Digital Press started in the early 90s, I think.

[WulfeLuer]

I had to think about this for a bit. I was 7 when 90s hit, and while I had played an NES somewhere for all of ten minutes somewhere before that, I didn't really know about video games. That changed very quickly; just about every kid in the neighborhood had a console but me (the majority of them being NES) and my parents got me one soon thereafter. Games and game-related stuff wound up something like in-neighborhood currency for a long time, somebody wanted x and would swap game y or a bunch of cheatbooks z.

Later on, when we moved out of the neighborhood and I was into high school, I was exposed to what we would probably term mainstream and hardcore as we know it. Everybody wanted RPGs since FF7 was now a thing, nerds like me and my friends were consulted about how to wreck this baddie or unlock that cheat, any non-meeting, indoor function of the local Boy Scout units would wind up with a console or two hooked up somewhere (as opposed to actual camping where the allure of fire and sharp things held much more sway). Hubs of sorts developed, one friend owned something like four consoles and we'd play games in like three different rooms of his house; I had this magic TV that made video game graphics look extra-awesome and people would being their consoles over to play on it (imagine a then 15-17 year old box TV outperforming state-of-the-art stuff well enough that people brought over Dreamcasts and fought over turns in Soul Calibur).

I had two friends that I would say were hardcore types, one was really big into getting titles that would be considered obscure (and command hefty tags now) RPGs and owned a modded PS1 so he could play imports (hilariously it wound up being either Pocket Fighter or this really weird danceoff game) he would have been considered a collector if he actually bothered to keep or track his stuff. The other was a 'serious' gamer that had to do everything perfectly and had no problem doing marathon grinding sessions or spending 10-12 hours just tearing through something, going to school and doing it again. Both used emulators and had translation hacks and untranslated roms (somehow I stayed ignorant of what exactly was going on with this computer witchery, mostly because I didn't have a DOS-level rig until the early 00s). My worsening RPG addiction is at least partly their fault.

While I can't objectively say gaming had reached a pervasive cultural threshold yet, I can say everybody I knew had at least decent knowledge and at worst a tolerant attitude to gaming.

[Aussie2B]

On the subject of rare and obscure games in the 90s, they were more of a scary thing, rather than something to be excited about. We didn't know know that in the future, there would be thorough, accurate emulation and ROMs/ISOs of virtually everything, let alone legal options to buy the games digitally in the years to come. There was a real fear that if we didn't manage to find a game we wanted, we'd never get the opportunity to play it. We also had no idea that some games would be valuable down the road, so that wasn't any incentive.

By the mid 90s, my tastes naturally led me to wanting obscure stuff. Nintendo Power convinced me to buy Chrono Trigger, which turned me on to RPGs (though I had prior exposure to them on NES). I wanted more RPGs and games similar to them. When I later read about Harvest Moon in Nintendo Power, I desperately wanted to play it. It was an absolute bear for my mom to find a copy, and I was unusually bratty in my insistence that she keep looking, haha. She was successful in the end, and I was overjoyed to have it and play it, but there was no extra excitement in that I got a rarity and no knowing what it'd be worth later, just the relief that I wouldn't miss out on it. I put similar efforts into other games, like calling every game store in town to ask about Valkyrie Profile (though that was a 2000 release), until I found one single shop with one single copy that became mine.

[jb143]

A couple other facts to consider...
The best selling game of all time is Tetris.
The Game Boy/GBC is the third best selling system of all time(after the PS2 and the DS)...with 90's system PlayStation in fourth.
Cultural phenomenon of Mario and Pac-Man. Everyone knew who those characters were. I don't know if you could say the same thing about today's most popular games and characters. I doubt I'd even know who some of them were.

[BlastProcessing402]

The people playing video games were mostly male

They still are. Don't believe the feminist propaganda. Most girls playing games do it on phones and play stuff like candy crush.

[Aussie2B]

It's feminist propaganda now to acknowledge there are more female gamers these days than in the past? Most gamers in the 90s were male, this is true. Most "hardcore" gamers these days are also male, that is true too. (Though mobile games are still games, so it's just elitist talk to say someone who plays games isn't a gamer because they're not playing "real" games.) But it's also fact that the female gaming populace is growing, and female gamers are more accepted now than they were back then. When I was passionate about games in the 90s, it was seen as an odd thing for a teenage girl to be big on games, and I actively tried to hide my passion. Online, most gaming communities were very apparently boys' clubs that were sexist and hostile toward female users, or they just refused to believe female gamers even existed online. I spent most of my early days on gaming message boards either lurking, because I felt too unwelcome to post at all, or I'd hide my gender, letting others assume I was male. So yeah, things have changed tremendously in terms of what it was like to be a female gamer in the 90s versus what it's like to be a female gamer now. Now we're even getting localizations of games targeting older female gamers, when back then basically the only games in the US specifically targeting a female demographic were stuff like Barbie, Mary-Kate & Ashley, and other such licensed dreck that parents would buy little girls and permanently turn them off to gaming because they were such clunky, awful games.

[Mad-Mike]

I grew up and started gaming in EXACTLY that time period - starting with an Atari 2600 in 1989.

This was how I remember it.

I remember video games being HUGELY mainstream, particularly console titles. At school, the #1 discussion amongst us male 8-12 year old students was whatever the newest Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog release was on the playground. Mario and Sonic were the like the Ford & Chevrolet or Fender & Gibson of video games. You picked your loyalty to one, and you stuck with it, and defended it to the end, at least that's how I saw it. If you had last generation's console, you were outed and bullied for it, and constantly pestered to "Get with the times". Parents everywhere loathed Christmas Eve/Day because it meant forking out another $100-200 on some new plastic box with controllers on it that "provides no exercise, vegitables, or educational value". Consoles were, entirely, a kid's game, and Sega and Nintendo ruled the roost until the Playstation came along.

Games were not cheap for any platform, usually costing around $40.00 apiece. I remember my 9th birthday, getting Super Mario Bros. 3 was a treat because it was $90.00 for that cartridge due to the chip shortage going on at the time affecting Nintendo's production - furthermore complexified by the sheer popularity of Super Mario Bros. 3 itself - and the Mario franchise as a whole. Yes, you could get cheaper games for your console, but typically they were the junkier titles like "King's Knight" or "Castlequest" or whatever. I also remember that most of us kids were not into RPGs at the time at all - Zelda was our idea of an RPG - but Dragon Warrior was too hard for most of us to actually figure out. I got massively into Dragon Warrior when I started retrogaming in the mid 1990's when all this stuff started becoming retro and I started spending afternoons chatting with wait staff at the non-alcoholic bar of my favorite burger joint. I always found it so funny how in 1991 we were all calling the Atari 2600 an old piece of crap and the NES "here and now" and the SNES the hottest thing - only for just 5 or so years later, people started collecting for all three to some extent. I watched the birth of console retrogaming and eventually retro PC gaming through the 90's as I was participating with people whom were at least 10 years my senior.

The internet had a big part of how retrogaming started in the 90's. Back then we did not call it retrogaming, we were just a bunch of guys with not a lot of money buying old Ataris and Nintendos and Commodore 64's and appreciating the games, the art, and the heardware, and trying to use the nefangled Internet to unravel the mysteries behind the creation of these wonderful creations. Most of us got internet through our local colleges - including my older sisters. That's how I did it back then - walk 6 miles in the 105 degree Alabama sun to the Auburn University Library to go look up rarity lists for Atari cartridges, and look to see if anyting I liked had sequels, and visit sites at the time like VGA 2000 that had screenshots for almost every game system that existed before 1995. I witnessed the start of TV Dog's Tandy 1000 Archive, and vintage computer websites. I watched Atari Age grow from the start. This was not mainstream. Something about 90's culture with the college crowd is "niche" was their mainstream. I watched as Emulation started, Stella, NESticle, LoopyNES, Paul Robeson's super-fast emulators that actually worked decently on 486 hardware....and then watched as Emulation went from "nobody gives a crap about these old game carts to" "Nintendo's going to sue you if you put the entire NES catalog on your website" - I watched as ROM sources turned from innocent little sites run by well meaning college students to places that might as well have been a Pornography site due to the rise of legal issues of piracy over the web over the 1990's.

PC Games were not as mainstream, but they were more popular than the Mac or Amiga platform. Growing up in that time, I know knew of the "two series" computer genres - PC, and Macintosh, because most of the people who owned a home computer back then had some kind of business justification to own one. They were expensive - very expensive - $999.99 in 1989 got you a 386 SX-25 with 2MB of RAM, a 80MB HDD, and DOS 4. And you were super privledged/lucky to have a 486, SoundBlaster card, or Super VGA card at that time. A computer with that stuff could easily reach the price of a economy sedan at the time. A Yugo cost less than a PC! People who did have a PC typically were upper middle class suburbanites with a scientist/professor/doctor/lawyer/engineer/programmer/developer/designer in their family, or were computer hobbyists in the 70's who never quit. These people usually had the latest games like Doom, X-Wing, Monkey Island 1&2, Ultima. The college crowd would freely throw shareware around like Pirates of the Barberry Coast, all the Sharedata Game Show titles, and things like Dungeons and Dragons, Maxit, and Depth Charge, or Chekkers - all of which I still have.

PC was the dominant platform for gaming because Macintosh was extremely picky about who they would let make games for their platform and there were some hardware and software limitations there as I later learned, and most of their titles were what Macintosh would deem "educational". Sure, some major franchises mad eit over like Monkey Island, Sam and Max, and Doom, but it seems most of the kids I knew who had a Macintosh at home had Carmen Sandiego, Sim City 2000, and probably the other Sim Titles for their computer. Actually, that seems to be the #1 game for Macintosh at the time was Sim City Classic or 2000 depending on what year we are talking about.

On the PC Side, PC's were seen as more serious business machines. Different people had differing views. Some, okay, very few (and usually technically skilled) parents let their kids play PC games and install whatever they want because "computers are the future" and they wanted their kids to learn how to do all this stuff because they saw that they actually were learning. That's how I learned DOS, installing programs, and about things like Memory and Hard Disk space - all the basics, playing Monkey Island and Ultima 6 on a 386 DX-40 with 5MB of RAM and VGA running DOS 5. If someone had a hot-rodded gaming rig back then, they were likely in a private school, rode to school in a brand new BMW 3 class, and so utterly paranoid of you destroying their computer by pressing the function keys only they were allowed to touch it or even look at it.

But less computer literate people saw it as a waste of time and generally gave their kids STRUCTURED playtime on the PC using titles they approved of. To them, the PC was not a "toy", it was a TOOL to do serious work - Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect 5.1, Harvard Graphics - THAT was what a PC was for. And anything that went wrong beit corrupt Autoexec.BAT or a failed hard disk costs astronomical sums of money - $60/hr just to rebuilt Autoexec.bat. $60/hr + $350.00 for a 80MB HDD. Video Card Upgrade? Well that 640X480 low DPI CRT is not going to cut it and look fuzzy! How's $750.99 for this special S3 809/Tatung bundle?

As the 90's went on and I got older, Video Games gave way to Girls and guitar for me and my crowd. For me, it was just a way to kill time between writing songs, recording songs, playing in bands, attentding school, trying to find my scrappy long-haired ass a job in uber-conservative east Alabama. By the late 90's it seems to me gaming got less mainstream and then it REALLY Kicked off - retro and current - in the early 2000's again. That's when all that you see today really got started as far as it now being like this big worldwide mainstream thing on both counts. The birth of Halo, XBOX, the PS2 (Playstation 2, not IBM), the egg shaped neon windowed Windows XP Gamer box - all of that was when the upward fly to where we are now got started.

So in short

Kids played mostly console games, tech illererate parents with computers often had PC's they would seldom let us game on hence not popular, Macintosh was highly limited as a platform for gaming, and Amiga/C64/others were so obscure unless you knew someone with one you did not know about em'. I knew a guy with an Atari XE - ONCE. NES, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis all ruled till the PLaystation came out - and from the Playstation era to 2000 - things faltered a bit with Tomb Raider and TEkken being sort of a niche thing for teenage boys for obvious reasons. Tech literate parents encourage and tried to get their kids onto computers - this included the school system - because computers are the future - which gave rise to people like me, maybe even most of us on here, I dunno. Walking six miles to the library to surf the web, playing musical houses every time our parents kicked us out to "play outside" so we'd go up the street to John and go play Mario Is Missing on his dads new 486 until they kicked us out and then it was over to Bennie's to play on the Atari XE, till they kicked us out and we went to go play Super Mario 3 at Will's......that's what it was like in the life of a kid gamer in 1993.

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

Take a look at the chart on this page to see how video game revenue in the past compared to now(ok, the chart is 5 years old, but still...)
http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Video_...d_Revenues.png

Things peaked in 1982. And peaked big time. And then the crash of 1983. The closest it ever got to that again was the mid-90's and again around 2009 or so.

Interesting to see the dynamic between arcade gaming and console gaming. The peak of 1982 was arcade driven, and it really is a tale of two eras. Prior to 1990 or so the bulk of video game revenues came from the arcade.

So while arcade revenues never came close to their 1982 levels, inflation-adjusted spending on consumer gaming has remained above 1982 levels since 1993.

[homerhomer]

In the 90s gaming was popular but it was still not quite as accepted as today. Video games were still considered kids stuff. There was a lot of creativity and excitement with new consoles and computer games. The future seemed amazing with unlimited possibilities. Arcade were still around but they were starting to close. Consoles were able too port arcade games pretty closely and that was big deal. Home computers were getting amazing. Games like Quake and Unreal, Descent and Warcraft were proving that computers were more powerful than arcade games. It was an exciting time. There was always this feeling of "what's going to be next" in the industry. BTW - The time between 1991 and 1996 seemed like ages apart. In 1991 I was renting Sega Genesis and in 1996 I was playing Quake on a HP computer. Good times.

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

In the 90s gaming was popular but it was still not quite as accepted as today. Video games were still considered kids stuff. There was a lot of creativity and excitement with new consoles and computer games. The future seemed amazing with unlimited possibilities. Arcade were still around but they were starting to close. Consoles were able too port arcade games pretty closely and that was big deal. Home computers were getting amazing. Games like Quake and Unreal, Descent and Warcraft were proving that computers were more powerful than arcade games. It was an exciting time. There was always this feeling of "what's going to be next" in the industry. BTW - The time between 1991 and 1996 seemed like ages apart. In 1991 I was renting Sega Genesis and in 1996 I was playing Quake on a HP computer. Good times.

I've heard there was a big shift in the mid '90s as well. I didn't get my first video game until 1998, I was 5. But it was an early '90s system, a Sega Genesis. I didn't really like it, I wanted something with 3D graphics like the Nintendo 64 with Super Mario 64 that was the first game I ever played. I had an asthma attack in October 1998, and that was hooked up in the hospital. The difference between Genesis/SNES and PS1/N64 was massive, we went from 2D to 3D graphics - games were more complex and lifelike, and with CDs (at least on PS1) they could be much more lengthy and in depth.

It was one of the three great shifts in the video game industry: the video game crash era (mid 1980s), the 2D to 3D transition (mid 1990s), and the online transition (mid-late 2000s)

Of course, looking back, I should have been grateful for my Genesis: at the time, we lived in a trailer and our cars were 14 and 21 years old so we weren't well off, and yet they were able to get me a Genny within weeks of when I asked for it.

[eskobar]

In Mexico things were different back then. Social negative paradigms were the rule back in the day, the SNES helped to make video games more mainstream, specially with sport games and the phenomenon that were fighting games like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat, NBA JAM was big too, specially in Mexico because local TV started to air NBA transmissions.

In secondary school it was ok socially to play video games, in high school and college was not very accepted. Today is quite normal to see a regular person know something about video games and are widely accepted as a form of entertainment.

I saw a change in people perception when the PS2 was released and even more when the Xbox was launched. The 90s were a great decade for video gaming, great games and excellent RPGs, easily my best time with video games were in the mid to fall of this decade.


I wish that video games go back to being less popular and less mainstream, back in the day you could produce a game that sold 10,000 units and make a profit, today you need to sell a million units to recover the production costs and the concepts are way too generic to please the masses, making most games really boring of quite generic ... every one wants to experience cinematic games that play themselves, hehehehe ...

[WulfeLuer]

I wish that video games go back to being less popular and less mainstream, back in the day you could produce a game that sold 10,000 units and make a profit, today you need to sell a million units to recover the production costs and the concepts are way too generic to please the masses, making most games really boring of quite generic ... every one wants to experience cinematic games that play themselves, hehehehe ...

That's a wonderfully salient set of points there. I love RPGs, and RPGs are best IMO with at least a few cutscenes and a bit of dialog, but the modern mania for showing cool cinematics at the expense of player involvement--and therefore investment--can be very tiring. And I don't like that some rather good and very fun games are considered failures even when they sell literally a million copies or more. At least back then even the cynical corporate cash-ins tended to have at least some element of experimentation or uniqueness.

[Aussie2B]

It think it's less a matter of popularity that killed experimentation and more the fact that publishers basically know exactly how well a game will perform sales-wise these days. Back in the 90s, an experimental game might end up turning into a huge hit. These days, there are very niche games with low budgets that can get by on low sales, but they also know they're not going to be surprised with high sales. So the niche games play it safe in their old ways, by rehashing the gameplay they know their small demographic likes and throwing in stuff like waifu fanservice. As genres like RPGs and shmups got less popular, that's what they've fallen into.

One thing I do miss, though, as selfish as it may sound, is when games like Chrono Trigger felt like my own little secret. My teenage self probably would respond to that with "What the heck are you talking about?" because I would bring the strategy guide with me to school practically every day, blabbering on endlessly about the game to my friends as I pointed out pictures, even though none of them had any idea what I was going on about and probably didn't care in the slightest. I'm sure I would've been overjoyed at the time to meet somebody else who had actually played it. But after I got involved in online gaming communities and saw everyone and their brother hyping it up, something about that was unappealing to me. I guess what bugs me is that no one can go into the game fresh like I did. You've got these 20-year-olds who are told over and over that this is the greatest RPG ever made, their expectations are then set impossibly high, and then once they give it a shot, they come back saying "This isn't that great". People are less able to experience games naturally these days. It's all but impossible to avoid hype, and then people start up games trying to scope out where the purported greatness lies from the very first second it begins. And I feel like this kind of hype is only getting more and more hyperbolic with each generation. It's to the point that people practically expect a life-altering experience out of Breath of the Wild.

[homerhomer]

I've heard there was a big shift in the mid '90s as well. I didn't get my first video game until 1998, I was 5. But it was an early '90s system, a Sega Genesis. I didn't really like it, I wanted something with 3D graphics like the Nintendo 64 with Super Mario 64 that was the first game I ever played. I had an asthma attack in October 1998, and that was hooked up in the hospital. The difference between Genesis/SNES and PS1/N64 was massive, we went from 2D to 3D graphics - games were more complex and lifelike, and with CDs (at least on PS1) they could be much more lengthy and in depth.

It was one of the three great shifts in the video game industry: the video game crash era (mid 1980s), the 2D to 3D transition (mid 1990s), and the online transition (mid-late 2000s)

Of course, looking back, I should have been grateful for my Genesis: at the time, we lived in a trailer and our cars were 14 and 21 years old so we weren't well off, and yet they were able to get me a Genny within weeks of when I asked for it.

That's just how it was, once you saw n64 or Playstation there was no going back. The same thing happened to me with Atari 2600 and the NES.

[Aussie2B]

The irony is that these days tons of people look at N64/PS1/Saturn games as practically unplayable due to their simplistic graphics and low framerates, while the 16-bit gen is viewed as a golden era. It seems like it's easier for people who play today's games to play and accept 2D games as their own separate thing, but early 3D games are just a very primitive version of the 3D games they're playing now to them.

[Gameguy]

I remember when the N64 launched and I first played it on store kiosks, with Super Mario 64 being the game demonstrated. I found the graphics to be ugly, the controls in game to be difficult, and the controller itself difficult to hold in my hands. I was about 8 or 9 when I first played it and thought it was trash, I just wanted my Genesis. 3D back then just sucked. Now I can appreciate the Playstation with several of the games being decent, but the N64 is still awful.

I did end up getting a current console around that time. A Gameboy Pocket which I had a lot of fun with(mostly with Duck Tales and Crazy Castle 2, I still have my games from then). Originally we planned on getting a Game Gear as I played one that another kid owned and I liked it(think it was Deep Duck Trouble) but we found out in the store that it was being discontinued so we went with the Gameboy instead. Back then we didn't buy anything used so if something wasn't sold in stores anymore, we couldn't/wouldn't buy it. Besides consoles we might have bought a few computer games but not that many, we just got a computer in 1997 with Windows 95. I mostly just played portable games then until the early 2000's, then went more to PC games but I still played with portables. I got into collecting older systems around this time, I never really cared about keeping up with modern stuff that much.

I can't remember the Saturn in stores though, I don't think it ever really caught on well to the general public. It wasn't like the Gamecube type of 3rd place but worse. Even today the best games on the Saturn and PS1 are the 2D games, most of the 3D games are barely playable with a few exceptions.