Gamers of today will never know the struggle of being a 90s gamer. Growing up during the golden age of video games had its downfalls every now and then, but we can only sit back and laugh at them today.
Scratched discs, no memory cards, wired controllers, TV adapters, and of course local co-op in front of a tiny box TV. Here are some of the most iconic problems we as 90s gamers faced on a daily basis.
No money for memory cards
Everything and its cat today has some sort of internal storage option these days, but back then you needed a memory card, and those were expensive.
Most of the time when we bought a new console, we did not budget in that we needed a memory card separately in order to save our game so we made do without it.
This resulted in leaving the console on overnight, as there was no way in hell we were going to play the first 20 hours of Final Fantasy VII all over again. Gamers will never know the struggle of just not being able to save your game.
Broken controller cables
Back in the day we never had Bluetooth controllers that magically connected to the device and could turn it on and off without even needing to plug it in.
We simply had wired controllers that had limited length and stretched across the living room to the console. The issue is that with wired and the fact that you are always moving the controller and flipping it around, came the deterioration of the cable.
After a while, the ends had no coating and you could see all the smaller cables inside, and even then we faced those breaking too.
Remembering passwords
Way before the memory card era came another way we had to save our progress. We had to remember passwords.
Fond memories of drawing up a grid on Mega Man on a sheet of paper and filling in the dots to save our progress, and let us not forget when we lost that paper we then had to try and randomly guess passwords.
I will never forget playing Jurassic Park and randomly choosing a bunch of codes to fill in, in hopes of loading into a part of the game I never got to.
Playing online while sacrificing phone calls
Oh good old dial-up, how you taught is patience. We all remember the struggle of downloading MP3 music which was aorund 3-5 MB back then and then having to sit and wait for a good 30 minutes for it.
To make it worse, dial-up cut out the phone so when we were playing StarCraft we could not receive or make any calls at home. Given that no one had a cellphone, this meant we simply had to be unsociable for the sake of gaming.
That part has not changed much at least.
Reading the manuals
When last did you open a game box and get a manual? Probably been a good seven years right? Well, back then, people cared less about the environment which meant that every box came with a manual inside it in every language on the planet.
Now seeing as gaming was still a new thing, people actually sat and read through all of these pages in order to learn more about the game.
Think of it as a sort of light reading session before diving into the game.
Missing one disc
A CD disc back in the day had 700MB of space on it which meant that it could most of the time fit the entire game on it. That was until we had games like Final Fantasy IX and Myst release.
These games came with four discs in them rather than one in order to fit in all the cinematics. Now, the issue is that disc four would only be needed when you finally got the part in the game.
You now get to the last disc screen and realize that it has gone missing and you are unable to continue playing.
Blisters on hands
Back in the day games were hardcore enough that they actually made us bleed and cry in pain.
Many of these were party games that saw us spinning analogues around, and even rotating them with our palm for hours on end.
This meant that the rubber or even plain plastic in some cases stripped our skin away as we punched the other player, or tried to get to the end of the race in Olympic Summer Games.
We damaged our bodies for gaming. If that is not dedication then I don’t know what is.
Screen looking
Before paid online subscriptions, we used to gather around the same 13-inch TV and play 4-player versus mode.
Yes, this means that each of us got 3 inches of screen for our block to fit in, but we did not care as we were awesome gamers and we wanted to show off our skill against our best friends.
The issue here is that everyone could see where we were going by slightly moving their gaze down an inch, or even perhaps without moving it at all.
This would result in everyone looking at each other’s tiny block and cheating in a way to predict where they were going. It was still fun though as big as the problem was.
Turning your console upside down
I have no idea if this was a real thing but we all had that problem where our consoles failed to read the cartridge or disc. We blew inside the cartridge, even though Nintendo told us not to ever do it, and we wiped the disc clean and yet it still did not work.
Magically once we turned our console upside down, it loaded past that darn screen that we got stuck at. Even when we turned it sidewards the same thing happened.
I always believed that the little people inside making it work enjoyed the new position, but I was 5 so it made sense to me.
Image Credit: Games Radar
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