Alright, I'm going to try and keep this post as short as possible although it's not going to be easy. Some of my earliest memories of video games include playing Super Mario on a friends Nintendo 8 bit, I'm sure all of you know which one that is but just in case you don't here's an image to trigger those brain impulses again:
I was maybe 5 or something when we were taking turns playing this although I remember my friend being a bad loser and using the "it's my Nintendo" card way too often to get extra turns. It was pretty fun but there'd be a few years until I had my own machine. There's some other memories of playing some DoS games, a pinball one I can't recall now and another one I managed to find the name of by googling "tank dos games" which turns out to be called "Tunneler" some of you boomers might remember that one:
I was maybe 6 or 7 when I finally got my own console, and it wasn't the Nintendo 8 bit but I got lucky and went straight for the Super Nintendo and it changed gaming for my child brain forever. I still remember the day I opened my birthday present and all my hopes and dreams came true, I probably felt like the Nintendo 64 kid but less psycho:
The games I spent the most time on there were of course Super Mario, they were almost always way ahead of their time. I remember we never got too many different games for the Super Nintendo, there were some things that came in the way of our living arrangements and we had to move quite often at the time so buying new games wasn't the highest priority. I think many of the games that were popular for most people at the time and pegged their S Nintendo memories to them are some I never played, such as Legends of Zelda and Donkey Kong, instead I had some games like F-Zero which was an okay racing game but not my favorite. The ones I spent the most time on were definitely Super Mario, Super Bomberman and Street Fighter 2. The latter was one of the best ones, the music, the graphics and the depth of the fighting was out of the world at the time in my opinion. Even though there weren't all that many modes just being able to beat everyone with each fighter was difficult enough. Who remembers trying to beat Bison with Dhalsim? I think that was the one that seemed the hardest to me but I could be remembering it wrong:
One thing I still remember to this day was how there was a place in Super Mario that we had gotten stuck, no matter how good we tried we couldn't make a jump to find out how the game continued. I also remember how curious you were as a kid just to progress into the game to see the new zones, new monsters and when you had to fight Bowser your heart was just racing like you were in a life or death situation in real life. Anyway, after many days of failing and somehow failing to realize that if you held the B button down while running he would run faster to make the jump I distinctly remember that I dreamt of the solution. I remember waking up and instantly putting on the game, making my way to the place where we'd fall down and die time after time again and looking at my brother and telling him "look at this" and literally making the jump on my first try.
Not telling him how I figured it out and trying to lay low on my new found dream powers so the government wouldn't kidnap me and use me for their advantage I played on for a few years but we had to move and I'm not 100% sure what happened to the Super Nintendo but I think we left it to some neighbor there as my dad promised me a Gameboy Color instead. Oh and before we move onto that I remember another game I got for the SN that I played quite a lot; Star Fox! I remember I had a lot of trouble finishing this one on the hardest difficulty and somehow I can still hear the voices of your team mates to this day:
Alright, Game Boy Color and naturally the first game as I imagine was for many of you too; Pokemon Blue:
This is where gaming started taking more and more of my time. If I had a Hive for each pair of batteries I wasted on Pokemon alone, well, I'd have a lot of Hive right now, especially in terms of fiat that went into them if it instead went into Hive today. This is also the era where internet started to be more common, although I realize that's not the same for the rest of the world, Finland was pretty ahead of its time here although not as ahead as the connection speeds Sweden was offering, our school still had one of those really old routers that'd take a couple minutes of annoying noises until the internet was turned on. The reason I'm bringing up the internet here is that after a lot of Pokemon gaming you got to a point where you had discovered pretty much everything and done everything in so many different save files, but once you started snooping around the internet of other people playing, cheat codes, glitches, etc it gave new life to the game. The mystery of being able to find Mew, the hopes, lies, disappointment when you made it to the truck on the side of S.S. Anne and was hoping that this occurred after pushing the truck to the side with Strength:
but instead realized the truck couldn't be pushed and it was just a rumor that started somehow and other very evil people edited out screenshots to make it look like it was real. Later I found out that the only way to get Mew was during an event where very few winners had to send their Pokemon Blue to receive Mew on the save file. Wonder what happened to those Mews over time as the game allowed for trading between players through a link cable. I never got into glitching too much, there was one I tried the one you could do in the Safari Zone and end up under the map but it glitched my game so bad I got scared and turned it off and hoped my save file hadn't gotten corrupted. Other than that the only glitch I felt comfortable enough was the famous Missingno glitch that made it possibly to get a big amount of an item you had in a certain position in your bag - which most people would use to get many Master Balls with. The funny thing here and something I was very proud of was that I noticed after facing Missingno my Pokemon Hall of Fame in the PC would change to random Pokemon that weren't the ones I had defeated the Pokemon League with, with enough attempts and knowing the code for Mew was in the game so it should be possibly I kept on doing the glitch, going to my PC in the nearest Pokemon Center and checking the 6 Pokemon of the Hall of Fame until one day I saw Mew listed there. So even though I never had him I got to see him in the game and I was pretty happy about having figured that out on my own.
I didn't play many different games on the gameboy, Pokemon was my favorite and after the 2nd generation was released I also played those to the same extent but not so much the other generations although I did give them a playthrough when emulators existed on the phone. During the gameboy days though and our parents had settled with a new home we got a Nintendo 64 as well. Being the Pokemon Nerd that I was I had to get Pokemon Stadium too and played that religiously as well, the fun part about it was that you could use your Pokemon from your gameboy to defeat the Stadium. My Mewtwo and other ones being all buffed up on steroids hp up, pp up, etc had an easy time defeating it and your reward was that you could get more of the starter Pokemon's for a new save file and you could also store some Pokemon onto the N64 when creating a new game on the Gameboy to be able to run through it with all 3 starters which felt good without having to glitch the game.
Pokemon Stadium 2 was also fun but pretty similar, wasn't a big fan of Pokemon Snap, though, that felt like a big waste of money and €60 at the time was a lot of money or whatever the equivalent of Finnish Marks was. Super Mario 64 of course also one of the best N64 games, other ones I remember playing quite a bit were F1 World Grand Prix, Banjo Kazooie, Goldeneye, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Starfox 64 and Turok 2!
(I still remember almost giving up on Turok because I somehow got stuck on the first place for a week on something dumb I didn't understand, maybe some others of you may remember replaying this part as well trying to get further or it was just me, this screenshot will probably tell you a lot.)
Anyway, let's get to the real gaming now which is when I got my first PC! I remember I had worked really hard one summer, many overtime days even though a couple years later they made it illegal for minors to work overtime but I got my PC so I didn't care. It was a really good PC at the time, a pentium 4 with 1.3ghz, maybe 2 gb of ram and a harddrive that would fit all of 100 gigabytes of data, woah! I don't even remember what the GPU was but I'm guessing it was one of the earlier Nvidia GeForces if even that, the only thing I cared about at the time was that it could run the game some other classmates were playing; Medal of Honor Allied Assault!
My former gaming experience was about to change drastically now with online multiplayer existing. This was the game I've probably spent the second most time on and it was amazing, some people were playing Counter Strike 1.6 at the time but I didn't care, I had gotten into this and it had a very active userbase and some things CS didn't have that made me like it a lot more. I remember getting into my first clan and playing on their servers, they had a website that would track and save all stats to showcase daily and weekly kill/death ratio's for each map, ranking compared to others and I'd slowly move up the ladder every day until I was good enough to play in clanmatches! I can still remember some of the first clanmatches, they were so exciting. You were on TeamSpeak with your clanmates, calling out when you saw enemies, where you died, when you threw nades and other tactics. It was fabulous, nothing else could compare with the thrill and excitement close matches would bring with this game.
After years of becoming better and better I'd move on to play in tournaments on a website called clanwars, there were even national teams being built, the golden days of some of the early first person shooters and esports. Only issue I had was that I didn't speak Finnish, a few times I used to play for the Swedish teams just because I could understand them and they bought it that I was living in Sweden and just had a weird accent, but that was unfortunately shortlived as detection for cheaters would improve over time where they'd also check the IP of each player and found out I was playing from Finland so I got quickly kicked out of those tourneys. As serious as those tournaments took the game, unfortunately the company that had made them wouldn't, they didn't see the importance of the online competitive scene at the time and were mainly focusing on pushing out new version of the game and the single player mode which most people didn't really care about. This caused cheats to be created daily, some people created anti-cheat programs everyone would run but doing it just as a hobby would quickly become obsolete as cheat creators found ways to constantly bypass the programs. It got to a point where with your experience you knew someone was cheating due to the high level of competitiveness but you couldn't prove it and the userbase started shrinking with CS: Source existing and most moving on to it. Here's a random video about MOH:AA competitive gameplay, although in really competitive matches most you could see would be the head of the enemy as leaning was a big part of the game and it was one of the main things people did before moving forward around corners, etc:
After the game died out I don't really remember what it was I was playing actively but I do remember joining a friend and going to a big lanparty in Helsinki called Assembly which I believe is still actively organized once a year. My friend got me to try out world of warcraft in vanilla and I was relatively new to MMORPG's but I remember playing it for most of the lanparty and asking my friend a million questions about it while I saw him riding around his Kodo in level 60 gear. That's kind of where my competitive FPS career died down and I spent more time leveling up than I could've ever imagined, it didn't make it easier that my first level 60 was a Warrior who hadn't learned First Aid and I almost always forgot to buy food but somehow figured out that sitting would regenerate HP faster in between killing mobs.
You may as well easily fast forward a decade from here cause most of my gaming time would go towards world of warcraft. Some ins and outs between a few expansions and reminiscing of the old times and how fun it was back then and how easy/dumb the game had become ever since along with all other mistakes Blizzard made with the game that would completely take away its magic in my opinion, but still had a lot of fun with it nevertheless for as long as it lasted. Some of my best memories of the game were definitely PvP Arenas since the Burning Crusade expansion, raiding Karazhan in the same expansion with my small 10 man guild that we had a lot of fun with and doing battlegrounds during those times were pretty priceless. Wrath of the Lich King was also okay and great competitive Arenas but shortly after that I lost interest and it started to feel a lot more like work than fun somehow. I was never much into filling out my achievements nor was raiding that exciting to me, probably cause of the competitive nature I had gotten from MOH:AA I was always more into player vs player where each move could be something new where you had to adapt and act fast and not something already pre-determined where you just had to hope someone else in the raid wouldn't fuck up yet again to wipe everyone out.
Naturally I did raid as well for some time, you don't play WoW for 150+ days gametime without having raided as well, some of my best memories was in WoTLK where I got into this guild that required you to write an application longer than today's whitepapers asking you about anything and everything, even each of your keybindings and why you had chosen them. Needless to say they were pretty serious and we made it up to top 15 in EU for taking down new content fast and some of the funniest times were when an Alliance guild on that same server were trashtalking us on forums saying they'd be the first to take down the new bosses and we ended up taking them down as server 2nd on our alt character guild. There was no coming back from that for them.
Unfortunately back when I was at the top recording gameplay or frapsing as they called it due to one of the most popular recording softwares was fraps wasn't as normal cause you needed a really good PC for it. Streaming in general wasn't as big as it is today, nowadays new wow content gets streamed by most players attempting world firsts with casters talking over the attempts and everything. Esports has just gotten so much bigger even for games like world of warcraft which to many seem like they're either dead or close to dying. Here's a recording of one of the most legendary world firsts from a guild that absolutely dominated The Burning Crusade with boss first kills; Nihilum:
After WoW I've spent some time playing various games but never quite bothered with single player games that much, it felt like my competitive experiences in the past would just cause me to get bored playing through storylines, cutscenes, etc. I'm always looking for that PvP thrill of close games where tensions are high and the outcome depends on split seconds and millimeter precisions. A lot of my late 20s instead went into Counter Strike Global Offensive, but we've now come to a time where Hive came into play as well and many of you who've been following me over the years may have noticed me streaming these kind of games. TCG's have also been kind of fun ever since Blizzard released Hearthstone for mobile I've sunk a lot of time into it whenever I was riding buses to school or wasn't able to be on the PC, although I often wish some new games would come out to bring the magic of the first Pokemon games back for the handhelds. So far I haven't had much luck with that but who knows, the future for gaming is bright and even though for us who are here and aware of blockchain it's still pretty early I believe that blockchain gaming is just around the corner to be as great as previous games we've experienced and bring a whole new ecosystem to it that may even save some genres from their imminent demise. Hail Satoshi. :)
Gonna end this post with one of the best WoW Arena players of all time, may you rest in piece, Reckful. Trying to catch up to your level was something that made WoW fun for me for a long time even though no one ever could. <3
Thanks for reading everyone, it's been an amazing week to read so many entries to the @hivegc contest. Some amazing posts in there bringing forth so many memories of games I had completely forgotten until now. I love this community and am looking forward to see us grow. :)
Woooo, how much passion in this post, I see that you really enjoyed remembering each game and each experience. I should mention that I laughed a lot at the Nintendo kid comparison, "but less psycho" hahaha. Although I believed that the child is actually you, but you don't want to admit it.
Those were the days man, this post brings me back! I used to play a whole lot of Star Fox...My go to games were: Duck Hunt on the original Nintendo (had those orange guns to shoot with at the TV), Super Mario World, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instinct, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest and Star Fox.
Oh yeah haha, I mentioned on Twitter that I forgot to include Duck Hunt as well, playing it with friends was pretty fun and probably one of the first co-op games. :D
Man Street Fighter really had some amazing music, I recently started listening to some Rock Versions of it and it really gives you goosebumps from all the memories:
😍
I loved reading this and it brought me along down memory lane to my gaming start.
Thank You for this.
You made me smile and very happy!!
Now I am off to play on my new 3 day old Switch and Animal Crossing :D
That is awesome you finally were able to find a Switch and start playing Animal Crossing.
Thanks!! I had really almost given up even looking for one. So happy I finally got it :D
I'm trying to ignore people recommending me to play that while I can, maybe once the workload fades away.
probably a very smart idea LOLLL
hehe star fox was amazing, i'd rather you wait for a crypto mmorpg than try wow now, you're not going to have a fun time the way it was back in the day imo.
Man, the first pokemon I played, was also blue and I remember it was from a friend, but the game had a pretty serious problem: it didn't save the game, once I turned off the gameboy all the progress was erased, so I had to start again every day. Every day I started again trying to get as far as possible, I spent hours and hours playing to get to the end of the Pokémon League. What memories hahah
Oh man that sounds like a nightmare :( it took a long time to get to the pokemon league as well unless you just went full 1 pokemon only. I think there are some speedruns that just use nidoking throughout all of it to finish the game in 3h or so.
The serious guilds.. the elite guilds.., I played WOW for years and managed to claw my way off it..,I can't go back as my account was connected to one of those software security things that changes every minute on a phone I sold ages ago.
A call to Blizzard will fix it, but it's enough to deter me wiping the cobwebs off my Lvl85 Warlock. I even have a great name as I was an early adaptor, 'Seductress' a female sex god. If WOW chars ever become like domain names, I could be rich!
Hahah, my warlock was called Wifetap. 😁
and yeah, best to wait for a more fair MMORPG, I'm sure there's some serious ones waiting just around the corner to utilize blockchain and make the previous ones obsolete.
A game like that where you could earn tokens, now that would hold great appeal to me.
Ace, I didn’t realise you were a gamer and were possibly a similar age.
My first gaming memory was playing Street Fighter Turbo 2 on my Uncles SNES - I agree, it was mind blowing - the response time, graphics, music, characters, everything.
And then I played various games on my Aunties MegaDrive (my only memory is the Lion King games) which I only recently realised was released at a very similar time to the SNES but I always assumed in my mind that they were a different generation of console.
Anyway, I love the energy of this write up.
I know my pal @jackshootsstuff would enjoy this post - he is a retro game photographer (and player) with a following on Instagram for his creative console photos :)
Sounds like you need to invite someone to Hive and get him to post! :D
Hey @acidyo, He’s already here upon my invite - @jackshootsstuff - some really cool posts but he’s not super active.
I’ll get on him about it 😆
Oh haha thought you linked his IG username! Cheers will check on his content! :D
The last time he posted was a month ago - I know he got very busy with work recently but I’ll give him another prod about another gaming post 🤙🏻
It’s seems bringing now people to the platform is good but keeping them here and active is the hard bit
haahaha omg that kid of the video is really happy i can't stop laughing
You are one of mine, wow I did not remember Super Bomberbam i really like that game too, there are so many games that I have forgotten with the passage of time.
It has been interesting to read your entry, I never imagined that you would participate! But it's great, I know most of the games you mentioned and reading the part where you mention that you died over and over again in Mario makes me think about how difficult it was back then to figure out what buttons and what the heck to do in the game , without any guidance.
Nowadays everything is so easy having internet and guides to know what to do that sometimes the real emotion of a game is lost a bit.
excellent selection you were from the simplest to the most current, greetings!
This was a walk on memory lane. For me it stopped on Super Mario and Pokemon. Gosh I loved those. I am sure I wouldn't enjoy them now as I am not a gamer, but they sure felt like the most amazing stuff back then when I was just a kid. I got a PC quite late in life therefore I played at school (shh) and at my cousin's place.
Personally, in my childhood, I also did not have a game console. My friend had a prefix Dandy and Sega. Our favorite game was also Super Mario, tanks (what you have in the photo), and also a game where you had to shoot ducks. It was fun. And most of all I remembered the electronic game "Wolf and Eggs" looking for my childhood. I hope you know what this game is.
Hmm not sure about wolf and eggs, can you find a screenshot of it maybe I can then remember :D
also nice to see you and your husband back active, welcome!
this is one of the first popular Soviet games! The game began to be released in 1984. I'm not sure if this game was in your country. But this game was great. Every fly dreamed of having this device.
Ah man.... you're going to make me all emotional before work. 😏 So many great memories of the original NES and so many hours and hours....and hours playing in happiness and frustration.
I think, other then Mario, my favorites were Final Fantasy, zela, and manic Mansion
Let me tell you @acidyo that you started with the soft games and ended with the more complicated ones. The video of the boy opening his gift has made me laugh a lot, that is how expressive children are when they receive what they have loved so much. I played Donky Kong and after spending the wee hours playing I was the first to rescue the princess. Great memories made us remember these games.
Well crap. I totally forgot about StarFox. That game was way ahead of its time and looked so cool back then. I am still trying to get into the whole Pokemon thing, but I can't get past the horrible dialogue. lol
I legit figured this would just be nothing but Pokemon games and CS:GO. At least I was partially right.
:D
UwU
Excellent post. I loved it
Thanks! :)
Honestly I just noticed you are more old fart gamer than me I started when I'm 6 but I only remember atari saloons and first computer game I played was Roller Coaster tycoon then I straight up jump to ultima online :D
That was very interesting. You started gaming just a little bit before I stopped. It was nice to read about some of the games I just missed by a few years.
Hehe, when are you planning of getting back into it? ^^
As soon as crypto makes me rich and I don't have to work for the man anymore.
I think we pretty much played the same games except for WoW.
I went the Runescape route instead.
cx
I think many of us were the child of the N64 hahaha. The excitement of having a video game console was incredible. My first GB game was Pokemon Blue too, when those 3 pokemon games came out it was the sensation of the moment. Excellent memories, reading what others lived is a way to travel to the past too.
Great post! "Tunneler" looks like a take off on the original Dig Dug (1982) which was a great Namco arcade game that was also ported to the home systems.
Source:https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=dig-dug&page=detail&id=637
I still play, and love, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
source
How does it compare to the Civilization games?
SMAC is Civilization 2 at its core, just iterated on and improved in every way, then transplanted into a sci-fi setting. It still holds up as one of the better examples of the genre even 20 years later.
Greetings, there are many experiences with different games a good trajectory you have in video games, I instead got stuck with super nintendo, street fighter was a great game, but my vice was to play Top Gear for me the best car game of the moment.
See you later, have a great week !
Haha, I loved playing pinball and felt like a T-rex with a tachycardia every time the ball threatened to fall into the pit
I've got to admit, I got a good laugh when I saw your first line... and then the sheer length of the post.
Golden games! Looking back there when I also played those, makes me feel so old, especially that today I have just levelled up (my birthday) lol
Is WoW still popping?
SF2 was great, although I like Mortal combat much more.
By the way, several months ago I tested the latest version of Street Fighter 2, and there you can unlock the Shin Akuma character (Ryu's sensei). That son of a bitch doesn't die easily.
Dude, you have to play donkey Kong country 1 and 2 and 64. And starfox 64, hope you played that....
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Same to me☺
Super mario was one of the best games at that time. I remember i worked hard to get good marks in exams so that my mom can give me permission to play Supper Mario on TV. Those days were beautiful.
wow @acidyio I didn't think you would participate, how interesting to read all those memories. Nintendo sixtiiii foooorrr jajajaja I have always laughed a lot with that video but there is nothing more real than the emotion of that child receiving that gift. Although there are games that I don't know, it's interesting to see all that video game tour from the beginning.
I dont even know most of these games, mostly because of my young age but it was interesting to read what the old games looked like. My first gaming experiences were on a Playstation 2 and I played GTA San Andreas, that happened around 2011
So many great memories, haha! Video games can be magical for our lives and the many posts that members have been writing prove it.
Well done, @acidyo.
One of my favorite DoS games was called Scorched Earth, where you were little tanks and could buy different kinds of missiles. The objective was to use trajectories to target and destroy the other tanks. It was super fun but a little slow in gameplay. Street Fighter 2 was probably one of the most monumental games to go from Arcade to console in my opinion. I am glad you included it. Star Fox was super cool when it came out and i am with you on F-Zero. Dhalsim was my original favorite in the Arcade because of his rubberband man features... but that didn't last long. I eventually liked Vega a whole lot once you could pick the bad guys. His jumping on the fence and then pile-driving the opponent was considered cheating by all the people that couldn't defend against it. Everyone had their characters and it was always fun to figure out the other person's techniques. This was an awesome post and I am glad you took the time to participate and share your experiences! It was almost as short as mine! hahahaha
Amazing post , i like it
When I read this my ID went to the floor, I imagine we are contemporaries, I also remember playing Mario for hours, tank, first at a neighbor's house, then they bought us one and it was worse, at home we were three, we lived fighting for those controls.
Nice gamer
You brought me good memories. There was only one console at home, 4 children and 1 mom. I was fanatic of Mario, but the one I most enjoyed was Castlevania because I was the first one to kill Dracula. Bomberman didn't let me sleep because though I was sleeping I could hear the bombs in my head, and I could see the green and blue colours. Past times are always better than the present times because they are accompanied with people we loved and may be they are not here anymore.
Woow! what an interesting story, I played Circus hehe and Mario Bros of course, in Counter Strike I hit the walls but it brings back great memories of the family Christmas vacations . I love the stories of the gamers who have been so outstanding to go to tournaments and compete.
I loved your story, thanks for sharing it. 🌟🚀
@acidyo I didn't play Super Mario Bros but many people talked about this. I think this game was special to many people. I started to playing game from year 2003 or 2004. Thanks for your nice article.
I will be happy if you read my entry for this contest.
Aha, you took me back to the beautiful days! I have started to play video games 25 years ago these times. As you, I played Super Mario, Duck Hunt, Street Fighter (Only Five Fighters), The Flintstones, Kunio-kun and more with my Micro Genius - 8 bit console. Now I have PS4, but I don't enjoy as much as I did on those days.
Dang, I stopped playing videogames when life got tough AKA work n shit.. I used to play literally ENDLESS hours when I was a kid, until around my mid 20's.
I never got to play online because I was mostly fantasizing with "magical"/"cartoony" games by myself. This has lead me to many social issues and now I'm forever alone! lol. Or maybe I stopped on time.
My favorites were Zelda (finished like 6 titles), Mario (I loved Paper Mario), Pokemon Red, Gold, Snap. Donkey Kongs. I loved banjo Kazooie. I beat starfox 64 like 60 times! lol! I never really liked war or fighting games, let's not even talk about soccer games which many of my friends loved.
Dude, thanks for the laugh with that nintendo 64 kid video! I had already forgotten about it hahaha
After some 5-7 yrs of no intense gameplay (only a few plays here n there), I sometimes wish I could play again, but now I'm just too busy trying to make some money to get by... Living in a third world country sucks, it's so hard to live from art/design. I'm doing my best to keep up with posting here in hive and I got some good votes on some posts, but for some reason on the last 2 posts I haven't received as much now. I'm in lockdown so I've had a bunch of time to put myself together and post up, but I guess maybe I shouldn't try to make an income from Hive, or should I? lol. I have to get creative. Hope things get better.
Great post, thank you for bringing back some good memories!