Describing how video games were to my niece, where you'd buy a tangible item that you then stuck into the machine to play it, and it was yours to play forever without subscriptions or even an online connection. :chomsky-yes-honey:
One summer in the late 70's my buddy and I got on our bikes around midnight with a pocket full of quarters and rode 20+ miles on back roads to get to the 7-11 in the nearby city to play Pac Man.
Once we shot our load we crawled to a nearby park and slept in the dirt.
No one knew where we were and we got home safely. Good times.
hilariously there were some Atari 2600 games that had a kind of equivalent to an online subscription model. You'd load games onto a special cart through a phone line and they'd play like 5 times then delete themselves, then you'd have to pay to download the rom again.
that company eventually became America Online so I guess they were always evil
I sometimes memorized the "copy protection" answers without having to check the manual or lore books. X-Wing was one such game. I could identify which trio of Aurabesh characters was associated with Kashyyyk and the like. :chomsky-yes-honey:
i recently got into, then promptly got out of physical game collecting. Only consoles left are a Genesis and a barely working Dreamcast, but I had a lot more, plus a bunch of games I'd find at local retro stores or eBay. I felt myself sliding into a hole of physical collections just to do it, eventually realizing I was developing a weird elitist hoarding, so I got rid of most of it. I wasn't even playing most of the games.
now I've got a small GPD handheld with custom firmware, two SD cards with literally every game made from like 1980 to 2005, and I play them all the time. Really happy about that, after realizing the games themselves are what's special and cool, not hunks of plastic. Currently going back through the Breath of Fire series. Gonna finally beat Koudelka after that.
Describing how video games were to my niece, where you'd buy a tangible item that you then stuck into the machine to play it, and it was yours to play forever without subscriptions or even an online connection. :chomsky-yes-honey:
Tell her what quarters are and what they were used for.
One summer in the late 70's my buddy and I got on our bikes around midnight with a pocket full of quarters and rode 20+ miles on back roads to get to the 7-11 in the nearby city to play Pac Man.
Once we shot our load we crawled to a nearby park and slept in the dirt.
No one knew where we were and we got home safely. Good times.
Hell yeah, I love that we have some older folks on here
It sure was a coincidence that my pre-school age kids liked all the same games that I wanted for Christmas for the NES. What a funny thing.
Very relatable, except for me it was PS2 and GameCube
I have. :flattened-bernie:
“Oh, so you still had subscriptions. You just didn’t get new content for yours”
hilariously there were some Atari 2600 games that had a kind of equivalent to an online subscription model. You'd load games onto a special cart through a phone line and they'd play like 5 times then delete themselves, then you'd have to pay to download the rom again.
that company eventually became America Online so I guess they were always evil
Old DRM was the wild west, my dad kept a binder full of code wheels and password tables in the cabinet above his DOS shitbox
I sometimes memorized the "copy protection" answers without having to check the manual or lore books. X-Wing was one such game. I could identify which trio of Aurabesh characters was associated with Kashyyyk and the like. :chomsky-yes-honey:
Pretty sure my parents got me a Nintendo to keep me from spending $20 a rip at the arcade.
i recently got into, then promptly got out of physical game collecting. Only consoles left are a Genesis and a barely working Dreamcast, but I had a lot more, plus a bunch of games I'd find at local retro stores or eBay. I felt myself sliding into a hole of physical collections just to do it, eventually realizing I was developing a weird elitist hoarding, so I got rid of most of it. I wasn't even playing most of the games.
now I've got a small GPD handheld with custom firmware, two SD cards with literally every game made from like 1980 to 2005, and I play them all the time. Really happy about that, after realizing the games themselves are what's special and cool, not hunks of plastic. Currently going back through the Breath of Fire series. Gonna finally beat Koudelka after that.