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Videogames tales from your country

UnNamed

Banned
I wanted to make this thread for a long time, since I've always been curious of what videogames are perceived and lived in other countries.
Make it point by point is easier and readable. Let's see if this thread is interesting for someone.

In Italy:
-videogames were usually expensive, at least before Playstation (I'll explain it later) and then with the Euro currency. In fact, Italy is one of those market were videogames were more expensive in the '90 than now. 80€ for Returnal is what I spent for DKC in 1994.
-This because different exchange rates, difficulties in economy, etc, but mostly because 'till 1995, videogames were only officially imported by local retailers. Without calculating the inflation, (from now on) new Megadrive releases could cost 70€, SNES games up to 85€. NES games up to 40€. MD console cost around 125€, SNES more than 150€, NES 80€.
-Unofficially imported games from Japan or US could cost more than 100€, I remember SF2 was 101€, Perfect Eleven 105€. NEOGEO was 400€, games 200€. The average salary was 600/800€ in the early '90.
-As many in Europe, computers were popular and original games were cheap (5-10€) and often sold in newsstands, piracy was crazy and not even a crime for a long time. Lot of C64 and Amiga users here. Computer peripherals were very expensive, I couldn't afford any of them (floppy, printer, monitor).
-PC were much more expensive!! My first PC was a mid range PC and cost 1500€, 3 wages.
-Despite NES was popular (people used to call every videogames "the Nintendo"), Master System sold more 'cause it was cheaper (games at 25€ max) and the local distributor for Sega did better in marketing, also SMS was sold for very long till the Saturn era.
-Since MS was popular, MD was popular too, and cheaper than SNES in console and games.
-Yes, Sega was OFFICIALLY pronounced SeeGA because SEGA is "saw" but also a slang for "fap".
-While computer games had an immediately release, console games and console itself had a big delay. Usually JAP->USA->UK->FR/GER->IT. Console games rarely had an italian localization. I don't remember any MD/NES/MS/SNES etc games with IT language built in it, until the Playstation era.
-Console/Computer were usually attached to the TV via RF input, until 32bit era were composite was common. But RGB TV were actually pretty common, my Wii was connected in RGB to a 1985 TV with a Scart/RGB input.
-Videogame magazine were a translation from UK magazine with new contents. A news printed in a japanese magazine, then a month later in a UK magazine, then (probably) a month later in an italian magazine. CES/ETCS (old trade events) news were published in september despite the exibition was in june/july. Now everything is in real time, but back in the day this situation was the norm.
-Because the delays, the higher cost, the laziness from Sega and Nintendo which probaly didn't consider Italy a worthy country, the local distributors in the middle, when Playstation arrived, everything changed: consoles everywhere, cheaper games ( a new release usually cost less then 55€), most of the game officially translated and dubbed, better support, more advertisement, new magazines exclusively for PSX. And later piracy, but piracy only don't explain why Playstation brand is the most popular in Italy till now.
-Nintendo had a direct distribution only in the GC era. At some point, the local distributor for Nintendo bought the local distributor for Sega, so you had Dreamcast on the shelves but no advertise at all because Nintendo didn't want their partner to advertise the competitors.
 

Kenpachii

Member
I was one of the first game console scalpers at age of 12. I got my parents to buy a whole france store of n64's empty because they where so much more cheaper then in my country. with 15 or something loaded up, i sold them for double the price in my own country. Which paid for a bike i wanted.

First PC was for free with windows 3.1 on it and a giant floppy. It didn't play much but hey atleast it was fun to mess around with. Got that thing for free anyway.

After i got more and more interested my parents bought me a super expensive PC, 5000 bucks or something with everything on it. I crashed that thing all day long so i could see how people fixed it. This is where i got real excited about hardware / software in the PC world.

As my dad worked in turkey and ran a company in poland when i was little, my parents wanted to immigrate towards both country's for x amount of years. They never ended up doing it because i was homesick as hell constantly but the trips i did move there i always bought entire library's of games there because they where just so much more cheaper specially for nintendo's handhelds etc.

My dad liked games i guess when i grow up, as he bought a atari with 200 games on it together. As my sister and i couldn't take it to lose, we would always slap the shit out of eachother once one lost. Endless shitshow, to the point i never saw that atari again.

n64 was pretty much the last console me and my friends bought. games where far to expensive 180 euro's basically and there simple wasn't much to play. Lots of my friends moved to PS1 or PC platform, but stayed with nintendo handhelds because of pokemon. The people that moved to PS1 was because every title would hit it that was populaire at the time. it covered everything.

I ditched consoles entirely after the disastrous gamecube which was straight up just a joke of a console ( wii-u of that area ). Totally missed the culture of what was going on. and ditched playstation after PS2 as the games simple didn't hold a candle towards PC games anymore, also PS3 was a massive disaster.

Consoles moved more into slow gameplay, lots of story talking. while i only cared for pure gameplay with zero story telling. Also RTS/MMO genre is and was non existent on those boxes. ( which is still the case, as mmo experience on consoles is absolutely dreadful )

I ditched consoles entirely and moved 100% towards PC solution as i was already on there naturally because of the degree i was getting in IT. Emulation did the rest.
 

brian0057

Banned
In Venezuela, console gaming was expensive as fuck. That's why the PS1 and PS2 were the most popular. They were cheaper.

It was a miracle for your parents to get you an original copy of a game. So that being the case, piracy has been a big part of the gaming scene.
There were (and still are) stores just for pirated games, bootleg dvd's and even stores that will charge for modding you console in order to play pirated copies.
It happened with my PSOne and my Wii. The only console we only got original games for was the Gamecube.

But PC gaming has always been the most popular platform. Entire cybercaffes would even host Warcraft III or Counter-Strike 1.6 tournaments.
During my high school and college years, after class, we would go to one of this cybercaffes (we called them "cybers") and play LAN for hours on end.

Even when the government banned millitary theme videogames or games (mostly due to Mercenaries 2), nobody noticed because everyone was pirating games.

You could just go to a street corner, grab a couple of bootleg games for the price of lunch money, and play for weeks.
Then along came Steam and it made everthing so convinient that almost everyone uses it.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot. As with the rest of Latin America, Club Nintendo was the gaming magazine of choice. I have stacks of those. I'd go ever month to the date to check if a new issue had arrived. My brother and I were huge fans of it.
 
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-Nintendo had a direct distribution only in the GC era. At some point, the local distributor for Nintendo bought the local distributor for Sega, so you had Dreamcast on the shelves but no advertise at all because Nintendo didn't want their partner to advertise the competitors.

Always had the impression that Nintendo was damn serious about the Italian market because of the iconic Fiorentina shirt.
 

Koenigssee

Member
In Vietnam, before the popularity of internet in 2001 we used to have cyber cafes with only LAN connection that any stranger of any age could walk in and play together with other people, popular games back then were Quake II, Worms Armageddon, Counter Strike Beta, StarCraft BW, Red Alerts, HOMM III and Age of Empires. The computers were equipped with 2.0 speakers instead of headphones, you could even hear the gunsounds while walking on the streets outside them cafes.

To this day AoE is still super popular within late 20-40 years old gaming circles of both Vietnam and China, one of the richest and most popular gamer in Vietnam is an AoE player. And we play good old AoE I only, without the official MS patch, and a certain glitch was allowed in the rules.
 
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yurqqa

Member
Russia was mostly Spectrum country in the end of 80-s - beginning of 90-s.
There were several local Spectrum clones, you could buy assembly sets for Spectrums and I never saw any licensed games for Spectrum in my whole life.

Then came local company that started selling chineese knock-off of NES with the "Dendy" brand.
They started really strong marketing campaign with ads, game shows on TV, magazines and so on. Pirated cartridges were dirt cheap, so it became very popular.
They warned people not to buy chineese copy products, but to buy official Dendy.
Till now almosy nobody know what NES is - everybody know Dendy.

Later PC and PLaystation got more widespread with priated copies openly sold everywhere for around $2-3.
And only when in the end of 90s when official localized releases of PC games were released for just a bit more expensive than pirate games, they started to conquer the market bit by bit.
 

Amiga

Member
I wanted to make this thread for a long time, since I've always been curious of what videogames are perceived and lived in other countries.
Make it point by point is easier and readable. Let's see if this thread is interesting for someone.

In Italy:
....

mostly the same things in Saudi Arabia minus things like the Sega slang. though gaming was interduce way before NES with the Atari, there were other consoles like the MSX and Amiga before Sega and Nintendo expanded the market. PS1 was another big expansion.

socially the gaming community was just us hanging at the video game store. it was small groups who knew each other personally. we had a hobby majority of society didn't understand yet.

English wasn't as common back then. we figured out menus by trial and error. games were simpler so this wasn't difficult.
 

UnNamed

Banned
Russia was mostly Spectrum country in the end of 80-s - beginning of 90-s.
There were several local Spectrum clones, you could buy assembly sets for Spectrums and I never saw any licensed games for Spectrum in my whole life.

Then came local company that started selling chineese knock-off of NES with the "Dendy" brand.
They started really strong marketing campaign with ads, game shows on TV, magazines and so on. Pirated cartridges were dirt cheap, so it became very popular.
They warned people not to buy chineese copy products, but to buy official Dendy.
Till now almosy nobody know what NES is - everybody know Dendy.

Later PC and PLaystation got more widespread with priated copies openly sold everywhere for around $2-3.
And only when in the end of 90s when official localized releases of PC games were released for just a bit more expensive than pirate games, they started to conquer the market bit by bit.
I remember I read something about Dendy and the russian videogame scene in general, especially computers, maybe it was an article from HG101, I don't remember. Very interesting.
 

cireza

Banned
France was a great country for SEGA games. A huge focus was put by SEGA France to deliver quality games on all consoles.

Master System had a very long life here, receiving great games up to 1994. This included games such as Desert Strike, Sonic 1/2/Chaos, Mortal Kombat 2, Monster World III, Desert Speedtrap, great Disney games (Deep Duck Trouble), Road Rash, Chuck Rock II and Power Strike II to name a few.

SEGA also supported the Game Gear very well, up to 1995. This console also had some good support in Japan, and this should be noted (with many great exclusives released there).

Then we have the MEGA-CD, that also got a ton of great PAL versions of the games. And where it gets really, really cool, is that SEGA France was doing a fantastic job at releasing games in French. You could get Fahrenheit and Night Trap entirely in French, which was pretty awesome. Dune was also entirely in French, and this is a fantastic game (translation was not done by SEGA in that case).

You would see the same thing on MegaDrive of course, and as Nintendo and its publishers were extremely lacking in that regard, SEGA was actually able to build a very strong image as "the console to get your RPGs and Adventure games". I remember having a flyer that was dedicated to this, showing all the great games available in French, as well as the more massive RPGs (that were in English). Landstalker, Soleil, Light Crusader and La Légende de Thor were all in French (and they were awesome games) and of course, we got both Shining Force games as well as all three Phantasy Star games. As France was a huge fan of Japanese animation, and we were already watching Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon and City Hunter back then, we got the MegaDrive Dragon Ball Z game in French as well (the game was actually full of mistakes, having been translated by Japanese people I would guess). Still pretty great, in my opinion.

All these things combined made being a SEGA fan very easy, and enjoyable, in France. You had a great budget offering with the Master System, and if you had more money, you could get the MegaDrive with many great games translated in French. I only got the MEGA-CD much later, and I love this add-on.

Sadly translations efforts fell apart on the Saturn. We got a ton of great games released, but most of it was in English.
 
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NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
Always had the impression that Nintendo was damn serious about the Italian market because of the iconic Fiorentina shirt.
That was N64 era. PlayStation was everywhere; N64 hardware and software cost so much more and weren’t piratable. Also, PS games were getting Italian translation and VA - the results were sometimes disastrous, but people could still understand the games in an era when English comprehension was abismally low in Italy. Advertising for the N64 was laughable in Italy, and distribution was terrible. Game boxes often didn’t even have writing in Italian. Nintendo didn’t stand a chance.

After the N64, Nintendo had to open a local division to distribute and localize their consoles and games to take matters into their hands. I remember when they opened an official Italian website - any mention of previous Nintendo hardware on the forums was swiftly and silently erased. I remember opening a couple threads about the N64 - they weren’t there anymore a few hours later. Nintendo was serious about covering up their past mistakes in Italy and starting over with a clean slate. Giving credit where it’s due, their in-house localizations have been high-quality ever since, and every strategy guide about Nintendo games has been stellar. In comparison, you can find so many examples of terribad localizations for PS2 games.



France was a great country for SEGA games. A huge focus was put by SEGA France to deliver quality games on all consoles.

Master System had a very long life here, receiving great games up to 1994. This included games such as Desert Strike, Sonic 1/2/Chaos, Mortal Kombat 2, Monster World III, Desert Speedtrap, great Disney games (Deep Duck Trouble), Road Rash, Chuck Rock II and Power Strike II to name a few.

SEGA also supported the Game Gear very well, up to 1995. This console also had some good support in Japan, and this should be noted (with many great exclusives released there).

Then we have the MEGA-CD, that also got a ton of great PAL versions of the games. And where it gets really, really cool, is that SEGA France was doing a fantastic job at releasing games in French. You could get Fahrenheit and Night Trap entirely in French, which was pretty awesome. Dune was also entirely in French, and this is a fantastic game (translation was not done by SEGA in that case).

You would see the same thing on MegaDrive of course, and as Nintendo and its publishers were extremely lacking in that regard, SEGA was actually able to build a very strong image as "the console to get your RPGs and Adventure games". I remember having a flyer that was dedicated to this, showing all the great games available in French, as well as the more massive RPGs (that were in English). Landstalker, Soleil, Light Crusader and La Légende de Thor were all in French (and they were awesome games) and of course, we got both Shining Force games as well as all three Phantasy Star games. As France was a huge fan of Japanese animation, and we were already watching Dragon Ball Z, Sailor Moon and City Hunter back then, we got the MegaDrive Dragon Ball Z game in French as well (the game was actually full of mistakes, having been translated by Japanese people I would guess). Still pretty great, in my opinion.

All these things combined made being a SEGA fan very easy, and enjoyable, in France. You had a great budget offering with the Master System, and if you had more money, you could get the MegaDrive with many great games translated in French. I only got the MEGA-CD much later, and I love this add-on.

Sadly translations efforts fell apart on the Saturn. We got a ton of great games released, but most of it was in English.
France is so incredibly passionate about nerd culture. I have a number of books from Pix ‘n Love, and some French video games magazines too. Their quality is incredible. And those books tell so many stories about the wild, wild video games market in France in the 80s and early 90s - the story behind the PC-Engine marketing in particular is almost impossible to believe in the global, hyper-controlled world of today. Small enterprises had so much freedom, a bunch of passionate people did things that would 100% get C&D’s in two days tops nowadays. Wild stuff.
 

cireza

Banned
France is so incredibly passionate about nerd culture. I have a number of books from Pix ‘n Love, and some French video games magazines too. Their quality is incredible. And those books tell so many stories about the wild, wild video games market in France in the 80s and early 90s - the story behind the PC-Engine marketing in particular is almost impossible to believe in the global, hyper-controlled world of today. Small enterprises had so much freedom, a bunch of passionate people did things that would 100% get C&D’s in two days tops nowadays. Wild stuff.
Indeed. If I recall correctly, there was a company called Sodipeng (which literally means Company that distributes PC-Engine) that was working on getting the consoles, and modifying every single one of them to allow for the correct RGB output that was the norm in PAL territories. Lots of dedication.
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
US/Canada are pretty similar except:

Canada

- Cases and manuals must have French. Not sure if they make special Canadian cases, or the US gamers get it too where they just make one packaging for all. Some games would have a separate French manual shrinkwrapped with the plastic case

- Exchange rates have fluctuated the past 30 years from par value to the US dollar to around 70 cents on the dollar. So a $60 US game can be $60-80 cdn

- Way back during the NES and Genesis days, the US would get games faster. So you had to wait months or break out the wallet and buy a game at $120 cdn because some shops would buy them in Buffalo for let's say $50, get nailed exchanged rate to $60-70, then they'd dump them off to must have gamers for over $100+. Some shops were selling Super Mario 3 for $150 until it got released officially for maybe $70 cdn

- The priciest games (aside from Neo Geo) were N64 games. I think they bottomed at $80, but I remember seeing them for $100. Next is current gen PS5/Series X games at $90, then Genesis/SNES carts at about $80 ($60-90)

- The cheapest eras lately were PS1 you could get games for $60 and some periods the past 10-15 years when the currency strengthens and we'd get games for $60 like the US. I remember getting Fallout Vegas for $55!

- Hardware popularity follows the US, but some systems sell so poor, I'm not even sure they even sold here to begin with as I never remember seeing them in stores..... Atari 7800, CD32, Philips CD-I, Neo Geo Pocket etc... I think I saw Turbo Grafx 16 sell in stores for maybe a year or two tops. Then it was all Genesis and then SNES

- A defunct store here called Consumers Distributing (a legendary store) would have special bundles. I remember Genesis having a Thunder Force II pack in and Saturn having Panzer Dragoon pack in. Although I'm not sure if these were official pack ins or they just did their own thing

- I knew one person with a Sega Master System and none with T16
 
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UnNamed

Banned
France is so incredibly passionate about nerd culture. I have a number of books from Pix ‘n Love, and some French video games magazines too. Their quality is incredible. And those books tell so many stories about the wild, wild video games market in France in the 80s and early 90s - the story behind the PC-Engine marketing in particular is almost impossible to believe in the global, hyper-controlled world of today. Small enterprises had so much freedom, a bunch of passionate people did things that would 100% get C&D’s in two days tops nowadays. Wild stuff.
In another thread, I mentioned the hoax Saint Seya for the Megadrive and I remember this rumor came from a french videogame magazine, since Saint Seya was very popular in France as well as in Italy.

I remember there was this french channel, maybe was on France 2, barely visibile from the north of Italy, there was a videogame tv show with news, reviews and previews, similar to Game Master, with this guy with long hair and a cap, and I was very angry because there wasn't nothing similar in Italy, and try to make it was unthinkable.



20 years later, the same guy did another video with another cabinet

 
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In Vietnam, before the popularity of internet in 2001 we used to have cyber cafes with only LAN connection that any stranger of any age could walk in and play together with other people, popular games back then were Quake II, Worms Armageddon, Counter Strike Beta, StarCraft BW, Red Alerts, HOMM III and Age of Empires. The computers were equipped with 2.0 speakers instead of headphones, you could even hear the gunsounds while walking on the streets outside them cafes.

To this day AoE is still super popular within late 20-40 years old gaming circles of both Vietnam and China, one of the richest and most popular gamer in Vietnam is an AoE player. And we play good old AoE I only, without the official MS patch, and a certain glitch was allowed in the rules.
Wololoo!
DZsvMjt.png


Story of "classic" video games programs in Finland:

GameOver with Vito from mid 90s, games were played on the show with you phone.
Some game news and guests.


Hugo also in the nineties, played over the Phone.


Tilt-tv early 2000s featured new games and game reviews:


Then at least not so classic BloboTV:
The whole thing was based on this ball shaped motion controller.


At the time when motion controls became popular(Wii), from Finnish startupcalled Ball-it. (which makes me think the whole thing was a big joke as it kind of means testicles in Finnish)
One of the guys behind it was one of the Rovio(Angry Birds) founders:


Trailer for the show.
 
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SALMORE

Member
in the middle east back in the mid 90s stores used to charge us between 6 to 7$ for PS1 bootlegged games , and if the game came in more than one disc they charge 7$ for every disc 😂
 

NeoIkaruGAF

Gold Member
in the middle east back in the mid 90s stores used to charge us between 6 to 7$ for PS1 bootlegged games , and if the game came in more than one disc they charge 7$ for every disc 😂
Every. Single. Person I knew with a PS1 had a modded console. I‘m not sure even one of my schoolmates had original games, apart from my buddy who, apparently, liked FF7 so much he bought it legit. CD burning was a real craze back then, and PS1 was a great boost to that. I finally caved in late 2000 or 2001 when I bought a boot disc just to play Chrono Cross, and at that point I told myself, why not play a bootleg or two with this thing? As partial justification, remember that this was still a time when PAL games ran horribly compared to their NTSC versions. Imports cost quite a bit and there was no Amazon, no Euro, no customs-free circulation of stuff in the EU, and PayPal was still very new. So I mainly pirated NTSC-exclusive games like most Squaresoft RPGs.
 
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junguler

Banned
in iran there is no copyright system for anything really, playing pirated games is a part of everyday life and even if it wasn't pirated nobody could buy more than 1 game and everything else just traded for other games.

i have a very gaming enthusiast family and we always had a pc and a console to play games on, be it atari 2600, nes, genesis, ps1 etc ... they eventually grow out of playing games and i was the lone gamer of the family.

i bought my first computer at age 14 from working that summer and soon after bought a xbox 360 and ps3, it was all pirated games of course, i couldn't afford gaming any other way and there wasn't much of a way of buying legit copies either.

an online friend of mine introduced me to steam and legit copies of games with call of duty modern warfare 2 and i was instantly hooked, i started buying more and more games on steam and on ps4, somehow i always had enough money to buy every games i wanted.

fast forward to 2-3 years ago, sanctions got really crazy on my country during trump presidency and pretty much our money became useless, i can't afford buying games to this day and had to resort to pirating games again unfortunately ...

now it's been almost 3 months that i'm using linux and haven't played any pirated games and haven't bought any games either. it's just free 2 play games and older titles that i owned before for the time being.

i won't stop gaming regardless of the situation i might find myself in but it's getting harder and harder to be able to participate in conversations about games on forums like gaf as i haven't played many of the games that are being talked about ...
 

ACESHIGH

Banned
Well, In Argentina arcades were pretty popular from the 80's through the early 00s. Then, regarding consoles: We were always a couple of years behind the US in console/PC adoption so from the late 80's through the mid 90s it was the Famicom clone era. It was the only Nintendo console that was truly popular in my country. From the mid 90's through the end of the decade it was the Sega Genesis era. Cartridges were overall much cheaper than SNES ones (maybe they were pirated) I had a SNES and I only owned 6 games from 1996 through 1999:

(Super Mario All Stars + Super Mario World - Wild Guns - NBA Jam - Super Turrican 2 - Mortal Kombat 3 - Donkey Kong Country) I shared games with my cousin so that way I was able to play games like Sparkster, Bomkers, Mortal Kombat 2, Killer Instinct, FIFA 96 and Super Star Wars. games were priced between 60 USD through 130 USD for UMK3. While your Genesis UMK3 would be 40 USD. I never knew anyone that owned a SNES, It was all about the Genesis.

Of course, eras overlapped so in late 90's the Playstation started to dominate driven by piracy (and that's my caveat with the PS brand its global appeal was cemented by rampant piracy) PS almost monopolistic dominance its still felt through this day. Other options are not even considered by gamers even when they have cheaper consoleN6s and games. Old millenials and centenials are PS adepts. In this country you don't play videogames, you play Playstation.

From the late 90s through the late 00's only PS consoles were popular, no one but extreme enthusiasts had consoles like Saturn, Dreamcast, N64, Gamecube or OG Xbox. During the late 00s PS3 popularity started to ramp up with the PS Slim. Xbox 360 consoles were also popular thanks to piracy methods like JTAG. The Wii was somewhat popular due to motion controls, cheaper price and piracy. The PS3 was also pirated with methods like Multiman, but it was much harder to pirate vs the 360 and Wii but here there was a change in purchasing habits:

Free online in the PS3 era was a master stroke by Sony. Old millennials that were PS adepts now had disposable income and less time to game, so they remained under the ps ecosystem buying original games and playing online with friends, since pirated consoles could not play online for the most part. And through the 10's things remained par for the course. PS4 dominates despite having paid online and terrible game pricing.

Handheld consoles were always rare AF. Maybe pirated PSPs and DS were the most popular. And regarding PC gaming, while not as popular as console gaming It slowly started gaining popularity through the 90s. Households required a computer so if you were a kid you were always trying to see which games you were able to run on them.

Games like Jazz Jackrabbit, Doom, Wolf 3D, Ultima, Wing Commander, X Wing vs Tie fighter, Duke Nukem and PC Futbol (legendary game for the spanish speaking world, maybe the greatest Spanish game of all time). Of course, the 3d accelerator era made PC gaming more popular, we had PC magazines like Xtreme PC and PC gaming boomed in the early 00s thanks to Cyber cafes with games like: CS 1.5/1.6 - Age of Empires 2 - World of Warcraft - GTA SA SAMP - Lineage - Command and Conquer)

I'd argue PC gaming has never been more popular in the country as of today, even if console still dominates, thanks to cheaper games, free online and game streaming being more and more popular.
 

Kuranghi

Member
Only thing I can really think of right now is that in the UK (specifically Scotland) Electronics Boutique allowed you to return games for a full refund the first time and subsequent times you got store credit, so when I was young with no income/pocket money I just returned games over and over again. It was part of their business model pretty much since the staff clearly recognised me after 20+ returns, recycling the use of that same £25-30 over and over again.

The buying of games with a high rating (ie things they obviously would get in to trouble for selling to a 14 year old, like 18 rated games, they didnt care about much else tbh) was a comical affair where I'd go into town with my dad, he'd go off to buy his things and I'd go into the games shop, look through all the the new stuff and pick the game I wanted and then my dad would meet me there and buy it for me.

Even though afaik the law and penalties were just as severe back then the store staff just didnt care as much. I'm guessing because there weren't as many eyes on the hobby and so the authorities couldn't give a crap either.
 

Toots

Gold Member
I remember working in retail in France during the N64 launch.
There's that weird turkish kid that comes in the store with his parents, talking about how he wanted to buy the whole n64 stock.
I was about to tell him to get the fuck out, when i noticed his parents seemed loaded with cash...
Smelling a good deal, i took his parents aside and sold them 15 consoles or so at twice the retail price. Which paid for a bike i wanted. It was an expensive bike.

Otherwise, i remember fondly going to boulevard Voltaire in Paris, going to one store asking for a game, only for them to tell me they had it in another store in the street, going there and buying it at quite an expensive price only to learn later that the fuckers used to send customer from one store to another and calling their collegue there so he can jack up the price before the customer arrives. That and the borderline pedophiles that hanged out in those stores.
 

Tschumi

Member
Once in late 90s/early 00s Canberra my primary school class went to New Parliament House for a tour. They gave us all a computer game. I think it might have been a launch. It was, god awful .. like Broken Sword without the architectural appeal and strictly no titillation.
 
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M1chl

Currently Gif and Meme Champion
- Czech Republic
Mainly PC land, when I was young console games were only for the rich kids, because PS1 costed 20K CZK (around 1200USD in today's money), game costed same as they do now on PS5, but obviously average pay was like 14 000CZK and now it's 28 000CZK.
First console which broke magical 5000CZK barrier was X360 core in 2008, when I bought it as my first console, intending to play games like Condemned 2, because first one I hold very closely to my heart.
We made games too, mainly Hidden and Dangerous, Arma, OG Operation Flashpoint, Mafia, Kingdom Come: Deliverance (and I worked on the game and yes I am super glad for it)
Also Machinarium, Samorost, Botanicula and animation from those game are done by my former Photoshop Teacher back in high school.
Games are still expensive and console gaming is here pretty niche against PC gaming.
Here you are born with computer and later you ascend to console gaming master race.
 

IKSTUGA

Member
- Finland has been Sonyland since the PS1, the Finnish abbreviation for playstation is actually often used as a synonym for console
- Almost every household has owned a playstation of some form
- PC gaming is also really big here, most HC gamers play on PC
- NES was huge in the early 90's, don't think SNES or MD were really all that big here
- Xbox did decently during the 360 era, pretty much dead now

- Housemarque (Resogun, Returnal) and Remedy (Max Payne, Alan Wake, Control) are our most prominent game studios at the moment
- Angry Birds came from Finland, nobody remembers the series anymore, not even us
- EA's NHL is one of the best selling games every fucking year
 
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