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Cake day: August 30th, 2025
  • Thorry@feddit.orgtoLinux Gaming@lemmy.world•Kazeta: the new Linux-based physical media OS (my article!)English
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    35 minutes ago

    digging through a shoebox of game carts. For someone who wasn’t alive for that era of gaming (not even close, honestly), it’s a neat little glimpse of what it was like.

    As someone who was alive for gaming in the 80s and 90s, it was nothing like that at all. Unless you were very rich, most people would have less than 10 games for the one console they had. It would be a small stack by the side of the console, next to the controllers. Games were usually around $70 depending on the game, which is like $160 in today’s money. NES games were cheaper, especially once the SNES was released. So people did wind up collecting NES games (2nd hand) once the SNES released. The NES moved to the oldest kid bedroom, with the SNES taking the place of the one console in the living room. They might have a shoebox of older games at some point.

    We did play a lot of game tho, often we would borrow games from other kids in the neighbourhood. Although everyone had the same 5 super popular games, but the other games people had varied. Downside was, the easiest ones to borrow were often the ones that weren’t any good. We all know that one kid that had the Star Wars SNES game and hated it, but you’d only very sparingly get a new game, so you were stuck with it.

    Another thing we did was rent a lot of games, you would go to the rental place and they would have so many games, it would blow your mind. They’d have posters up, often large set pieces for some games and movies. It was like kid heaven. Then you’d have about 10 mins to figure out which game to rent, otherwise your dad would get annoyed and tell you to get a move on. People even rented the SNES when it was just released for a weekend, so they would know if it was any good before buying it for the family. It was a big purchase, so you’d better make it worth it.