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Which gaming era was peak childhood for you?

Which one?

  • Total voters
    229
1990s to mid 2000s. The rise and fall of Sega, fighting games, the last hurrah for arcades, PC emulators, bullet hell shmups, and PSP's official library and hacking scene. Whatever category that belongs to.
 
Core millienial here. Polls like this always make wonder where gen Z talks about videogames, youtube? Reddit? Cause clearly this type of forum format on neogaf and REEE are millienal strongholds, at least according to polls on both sites.
 
Late Gen-X'er here. Started with an Atari 2600 then an NES. I'd say the most influential consoles for me were NES/SNES/Genesis.
 
I don't know exactly which is which but my peak childhood was when the NES came out which I got but before that I had a Commodore 64 and Atari so yeah I'm getting old! lol
 
What's with all these fucking groups 90's kid simple as.

The first system was Commodore c64
 
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late gen x. grew up with an Atari 7800, but i had neighbors with NES and Genesis systems, so i played those a lot.

im very glad to have been alive during the golden age of arcades! i remember printing out Mortal Kombat II movelists downloaded from BBSes and bringing them to the movie theater. i remember beating the TMNT arcade with 3 other random kids.

lol i memba
 
Early Millennial, Core Millennial and Late Millennial.

More Early Millennial than the others.
 
My childhood gaming started out in Core gen X, was very impressed by Late gen X, then continued onto Early millennial. By Core millennial I was a midteen, and by Late millennial I was in uni.
 
MrRogers said:
Core millienial here. Polls like this always make wonder where gen Z talks about videogames, youtube? Reddit? Cause clearly this type of forum format on neogaf and REEE are millienal strongholds, at least according to polls on both sites.
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Yeah, they're mostly on those sites. I often see Early Zoomers say things like "Back in my day we had Halo 3, not Fortnite" or "Real men cry listening to childhood Minecraft music" which makes me feel really old.
 
ThePrequelsSuck said:
Millennials are more people who were school-aged at the turn of the millennium.
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Yeah but that's not how it should be. By this definition you could die before the year 2000 yet be a millennial? Doesn't make sense. How do I get on the sociology committee to change this to make it correct?
 
ZywyPL said:
Late Millennial - this is IMO where the games have reached their absolute peak, while Early Zoomer is where everything went teeerribly downhill due to internet popularization, which opened the doors for laziness and incompetence for the devs/publishers.
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But lazy devs have always been a thing
 
I went from Commodore Plus/4 to Commodore C64 to PC MS-DOS. So that would be Late Gen X I think. Tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat to make Wing Commander run better etc.
 
PS1 - Dreamcast - PS2 - Gsmecube was my childhood and brings a tear to my eye. *sniff* Time flies I will never be that happy and carefree again *sniff* Let's collectively hold hands Gaf we're all brothers and sisters.
 
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ThePrequelsSuck said:
But lazy devs have always been a thing
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Nah, without the internet the games couldn't be unfinished, sold in alpha/beta stages, couldn't be unpolished, with tons of bugs, because there were no day 1 patched (which I have yet to see one that actually works), they couldn't cut out the content to sell it later as a DLC, and so on. Nowadays gamed are a mess, or should I say a joke, and not a funny one to say the least.
 
ZywyPL said:
Nah, without the internet the games couldn't be unfinished, sold in alpha/beta stages, couldn't be unpolished, with tons of bugs, because there were no day 1 patched (which I have yet to see one that actually works), they couldn't cut out the content to sell it later as a DLC, and so on. Nowadays gamed are a mess, or should I say a joke, and not a funny one to say the least.
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Uh yes they could lol. Ever heard of Action 52? Or Big Rigs? Or the E.T. game? Those were highly unpolished yet were released pre-Web 2.0/pre-2005/pre-7th gen. Even before the 7th gen, greedy developers were suckering people.
 
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I feel like I missed out on the Arcade Period as the beginning of the 2000s was when they started to wane.

Lucy enough to see a Daytona USA Machine and played some SNK arcade games in a somewhat empty Arcade shed. Haha.
 
ThePrequelsSuck said:
Uh yes they could lol. Ever heard of Action 52? Or Big Rigs? Or the E.T. game? Those were highly unpolished yet were released pre-Web 2.0/pre-2005/pre-7th gen. Even before the 7th gen, greedy developers were suckering people.
Click to expand...

There are always exceptions of the rule, of course, but the proportions have turned around 180 degrees, now a finished, polished games with full content are harder to find than a unicorn.
 
I put early, core and late Millennial. Late M was ahead of its time. WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE!

Early Zoomer is when gaming fell into the abyss to never return. All the technology and we get piss poor performances in beta form.
 
Started with SNES/Gen but "peak childhood" is 100% N64 and Windows 95 for me.
Never will match the feelings of playing Ocarina, Goldeneye and Starcraft the first time.

Also, are we really calling people Zoomers?
 
bobone said:
Also, are we really calling people Zoomers?
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It will have to be a word that means different things to different people or depends highly on context. Zoomers have been around for decades and didn't have anything to do with Generation Z...
 
ZywyPL said:
There are always exceptions of the rule, of course, but the proportions have turned around 180 degrees, now a finished, polished games with full content are harder to find than a unicorn.
Click to expand...

Publishers crashed the video game industry once, and they will do it again. Unfinished, unpolished cash grabs are not a new thing, and it's hard to say what will be the breaking point. Maybe it will be Pay2Win and some combination of unfinished games with broken promises of x years of support if enough people pay and play.
 
ThePrequelsSuck said:
Uh yes they could lol. Ever heard of Action 52? Or Big Rigs? Or the E.T. game? Those were highly unpolished yet were released pre-Web 2.0/pre-2005/pre-7th gen. Even before the 7th gen, greedy developers were suckering people.
Click to expand...

i had an Atari 7800 and it was backwards compatible with 2600 games. i ended up with two copies of the E.T. game even though i never bought it, because friends would bring it over and "forget" it at my house!

modern gamers tend to think companies ripping people off is a new thing. it's not. i was there during the Atari shovelware fiasco. we would go to a discount store called Big Lots and they had piles of brand new Atari 7800 games selling for $1 a piece. i would bring home a dozen games, but more than half of them were crap. before the NES the market was flooded with trash for a long time.

i remember reading about the video game crash and the E.T. landfill back in the 80s. Nintendo was taking a big risk because for a while it seemed like games were a fad that had run their course. Nintendo did a lot of outreach to stores to reassure them that the NES/SNES were not cash grabs. i remember my dad came home from visiting a Sears looking for Christmas presents one day, he had this laminated chart that showed all the consoles and their specs, and we went over it. we decided to get a SNES and what a great decision that was.
 
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from erly milenial to late zoomer
WBqy1C4.jpg
 
For me it is an easy choice : the entirety of the 90s. So from the beginning of the MegaDrive to the end of the Saturn.

This is the period where I found the games to be at their best. Fun, simple, developed by smaller size teams etc...

Honestly, when 3D arrived in home consoles, it was like everything was possible. Games where you fly a dragon and shoot at stuff were greenlit and were actually the most impressive games out there. And this was the norm. This does not happen in 2019 lol. And 2D was at its peak.
 
It's pretty funny, looking back at some old GAF threads, seeing that most of the late 90s/early 00s born "Millennials" this site bashed on hard were actually Zoomers (though most people make this mistake).
 
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Started with PS1 and GBC.

Can still remember me and my brother playing games like Moto Racer World Tour and Twisted Metal 3.
 
Started with Late Gen X, but the most fun and excitement I had was during Early and Core Millenial. Japanese imports, Saturn, etc... best time.
 
Definitely Core here. N64: Goldeneye, Star Wars Shadows of the Empire, and Turok I played all the time.
Missed out on the SNES and Genesis as my parents thought games were a waste of time! Took a lot of convincing to get an N64.
 
nes, then genesis was my best time, but also I was more of an arcade dude back then as well, that's my peak childhood, pinball, crossbow, and xevious :)
 
Early millennial is my first experience gaming, but I was only about 3-4 at the time and my cognitive memory was pretty limited, I remember much more from the core millennial (n64 for Christmas, getting a GBC for my 7th bday. Good times.)
 
Born in 86 so pretty much the PSone era and the early PS2 days. Glad to have been there because it was probably the best time to be a child. Seeing that transition from 2D (NES) to 3D (PSone + N64) games and then the first games that actually look like something (PS2) was marvelous.
 
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