Gamers of reddit that lived in the 90's. What's the biggest shocker you had on your gaming journey?
Being able to save your progress was revolutionary.
Before that, it was either writing down long ass passwords or straight up restarting from the beginning.
microtransactions
i seriously can't beep believe that players actually *defend* microtransactions.
it's not just reluctant acceptance, it's gotten to the point where people actually defend them now
it bums me out
Not really a shocker, but the release of Diablo 1 happened to coincide with my college installing ethernet in our dormitory.
RIP my grades.
Grand Theft Auto III.
My friend and I were 13.
Let's be real: That's basically the intended target audience for those games, ESRB be damned.
His mom's new boyfriend at the time was attempting (and quite frankly, succeeding) to impress him.
So, his future stepdad bought him a PS2 and a copy of GTA III.
The moment the first mission ended, we were both awestruck at the fact you could go... anywhere, in a fully 3D world far larger than anything we'd ever experienced.
Up to this point, games had levels, you see.
And each level contained well-defined boundaries, beyond which the game itself simply ceased to exist.
But this?
GTA III's city was seemingly endless.
You wanna drive to that giant building on the horizon?
Pick any car you see, hijack it and go nuts.
Feel like walking instead?
You could walk, sprint and jump from one end of a borough to the other, which honestly took at least an hour.
Couldn't get up that hill, or over that gate?
Find something to ramp off of or -- barring the presence of an incline -- create a staircase out of crashed cars.
You could drive through tunnels, over (and under) bridges, and even run along the elevated train tracks if you felt so inclined.
Any surface you could see, you could eventually stand atop.
Figuring out how was half the fun.
Everything during a journey was equally mind-blowing.
If you hit a traffic light with your car, it'd spark and collapse, blocking the intersection.
If you rammed your vehicle into a concrete barrier, its hood would crumple or its doors would fly off.
Oh, and that giant plate glass window at the car dealership?
Yeah, barreling through that at full speed did **exactly** what you'd expect!
And that was before we found out you could change a car's radio stations between a dozen channels, each with their own music, banter, and hilarious (to a teenager) commercials.
We seriously spent the first two hours running into and/or over
everything (and everyone) we could find, just to see what would happen, dope-ass tunes blaring in the background.
Everything felt significant and exciting, in a way that's become standard (and unfortunately mundane) for open-world games.
After spending hours trying to get onto a solitary rooftop, we'd find a package of drugs that would unlock new weapons at our hideout.
Getting into a cop car or a firetruck or an ambulance or a taxi unlocked hidden mini-games: You'd catch crooks, put out fires, rescue dying people, or maybe just give random dudes rides to the park.
Even the simple act of finding an out-of-the-way alley or a hidden road meant something, in case
you needed to recall such knowledge during a high-speed chase.
Nowadays, most of this stuff is expected.
In fact, when it's missing from an open-world game, things just feel empty.
Plus, the fact it's expected sort of kills the sense of wonder; even if the graphics are way better and the gameplay is far smoother and the soundtrack is literally hundreds of songs deep.
I'm really glad how gaming has advanced in the two decades since, but I do genuinely miss that sense of discovery and excitement (and pure beep mayhem)...
Sonic & Knuckles
It was a Sega Genesis cartridge game.
There was a complete plot and you could play through the entire game as either Sonic or Knuckles (with slight differences to both the story and gameplay for each).
The really crazy part, though, was that the top of the game cartridge opened up and you could plug in either Sonic the Hedgehog 2 or 3.
If you plugged in Sonic 3 it would allow you to play through both Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles (the two games were developed concurrently and released at about the same time) with a bunch of added features/gameplay.
If you plugged in Sonic 2 (which came out 2 years before the other games) it let you play through all of Sonic
2 as Knuckles, which dramatically changed gameplay in some way.
If you plugged in any other game it let you play a mini-game.
I had Sonic 2 since it came out.
Suddenly getting to play the same game as a different playable character who hadn't appeared in the original game, and with new gameplay features totally blew my mind.
Today we would see it as a DLC expansion or playable character, but at the time I'd never seen anything like it.
Probably the concept of "living through the 90s" being no longer the norm in the community.
I read accounts of people talking about the "super old" system they grew up on, only to find out they're talking about a Gamecube or a PS2.
Excuse me, I have to go affix an onion to my belt.
Mario 64 when it became 3dimensional was crazy.
When 3D cards started to become mainstream in PC gaming in the late 90s.
The original Tomb Raider was one of the first games I played both in regular 3D and accelerated 3D, and the difference was night and day--it looked and moved so much better.
Probably when I was 9 and first played Doom.
I couldn't play it in the dark because it was too scary.
The original Doom.
The MMORPG genre.
Everquest was the most amazing game I’d ever played.
As a dumb middle-schooler, learning that the different characters in Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 were actual skateboarders blew my beep mind.
I though they were all just randomly generated skaters with made up names like Rodney Mullen or Chad Muska.
I would say metal gear solid...
Changing the controller port to fight psycho mantis.
Blew everyone away
Ocarina of Time at the Forest Temple.
I saw a shadow of something that was apparently on top of my character so I stopped moving, got close to the screen, and looked as it got bigger.
Before I could react... yup, Wallmaster.
The fact that games have stayed 60$ all these years.
Edit: I know prices have started going up.
Point being with inflation considered, game prices have stayed impressively stable in comparison to almost everything else.
60$ in 1990 is worth 119$ in 2020 for your consideration.
That after Age of Empires 2 the next RTS that would keep me busy for a long time would actually be the remake of the same game 20 years later.
I never cared about Starcraft though.
The N64 controller.
To this day, I’ve no beep idea what they were thinking.
the first Playstation.
The only real 3D game i played before that was SNES Starfox, and then suddenly BOOM!
Lara's pyramid boobs
Starcraft and the original C&C were eye opening for me.
Also sim city and the Sims.
The first time I saw a fatality in Mortal Kombat.
Half the fun of that game was the rumors that surrounded it— when that one proved to be true, I was both blown away and delighted.
Goldeneye.
There had been mulitplayer games before but playing this with mates all night after the pub was an added level of competitiveness, still prefer that to playing online and not being able to give the same level of abuse to friends.
The graphical jump between console generations, more specifically with 2 game series I played a lot.
Namely Gran Turismo 2 to Gran Turismo 3 and Final Fantasy VII to Final Fantasy X.
And in Final Fantasy's case, considering I never played IX until around 2007, it was quite the jump to say the least.
Playing Half-life Deathmatch and seeing the red dot close to you
How amazing new games were in the 90s.
On the PC it seemed like every new game had vastly improved graphics compared to the last one.
PC hardware was improving soooo fast back then.
Not that much difference now even over 10 years.
going from responsive, fast games, to sluggish blurry piece of beep 3d game in the PS1 era.
Seeing e-sports finally get big.
Despite my family's best attempts, I was never into sports.
Having big events I could watch with my friends was a nice change of pace.
If you were gaming in the 90's, you were a nerd.
Also seeing it become as popular as it did was a shocker eventually.
Legend of Mana giving you a Chocobo if you had FF7 data and a dope ass sword for Saga save data on the same memory card.
The introduction of online games/worlds blew my mind.
Early on, I had a family member that played MUDs, but they read a lot faster than me, so I just had them explain what was happening, but it was still cool.
The first online games that I played on my own were Neopets and Everquest around 1999.
I was infatuated.
I can't put into words how fantastic it was to be present at the cusp of the internet being integrated with games.
Revealing that Samus is a woman.
Going from Sega Genesis to N64 as a kid blew my mind, getting Rogue squadron for Christmas is still one of my best memories.
This cave is not a natural formation.
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