I will always remember the nineties as a never-ending race to the finish line.
It seemed like every magazine I read, every TV show I watched and every store I ventured into couldn't stop hyping up the new and upcoming tech (even if some of that tech ended up never coming out at all) to the point where the people running all of those things would gosh about them with child-like excitement. You couldn't really escape the feeling that you were missing out big time by not being at the forefront of the technological race, especially when it came to videogames.
I remember feeling a genuine pang of jealousy when my best friend finally upgraded his gaming console, leaving behind our beloved SEGA Genesis model 1 and getting a shiny PlayStation in its place... taking a look at gems like Twisted Metal 4 (the first CD-based game I had ever played) felt jarring. Compared to it, most of my beloved classics felt like relics from another time.
Look at all that upcoming tech!
And to make matters worse, my situation on the PC wasn't any better.
While I can say with complete certainty that I had an excellent childhood, some things were made absolutely clear right from the get-go. Chiefly among those items was the fact that a working piece of tech would never be replaced, even when growing obsolete. It's actually a really solid piece of advice that shaped my entire approach to technology and consumerism, but I feel that it played a role on isolating me from my peers in subtle, yet important ways.
For a huge chunk of my childhood, our home computer was a 286 running MS-DOS and paired with a black-and-white monitor. It was a great PC, and one that could play pretty much everything I threw at it... except for games and programs that came either on a CD or a 3 1/2 floppy disk. That means that I missed out on a lot of what I like to call "school yard dealings", which were nothing more than my friends and classmates exchanging --and sometimes selling-- games on floppy disks to each other, a practice almost entirely fueled by the fact that Billiken magazine had started pairing low quality, basic games with their issues.
This was mind-blowing technologically when I first saw it, as I was still used to the 8 and 16-Bit graphics of the past generation of gaming.
Our parents loved the magazine because it had a lot of really useful information that could aid everyone on their school projects at a time when the sole idea of the internet was completely unknown for most of us. We loved it because it came with trinkets and games we could have fun with once the magazine had been flipped through exactly once and promptly discarded. It was an interesting middle ground for both groups. However, most of my diskettes would seat completely sealed for years, as I couldn't really insert them on our home computer (nor could I trade them, since I would be trading something I had no experience with for something I couldn't really use... I mean, what would be the point?).
Things came to a boil when my uncle returned from a business trip on Brazil and gave me a huge, extremely cool Alien vs Predator action figure that was as big as my forearm. The toy came bundled with a videogame... that I couldn't play. That soured me completely, but it wasn't actually what prompted my parents to upgrade (of course not). What pushed them to do it was my school requiring us to keep year-long computer projects that doubled as dull homework assignments -- these needed to be saved on floppy disks and completed over the weekend for the duration of the school year.
My dad wasn't at all pleased with this development, since his job required him to do office work (such as creating spreadsheets and completing articles), something that he could totally do on our then-current system, but the school won out in the end. We ended up selling the 286 to a workmate of his that same month and got a Pentium II running Windows 95 a few days later.
(Quite literally) the Dark Ages. And I loved every second of it!
I already had some experience with Windows because of both school and going over to my friend's house, but having the real deal on my own home was incredible (especially now that I could actually break the shrink wrap on many of those games I had neglected and partake on recess economics). That computer ended up lasting until 2008, when it was already a museum piece.
However... this upgrade would soon prove to be both meaningless and a blessing, as the nineties would come to a screeching halt almost as soon as I got it.
Unbeknown to me at the time, my mindset that things were moving way too fast was actually shared, just not by people I could interact with.
In 1998, three sites were launched simultaneously on entirely different parts of the world and officially kickstarted the Abandonware Era.
Sites like this one were like the Holy Grail of the retro gaming scene, and it's deeply saddening that they have all been killed since.
Home Of The Underdogs in the United States, La Casa de Pololin in Spain and one site that shall remain nameless (because it still exists) in Argentina were created to honor and share the many games that had shaped entire childhoods, but that could no longer be acquired through legal means because they had all stopped being sold.
And while some people spent thousands of dollars upgrading their rigs in anticipation for the hottest new games (peaking with the release of Doom 3 a few years later, which saw many people completely overhauling their PCs just to have a chance to run it), others were casually browsing through these online catalogs, trying to both re experience childhood classics or finally play those games they could never afford as children.
Me? I stood at a crossroads.
Without internet access (that would only happen seven years later) and with my PC growing more and more outdated by the day, I contented myself with hanging out and throwing stuff at it, seeing what would stick... a practice that my friends would be very happy to continue, often coming over with bags full of CDs that they insisted on installing on my aging system. It was actually hard not to laugh at their genuine bafflement when stuff clearly meant for better PCs would just not work on mine -- Quake 3 Arena (a game that was completely new at the time) would actually crash my PC during installation because the game was actually larger than my HDD. Emulators such as BoyCott Advance and Bleem! would downright freeze my entire rig because of the incredible strain they'd put on its components. Even small stuff would sometimes not work because of missing DLLs or something.
I never understood why 'Bleem!' didn't work on my computer... but hey, it wouldn't work on my PC today, either!
But then I started getting really involved with the Abandonware scene (despite the fact that half of the internet was closed off to me because of a language barrier), and I found out that I had just about the perfect system for it. Whilst many of my peers were already upgrading their entire machines in preparation for the new wave of gaming --moving to less DOS-friendly operating systems in the process--, staying by my rickety system actually paid off by allowing me to run all the fun stuff they just couldn't anymore. I'll forever remember my friend's face when I managed to trade Pokemon on No$GBC (a DOS-based Gameboy emulator with link cable capabilities) and his genuine shock when he couldn't do that himself at time when stuff like DosBox was fairly unknown.
It was actually quite interesting seeing how stuff changed over the years, particularly after the advent of YouTube and its myriad of retro gaming channels.
While retro collecting was initially mocked and looked down on, it soon became almost the norm. Of course, there was still a lot of people who kept going forward and never looked back, but a lot of others felt tempted to at least try their hand at this new thing, even if only for the aesthetic pleasure of displaying a nice-looking "oldie" on their TV table. Very soon, a lot of forums started hosting their very own gaming markets, where people could buy and sell hardware and software as long as it was legit. These were strongly moderated and were only open to members who had met some standards (like reaching a certain post count or having been a member for X number of months). They were also patrolled by a so-called "ethics police", meaning that you couldn't get away with putting an unfair price on something that was either not worth the asking price or damaged to the point of not being a fair transaction.
"No, no. That isn't an extremely messed up copy of 'Rad Racer'. It's a... uhhh... special edition 'road rash' copy with built-in rattling. Very expensive!" - Some sleezy online salesman, circa 2007.
Outside of those, however, it was the freaking Wild West.
Auction sites like DeRemate and MercadoLibre were soon plagued with people who had rushed to the back of their closets to retrieve yellowed, battered, often non-functional consoles to sell for exorbitant prices. It was a shameful display and I feel more than a little annoyed with my 17-year-old self for playing right into their hands and buying stuff that would have definitely caught the eye of the aforementioned "police" upon forking out the cash for it. I don't actually regret it, because I was playing the game as it was played at the time, but dang.
It's genuinely funny to me how things shifted directions to the point of not making any sense... phones were getting smaller and smaller, then suddenly became huge again. People would always be hunting for the latest GPU or processor, then sell them to get their hands on an elusive Atari 5200. It was such a fun time, and I'm glad that I got to experience it, even if completely involuntarily.
It seemed like every magazine I read, every TV show I watched and every store I ventured into couldn't stop hyping up the new and upcoming tech (even if some of that tech ended up never coming out at all) to the point where the people running all of those things would gosh about them with child-like excitement. You couldn't really escape the feeling that you were missing out big time by not being at the forefront of the technological race, especially when it came to videogames.
I remember feeling a genuine pang of jealousy when my best friend finally upgraded his gaming console, leaving behind our beloved SEGA Genesis model 1 and getting a shiny PlayStation in its place... taking a look at gems like Twisted Metal 4 (the first CD-based game I had ever played) felt jarring. Compared to it, most of my beloved classics felt like relics from another time.
Look at all that upcoming tech!
And to make matters worse, my situation on the PC wasn't any better.
While I can say with complete certainty that I had an excellent childhood, some things were made absolutely clear right from the get-go. Chiefly among those items was the fact that a working piece of tech would never be replaced, even when growing obsolete. It's actually a really solid piece of advice that shaped my entire approach to technology and consumerism, but I feel that it played a role on isolating me from my peers in subtle, yet important ways.
For a huge chunk of my childhood, our home computer was a 286 running MS-DOS and paired with a black-and-white monitor. It was a great PC, and one that could play pretty much everything I threw at it... except for games and programs that came either on a CD or a 3 1/2 floppy disk. That means that I missed out on a lot of what I like to call "school yard dealings", which were nothing more than my friends and classmates exchanging --and sometimes selling-- games on floppy disks to each other, a practice almost entirely fueled by the fact that Billiken magazine had started pairing low quality, basic games with their issues.
This was mind-blowing technologically when I first saw it, as I was still used to the 8 and 16-Bit graphics of the past generation of gaming.
Our parents loved the magazine because it had a lot of really useful information that could aid everyone on their school projects at a time when the sole idea of the internet was completely unknown for most of us. We loved it because it came with trinkets and games we could have fun with once the magazine had been flipped through exactly once and promptly discarded. It was an interesting middle ground for both groups. However, most of my diskettes would seat completely sealed for years, as I couldn't really insert them on our home computer (nor could I trade them, since I would be trading something I had no experience with for something I couldn't really use... I mean, what would be the point?).
Things came to a boil when my uncle returned from a business trip on Brazil and gave me a huge, extremely cool Alien vs Predator action figure that was as big as my forearm. The toy came bundled with a videogame... that I couldn't play. That soured me completely, but it wasn't actually what prompted my parents to upgrade (of course not). What pushed them to do it was my school requiring us to keep year-long computer projects that doubled as dull homework assignments -- these needed to be saved on floppy disks and completed over the weekend for the duration of the school year.
My dad wasn't at all pleased with this development, since his job required him to do office work (such as creating spreadsheets and completing articles), something that he could totally do on our then-current system, but the school won out in the end. We ended up selling the 286 to a workmate of his that same month and got a Pentium II running Windows 95 a few days later.
(Quite literally) the Dark Ages. And I loved every second of it!
I already had some experience with Windows because of both school and going over to my friend's house, but having the real deal on my own home was incredible (especially now that I could actually break the shrink wrap on many of those games I had neglected and partake on recess economics). That computer ended up lasting until 2008, when it was already a museum piece.
However... this upgrade would soon prove to be both meaningless and a blessing, as the nineties would come to a screeching halt almost as soon as I got it.
Unbeknown to me at the time, my mindset that things were moving way too fast was actually shared, just not by people I could interact with.
In 1998, three sites were launched simultaneously on entirely different parts of the world and officially kickstarted the Abandonware Era.
Sites like this one were like the Holy Grail of the retro gaming scene, and it's deeply saddening that they have all been killed since.
Home Of The Underdogs in the United States, La Casa de Pololin in Spain and one site that shall remain nameless (because it still exists) in Argentina were created to honor and share the many games that had shaped entire childhoods, but that could no longer be acquired through legal means because they had all stopped being sold.
And while some people spent thousands of dollars upgrading their rigs in anticipation for the hottest new games (peaking with the release of Doom 3 a few years later, which saw many people completely overhauling their PCs just to have a chance to run it), others were casually browsing through these online catalogs, trying to both re experience childhood classics or finally play those games they could never afford as children.
Me? I stood at a crossroads.
Without internet access (that would only happen seven years later) and with my PC growing more and more outdated by the day, I contented myself with hanging out and throwing stuff at it, seeing what would stick... a practice that my friends would be very happy to continue, often coming over with bags full of CDs that they insisted on installing on my aging system. It was actually hard not to laugh at their genuine bafflement when stuff clearly meant for better PCs would just not work on mine -- Quake 3 Arena (a game that was completely new at the time) would actually crash my PC during installation because the game was actually larger than my HDD. Emulators such as BoyCott Advance and Bleem! would downright freeze my entire rig because of the incredible strain they'd put on its components. Even small stuff would sometimes not work because of missing DLLs or something.
I never understood why 'Bleem!' didn't work on my computer... but hey, it wouldn't work on my PC today, either!
But then I started getting really involved with the Abandonware scene (despite the fact that half of the internet was closed off to me because of a language barrier), and I found out that I had just about the perfect system for it. Whilst many of my peers were already upgrading their entire machines in preparation for the new wave of gaming --moving to less DOS-friendly operating systems in the process--, staying by my rickety system actually paid off by allowing me to run all the fun stuff they just couldn't anymore. I'll forever remember my friend's face when I managed to trade Pokemon on No$GBC (a DOS-based Gameboy emulator with link cable capabilities) and his genuine shock when he couldn't do that himself at time when stuff like DosBox was fairly unknown.
It was actually quite interesting seeing how stuff changed over the years, particularly after the advent of YouTube and its myriad of retro gaming channels.
While retro collecting was initially mocked and looked down on, it soon became almost the norm. Of course, there was still a lot of people who kept going forward and never looked back, but a lot of others felt tempted to at least try their hand at this new thing, even if only for the aesthetic pleasure of displaying a nice-looking "oldie" on their TV table. Very soon, a lot of forums started hosting their very own gaming markets, where people could buy and sell hardware and software as long as it was legit. These were strongly moderated and were only open to members who had met some standards (like reaching a certain post count or having been a member for X number of months). They were also patrolled by a so-called "ethics police", meaning that you couldn't get away with putting an unfair price on something that was either not worth the asking price or damaged to the point of not being a fair transaction.
Outside of those, however, it was the freaking Wild West.
Auction sites like DeRemate and MercadoLibre were soon plagued with people who had rushed to the back of their closets to retrieve yellowed, battered, often non-functional consoles to sell for exorbitant prices. It was a shameful display and I feel more than a little annoyed with my 17-year-old self for playing right into their hands and buying stuff that would have definitely caught the eye of the aforementioned "police" upon forking out the cash for it. I don't actually regret it, because I was playing the game as it was played at the time, but dang.
It's genuinely funny to me how things shifted directions to the point of not making any sense... phones were getting smaller and smaller, then suddenly became huge again. People would always be hunting for the latest GPU or processor, then sell them to get their hands on an elusive Atari 5200. It was such a fun time, and I'm glad that I got to experience it, even if completely involuntarily.
What about you? What were your experiences at the time?
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