Originally posted by Cassius_Smoke
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Gaming facts you do not accept
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Only spotty nerds in dark bedrooms played video games before the PlayStation era.
That ridiculous myth is 100% BS.
Only 30+ guys who are high on nostalgia can enjoy old school retro games.
The N64 was a terrible piece of tech that had hardly anything to offer gamers.
The Dreamcast was a complete flop -- and has no relevance in gaming history.
The SNES can't run action and shoot 'em up games smoothly. Some talented devs(just look at Konami) did wonders with the tech.
The Amiga's games catalogue is complete garbage. No, there are plenty of very good games. It's just a sad fact that you also have lots of dodgy ST ports and badly designed titles.
The Sega Saturn was a joke. No, it was a really big thing in Japan. There were lots of really good games covering all genres.
Chiptunes really held musicians back -- and game music vastly improved with the advent of redbook CD audio. Lots of people actually appreciate how melodic and inspiring the best chip music can be. CD quality audio isn't a bad thing, but the idea that chip music prevented musicians from creating inspired music isn't true.Last edited by Leon Retro; 09-10-2020, 00:01.
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Originally posted by Golgo View Post^ It'll be a PS5 game soon...yeah, baffling to me too. Hated every second that I played it. It was like being stuck at a bus stop with a bunch of kids who have just realized you can look up swear words in the dictionary.
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Originally posted by Leon Retro View PostOnly spotty nerds in dark bedrooms played video games before the PlayStation era.
That ridiculous myth is 100% BS.
Video games, when they started out, were definitely a widespread medium with broad appeal.
That's the 70s. And I didn't search for long; literally googled "70s arcade photo" and it was in the first matches.
Videogame arcades had a strong relationship with pinball arcades and pool halls, both of which were places that attracted a range of people of different ages, genders and backgrounds - and videogames, being a new medium, were non-judgemental; it hadn't settled into any niche yet. They were also cool; worth keeping that in mind.
This continued up until the mid-80s, when videogames went through a big slump in North America (I'm not using the commonly used term for this North American slump, because I dislike it, but that's another topic). But by 1988, if you went to a videogame arcade, it was most populated by young children (mostly male) and older teens (almost exclusively male). Videogames then did go through an era where, if a gamer wasn't a young kid, there was a perception that they were a socially awkward/distant, predominantly male teen. Of course, it wasn't really "true" insofar as there were still plenty of people playing games outside this niche, but the key factor here is who was buying the games, as they served as the industry's driving force. My sister in the 80s/90s loved videogames but she has never bought one.
That era persisted from the late 80s up until ~1995. There have been various theories as to why. I once read a compelling one, that a big influence on gaming of that era was the NES. When Nintendo sought to bring the NES to the USA, they partnered with Mattel, the toy manufacturer, and Mattel told them that if they wanted to market the NES as a toy, they had to pick - blue aisle or pink aisle. That's because all of Mattel's toy's were excessively gender-coded. Nintendo picked the blue aisle; though the debate is whether they picked it because they wanted to appeal to boys, or because they saw the way the wind was blowing at the time. Hard to say.
But that did lead to an era of male-focused gaming in the US and its cultural exports (in terms of what was being made), and companies like Sega really tilted into that with their juvenile 'tude advertising campaigns for the Megadrive. And it made sense. Generally, in advertising, you have two choices - go wide, or go deep. Going wide would be marketing videogames to everyone, going deep would mean marketing to a specific demo and mining that for all its worth, and gaming did the latter.
This was totally broken up in the mid-90s by (and I know it's not always a popular thing to say here) Sony. Sony used their music arm's contacts and aggressively marketed the PS1 through places like nightclubs and universities, and they tried to court everyone, not just the niche that had flocked to the Megadrive. It was effective, as we now know.
The point here, I guess, is that there was an era before videogames were associated with spotty, neckbeard male teens, and there's been an era since. That era was short, and sandwiched in between, but it did exist, at least from the perspective of how the industry marketed itself, and this is one of the reason you get some gamers who get bent-out-of-shape today as the industry becomes more diverse; because they remember when the industry almost exclusively catered to them while forsaking everyone else.
Last point on this; bear in mind this was most evident in the US, and in the UK to a lesser extent. Part of the reason I hate who wikipedia talks about this stuff is that it has a very US-focused slant; for starters, its page for the "Megadrive" is called "Genesis". In Japan, this while process was very different, in the UK was distinct too, though closer to the US experience than Japan.
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Popularity of video-games has definitely increased since the year 2000. Thanks to GTA and call of duty and Fifa no doubt.
Going to school through the 90s and playing video games I definitely felt like I was an outsider to some extent. Now kids play fortnite and tonnes of other stuff with no issue of being called a nerd.
[MENTION=5941]Asura[/MENTION] - good post
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Originally posted by Asura View Post
This was totally broken up in the mid-90s by (and I know it's not always a popular thing to say here) Sony. Sony used their music arm's contacts and aggressively marketed the PS1 through places like nightclubs and universities, and they tried to court everyone, not just the niche that had flocked to the Megadrive. It was effective, as we now know.
sponsoring football and also The British GP and the Williams F1 racing team, along with clever grown-up adds like this
Sadly it seemed a little too focused on the older male gamer mind. But SEGA did look to appeal to the older gamer and making gaming cooler.
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Originally posted by Team Andromeda View PostBut that's another gaming fact I do not accept.
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Sadly it seemed a little too focused on the older male gamer mind. But SEGA did look to appeal to the older gamer and making gaming cooler.
When I think of Sega's attempts to "market to adults", all the ones that stick in my mind are where, as a 10-yo kid, I thought they looked really grown-up and cool, not like kiddy-kiddy-Nintendo, who were "lame and for babies". But if I look at those things now, they really looked like they were focused at kids. It's like, to give an example, of when NERF advertise their toy guns; they're marketed at 8-10 year-olds, but in the TV adverts, they're always being played with by teenagers and young adults, because a 10yo who buys a NERF gun aspires to be their older sibling.
I doubt we're going to agree on this, and that's fine. But I think if Sega really thought they were appealing to adults in that era, it's no surprise that Sony got to show them that there was no room for amateur hour in that type of advertising.
And this is coming from someone who owned a Saturn through that whole era and loved it - but I wasn't square in the sights on that one. I just loved all the niche Japanese arcade stuff, or games like Gungriffon/Guardian Heroes.
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