Those of us gaming in the 80s/90s...What do you remember most fondly?

Hey gang,

Lockdown is ending, in a way, and I'm becoming nostalgically wistful. I guess a part of it comes with entering the summer season of my life story too. It's becoming very easy to look back on "the good old days" of gaming. Which is weird, because in terms of life, I'd argue that "These are the days". Life has kinda never BEEN better. I'm off work for 6 weeks for summer holidays, I'm going to Japan in....well, to be confirmed (Once the immigration problems end), and I have Tsushima, a game I've been looking forward to for...4 years? I actually started it on Friday, but...life's got in the way. Between my Japanese lessons, D&D, and all in all living life I haven't had much time to sit down with games.

Which I guess is what's got me nostalgic about the good old days. When I think back about fond gaming memories in the last....5 years, I struggle to think of...well, anything really. I remember really enjoying the first time I heard "Rivers in the Desert" in Persona 5, and that scene in Yakuza Zero where Kuze was riding the bike with the big steel pipe. I guess I also remember 2B's arse, but for less ideal reasons.

However....when I think back about my experiences with the yesteryear of games, there's a LOT of memories. Going back to the 90's, I remember my FIRST EVER game and level, which was Snake Man's stage in Mega Man 3. I had an NES with SMB and MM3, and I think I kinda just played Snake Man and Gemini Man on repeat. Those were good times. I remember getting a Super Nintendo for Xmas one year. I remember when I was allowed ONE game for Christmas, and I picked "Super Mario Kart". That was a good year. I remember my dad getting me an N64 from the LOOT magazine back in ...98 I guess? I was about 9-10. I remember getting South Park with it and playing a LOT of it. It was actually pretty shit. I had a black N64 and a Green controller with a red rumble pak.

The absolute greatest Xmas of ALL TIME was when my mum struck ABSOLUTE GOLD. She got me Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time, and it was just....man. That was a REALLY REALLY good 6 months or so of gaming.

I remember when my best friend, Alex and I would play Dynasty Warriors 4 every weekend. We'd pick a new character every month and grind them out really fast. I was a big Pang Tong fan, and also Taishi Ce. I remember when he got the PRIMA guide for FFX, and we spent 18 months squeezing ABSOLUTELY EVERY DROP of fun out of that game.

A fond memory was playing the SNES/PS1 Final Fantasy games. I had a lot of fun with FF6, but I actually never finished it. I got to Kefka's Tower and just...couldn't beat it. I didn't really understand the need to level up, and grind things out, so I had one SOLID team of guys (Locke/Gogo/Sabin/Edgar) and the rest of my guys sucked. It's one of my ultimate secret gaming shames, that I never finished one of my all time favourite games.

I guess more than ANYTHING, I remember how...pure the gaming experience was. You'd go to a store, you'd see the boxart, and then look at the back of the box, and that was IT. A little later on, you'd use gaming mags for a little guidance, and later on with that, you'd have PC Gamer with that AWESOME demo/utility disc every month. I think I got my first WINZIP off that disc. I loved how good games were before the internet. You'd get a solid, stable gaming experience. You put your cart/disc in the console, and you'd be PLAYING. No patching, no 8 minutes of loading, no notifications, no trophies, no achievements. It was just you, and the game.

I miss those times. What about you?

The best part of gaming in yesteryear was going to visit family and relatives and taking a ride to the local mall to see what their arcades looked like and the games they had.

If there were achievements for MM3 back in the day you might have had a more complete experience. So much derision for achievements but they have always been there just not as forward facing. Sure, we created our own fun back then but imagine the playground wars if you could prove that you actually beaten MM3 without taking damage.

I don't truck in Nostalgia all that much in general but I guess I would say that I kind of miss game manuals.

Except.. not really? I don't think I give a shit about manuals. I probably wouldn't read them if you brought them to the way they were before. But I live in a small town with nothing in it about ~30 minutes or so from another small town but at least that one had a Walmart. So when I was able to get games it came from there and I remembering excitedly reading a lot of game manuals on the trip back.

The Pokemon craze was the best! Lived in Japan when it started and moved to the US just before it started so got to experience it twice and I was the perfect age!

There's no way now to recreate the scarcity. You couldn't just fly through ROMS, you would play and cherish each one (or not, but if you liked it you'd probably play through a single game a lot). Seeing certain games in the arcade was the only place you could see them and it would be mindblowing.

I have a lot of memories as a kid coming back from the store with a new game (or rentals as well), very excited and pouring over the manual.

It was also crazy to have your mind blown with games pretty often. There's cool stuff now for sure but back then you would see big leaps that I just don't think we will again. I saw the jump to CD-Roms on PC having a game series like Monkey Island suddenly have voices after a time was crazy.

I think I miss just that general feelings created from that sometimes even though now I have way more choice but also a backlog... so yeah there's been strange effects. Some of that also involves growing up though as well.

Everything you're describing sounds like you're more nostalgic for that time and place in your life more than the games themselves. I loved my time gaming during the 90's, but I just don't have much in the way of nostalgia for that time. Yeah sure go into the game store, look at the box art and bring the game home sometimes you end up with Gunstar Heroes or Out of This World and other times you end up coming home with Vectorman or Pit Fighter. I don't know, I just don't understand the whole premise here, notifications can be turned off, I've always enjoyed PC gaming so patching and installing has always been a thing for me SINCE the 90's and games loading has also been a problem for years and years Cassettes, Floppy disks, CD's and hard drives all have seek times.

I was always fascinated by 'other' gaming machines friends and families had. To me, the stuff I didn't own was the coolest stuff.

I remember one of my friends had an Amiga, and most of his games were copies with titles written on with marker. I was really young at the time, and I wondered... If I just wrote a game title on the floppy disc, then it'd play that game.

Another friend of mine had a Macintosh, with a weird slab of a mouse. I think he only had a Golf game, but it was amazing.

And separately, by the time we got a family PC, my dad used to bring home these discs full of ripped games and songs on called Blobbys and Bradshaws (most likely a regional thing). For the longest time I thought this was the main way to get PC games.

Gaming magazines.

Going over to a friends house to play a game, borrowing games from friends, having a book full of Metroid save codes, renting games from the local grocery store... all stuff I miss.

I don’t miss the veritable black hole of information about video games, though. I wasn’t aware of any gaming magazines that weren’t just ads for the system they were for, like Nintendo Power. I’m sure they existed, but I wasn’t in a place (financially/maturity/geographically) that allowed me to read them. Getting your folks to buy a game based on box-art alone was a hard sell, even though my folks were never very “anti-game” or anything like that, games were expensive. I actually don’t remember owning that many games growing up, we’d just rent and borrow everything.

I haven’t felt the thrill of beating a game in years. For at least the past decade, when I finish a game I don’t feel any sort of joy like I did when I was a kid. It’s probably mostly related to growing up and what makes me happy or excited now, but I kinda feel like part of it is also the fact that games are rarely actually done when the credits roll. Being dumped back into the point right before the final boss fight or having a new game+ be the first thing you see after the credits roll is kinda anti-climactic. I find myself playing very open-ended games nowadays because being “done” with something kinda sucks. I “beat” Minecraft the other day and was happy to do it, but mostly because I have shulker boxes now. When I finished Control I was just a little sad that I wasn’t going to be in that world anymore, and cleaning up collectibles didn’t seem like that much fun without the story driving me along.

-Attempting to program a BASIC game printed in Your Sinclair magazine. Failing miserably to copy the 30 lines of code accurately and ending my programming career at the age of 6.

-Getting a SAM Coupe and being blown away by the FMV (full is a lose term here) and sprites that didn't clip through the background colours (as they had on my Spectrum).

-Going to my friend Bruce Lee's house and playing Sonic on his Mega Drive. IT WAS SO FAST, so fast. I would dream of that game.

-Visiting my best friend who'd moved from rural England to suburbia USA with his family. Sneaking into the basement to play Home Alone on his SNES after everyone had gone to bed. Waking up his parents in the process and getting into all sorts of trouble.

Wolfenstein on shareware disc, Doom WADS with boobies, Marathon on my friend's Mac, Running Descent on my 3DFX GPU, Command and Conquer at a LAN Party, being blown away by my neighbours Atari Jaguar, Duke Nukem on Wireplay and the horrific phone bills that resulted in, and many many other moments.

To be brutally honest I remember how many terrible games there were back then. These days, you;ll have people complain about this or that.. but your average Assassins Creed or whatnot is still an amazing product. Compared to those days where you got these awful racing games with parallax scrolling but you couldn't see more than 10 pixels ahead of you.. or games where there were no saves and you were expected to just master it all in huge sets. Games with unclear goals, unclear mechanics, obtuse puzzles. In the 80's and early 90's I basically almost never finished anything because I had no idea how. I only ever beat Contra because because my Famicom had the 30 lives cheat built in.

The oldest game that I have fond memories of is Combat for the Atari 2600. Being able to destroy cover was such a crazy concept for me and I really enjoyed the gameplay of that one.

My nostalgia is mostly tied up into other people's purchases strangely enough. I don't think I have ever gotten a console on the day of release, and in the 80s when I had no purchasing power it was usually a year or two into the system's life before I would get to own one myself. I remember going to my cousin's house on the day they got an Atari ST, it was the first 16 bit system I had seen and after only seeing C64 and Spectrum games before it blew my mind - especially the colours, seeing shading in a game was so very cool.

When I eventually got an Amiga, a friend dropped a load of old discs around for me to get started with and amongst a lot of tat and demos was Stunt Car Racer. I think this was the first polygon looking racing game I'd seen running outside of Hard Drivin' in the local arcade. It ran like balls, but at the time seemed like lightning, and I played it for months. I blame my massive love for the Trackmania series on this game.

The first time I go to see a Doom running on a PC at a friend's house sometime in 1993 just shredded my brain - it was the sharpest looking thing I had ever seen (I'd only ever played games on a TV before so seeing a computer monitor was like getting new glasses after too long).

So many others too. I'm always grateful for emulators and such to make some of these memories accessible to tap into physically again.

I really miss shareware. These days we barely even have demos, but shareware was a step up from that, usually containing about a quarter of the full game (sometimes the full game but with a handful of limitations, like missing the level editor or a selection choice of characters/vehicles/weapons).

In some sense, I guess the attempts on making episodic games in the last 15 years or so have had some of that spirit, as often the first episode was free, though there's a pretty big difference in say the amount of content in the first episode of The Walking Dead and the first episode of Doom.

I played a lot of the first episodes of DOOM and Wolf 3d (The awesome bit with Mecha Hitler)

I was single digits in the 90's so i don't have much of an "academic" mind for what i did gaming wise, but i do have memories.

My father was an aerospace engineer and was always bringing home suitcase sized laptops i could play games on, we also had a BBC computer where games were on cassettes, i only remember one where you had to make decisions about running a village and the nearby river would flood and destroy it, my uncle had loads of DOS games and i played a lot of a helicopter game where you land and rescue people, back home i had Overkill, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure and a really cool game i've never been able to find that's like Jill of the Jungle but it's not that, i had other games too but those were the big three.

In the late 90's into 00's i remember Redline Racer, which i kept coming back to because its graphics blew me away, and a low budget submarine game which was really cool, it was like a buy low sell high space trading game but under water.

Just realised i've only been talking about PC but i've always gravitated to it, i remember going to a car boot sale with my parents and one of the people selling stuff was our window cleaner, he had a Mega Drive and some games and that's where my console collection got started, my grandma got me a Game Boy Classic for christmas and i remember playing a shooting gallery Terminator game, don't remember when or how i ended up with a Master System and a SNES, i got them all in a strange order unrelated to their release dates and it didn't matter which had better graphics or sound, i was a kid and switched between them constantly, for me the Master System was just as good as the SNES, Enduro Racer was awesome.

The christmas where i got an N64 was incredible, earlier that year my mum told me she was at an auction for charity and bid on an N64, but the rich family outbid everyone, she probably shouldn't have told me that because i'd have been upset, but i remember being fairly grown up about it, thanking her for trying.
That christmas as soon as i saw the size of the present i knew exactly what it was, what a day, i played the living hell out of the N64.

Being older by this time i have more knowledgeable memories of the PS1, and despite all the amazing genre defining games on that system for some reason the memory that always sticks with me is C-12: Final Resistance, still being young and not reading any game reviews i thought it was something special, looking at it now i still think it has attractive qualities. Oh, also Demolition Derby 2's main menu music scared the s*** out of me.

That's just a scattering of my early gaming memories, less about my favourite games and more unique moments that stuck with me.

Edit: I have to mention PC adventure games, Discworld, Riven and Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, i was young and too impatient to figure out adventure games, so i spent hours and hours watching my older sister play them.
Even if i was more patient i wouldn't have been able to play them alone, the ambience of Riven and Titanic is suffocating.

Hmm there are a few things I guess. I miss reading the game manual on the car/train back home from the store. I also miss having pretty much one game at a time to play through. I would sit down and experience it from start to finish. Nowadays I'm in the middle of like 15 games at the same time, and i have trouble finishing them.

Yeah, I loved particularly how Doom's shareware episode had a complete story in it, with a wonderful downer ending.

Another 80s/90s thing I miss is that we used to have a tier of simulation games between the arcade Ace Combats and the hardcore DCSes of the world - stuff like Microprose's, DID's, Spectrum Holobyte's and Digital Integration's sims that were sim-like enough to have you think about keeping the plane in the air, landing and not passing out in high G turns, but not having to deal with preheating the engine, fuel mixtures or going through a 30 minute checklist before taking off.

I love Ace Combat in the sense that it's the best Wing Commander game we have right now, but I don't really like how damage doesn't matter below a particular threshold, and above that you essentially just blow up. I loved how you in, say TFX or A-10 Cuba! could still struggle to keep the plane in the air after taking severe damage. You could've finished the mission objectives and was now limping back home to base, or at least trying to reach the frontline where you could eject and land in friendly territory.

I'm ultra-nostalgic in general, so I think about this a lot, and I reached the conclusion that what made my gaming journey through the 90s so special was how batshit insane the PC gaming scene was. It was the era of throwing every idea against the wall and seeing what stuck, and unlike today, most of those weird ideas made it into big-ass boxes on store shelves, which lent them an air of legitimacy and mystique that "random weird Steam game" doesn't carry. Ditto for shareware compilation discs. Yeah, they were mostly student projects, indie games, and some bigger "chase" titles scraped off a server and slapped on a disc, but again, that gave the games more "weight" being physically pressed and sold in stores.

Obviously a lot of that also comes down to having been a kid in the 90s, which makes everything about games more mysterious and exciting. Not to mention that we made do with the games we had, and spending tons of time with even bad games made us appreciate them as much as the good ones. (I even feel fuzzy toward Maabus, which I hold up to this day as the biggest disappointment I owned back then. I hate it, but I love it)

I miss scanning the boxes on the shelves, not knowing or caring what the critical consensus said, just grabbing whatever pitched itself in the coolest way, and then dedicating myself to that game no matter what until I got the chance to get another. It's cool that I basically have limitless games these days, but being spoiled for choice and knowing the machinations of the industry means that I don't appreciate what I have in the same way.

The entire floor of our dorm would be randomly assigned teams in Tecmo Superbowl and we would play a whole season leading up to and during finals. Popping into the designated room to watch someone play their game or to play your own was a great way to blow off steam and really helped make everyone feel like part of a group. I switched schools after my Freshman year but I never lived in a dorm that felt more like family.

@fracturedveil: What year did this take place? It would be totally awesome if this took place during the 2000s or 2010s. You can just say 'not during those times,' as a response.

40 last year and my strongest memories from the era would be Goldeneye, Championship Manager, International Superstar Soccer, Civilization, Blade Runner, Grand Theft Auto, Turrican, Lemmings, Doom, Heretic, and Hexen.

I remember back in the very early 80's saying to people, "Imagine how good video games are going to be in 10 years", while playing a table top Galaxian arcade machine, big smile. I have said that every decade since, now not so much, I have finally reached my place of contentment with video games. They are still fucking fantastic :))

ATA

ATDT 555 555 5555

Having a book of BBS'. One of them was a multi-node BBS and once you connected, you could play 4 player Doom deathmatch!

Then there were dumb Door games like Legend of the Red Dragon.

Making levels in Doom with DoomCAD gave me a leg up when I ended up taking CAD classes in college.

Speaking of Doom, Aliens TC mod.

Playing TIE Figher, but I had my MIDI keyboard hooked up to the MIDI port of my sound card.

Jumpers, IRQs, DMAs, Interupts.

Having to boot my PC with a floppy disk that had a custom autoexec.bat and config.sys to make sure there was enough highmem to load what I needed.

Beating Super Mario World at Venture or Sears.

Stores like CompUSA, ComputerCity, Elek-Tek. As I a kid, I would stare at things like sound cards, hand held scanners, and 3do blasters...

Arcades - nothing at home could touch the graphical fidelity of these games.

The excitement of lurking around a house in UO that you knew was about to rot due to lack of maintenance. Grabbing as much loot as you could that now just lay in the open world, only to have your ill gotten goods taken as two words pop up on the screen. "Corp Por"

Corpse runs in Everquest. Because what was more fun than losing -all- your gear? Losing a half week's worth of XP that you had to grind for by mindlessly camping a single set of mobs for hours on end. Camp check!

ATH

Man gaming magazines for me in the mid to late 90's was some of my favorite times. Our library at school (elementary school) actually had PC Gamer magazines on the shelf that were up to date! It made no sense but it was amazing. I used to love reading about games and just day dream about them. Doesn't really happen for me anymore though. With the internet and being able to read up to the minute news, there's just no mystery anymore.

1985 or so. I'm 7ish years old and my dad pulls out a pong machine from the 70s. One of those philips ones with a gun.. I played that thing so much, and seeing as I was a little kid and thought that games would move more towards gun controllers and maybe not lean super hard on the one-button one-knob controls of the pong machines... I was wrong about that one, but I just wanted it to be true all my life, and now we have VR, so 7 year old me is extatic.

Super Mario 2 was an incredible game. I loved it so much, and I think it was one of the first games I ever finished. (still to this day I've never finished Mario 1...) The vibe of SM2 and the music and everything, just so good. Controls were great once you got used to them. Having the princess to do easy mode was brilliant, just a great game and I remember my time with it so fondly. Sitting on the top stair of my basement staircase playing on a 14inch black and white travel television... Perfect.

Super Nintendo was a quickie for me. I found girls and stopped playing until I found the playstation... At which point I got back into gaming and never ever stopped. I rented a PS1 with Ridge Racer and played non stop for a whole weekend. Sleeping only in bursts because I kept waking up super amped to drive more... Played the ridge racer arcade car-cab some days after, lost my shit, bought a PS1 and Ridge Racer the next week. That first game was incredible. And the first time playing it in the arcades is still seared into my memory. The arcade was all dark and people were hanging around the machine watching me sucking really bad, and it was glorious.

Doom: Made me so nauseated. The headbob just churned by gut. Didn't care, the game was beyond anything I'd ever experienced. I bought a PC the next week..... Played Doom 2 in marvelous sub-20fps all the way shrunk down to a postage-stamp sized window..

Quake: Holy shit. To me, this is when games got real. Multiplayer? With many folks and teams and shit? Up to this point I'd only done modem to modem Doom 2 with a buddy, pretty fun, he was a million times better than me though... But in quake, playing with multiple people, finally shit got good. Multiplayer was real, and it was eye opening. All of a sudden I was playing with people from across the world.. I can remember how this blew my mind to smitherines. It's such a normal thing now, people are playing massively multiplayer games on their phones.. But back then, seeing a HUMAN in a game and not just some shitty AI.. It was worthy of slackjawed bedazzlement. Not until MMORPGs came into play did I have my mind blown again as far as MP is concerned.

Half-Life and Counter-Strike dominated the end of the 90s completely for me. Miss the 90s a whole lot... Great decade.

Oh I remember those.

I always look with certain sadness how gaming and industry changed. In my humble beginnings I started on Commodore 64 then Amiga 500 (she really was my best friend) and then PC.

Gaming back then was about fun and spending time with your friends and family, chasing that high score. But just having fun.

Games became way too serious nowadays and gamers stress, rage and are agressive/toxic towards other players.

That's not how it was before. I remember Base Jumpers an old Amiga game I played with my friends. You work together to climb the tower and then base jump down while trying to push and interrupt you friend so you win.

There wasn't any shouting from the loser or gloating from the winner. There was only laughter. I do miss those days.

The new game smell.

Mostly for me it'd be living a 15 minute walk from a Blockbuster and having a weekend allowance to rent one new game. I played so many games in the SNES/PS1/N64 era than I can remember. And I'd go there with other kids from the neighborhood and we'd just wander debating what to rent. Then Monday recess would be all about what games were worth the allowance and what weren't and you'd rinse and repeat every weekend unless you'd found a game that required multiple rentals like a JRPG or super hard arcade game.

A close secondI guess would be local co-op, but that's more a result of growing up and continuing to love games while realizing that everyone else mostly played them because their parents gave them a console and a few best sellers to keep them calm and satiated at home, like toys, and so those old friends consider them as such now as adults.

The degauss button.

@robertorri: Now we're getting somewhere.

Not having so many options when it comes to playing games - meaning that I would play and invest time into every single game I had and get the most out of it. Now I'm absolutely spoiled for choice. Too spoiled. I had plenty of choice back then, but I never had a feeling of too much choice or that I was wasting time by playing the same game over and over and over when there was so much else to play.

I feel like there was a point in my life where I needed to tune the TV to play something. Might have been one of those TV Boy Chinese console things. And the dawn of 3D acceleration was cool.

The thing I miss in retrospect was finding true gems like "Chrono Trigger" or "Earthbound" in rental shops and being just BLOWN AWAY by them. This, of course, was balanced in times where you'd bring home something like "Brandish" or "Drakhen" and...well, you have three whole days to find out if the game's terrible, or if you're just terrible at it.

Put like that: I miss having the time to truly think to myself, "Yeah, I'm going to play through the 3 hour Baldur's Gate 2 tutorial that needs to be slogged through EVERY SINGLE TIME before starting a new character. That's what I'll do with my day today!"

This is more early 2000’s, but I miss community run multiplayer shooters. I grew up playing Novalogic games (Delta Force, Black Hawk Down), Counter Strike, and Battlefield. Community run servers were great because they each had their own rules, style, and regulars. It was fun to try out different servers to find a group you liked and to regularly visit them.

There are still some games that have custom/community servers, but it has largely disappeared for the convenience of matchmaking and ranked play.

I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a fan of video games. And this is something I've said, consistently, pretty much every year since maybe 2010? So yeah, nostalgia has never been as big of a thing for me. Some of the games I've played over the last few years include some of the most fun I've ever had playing a game. It says something that, for me, as an N64 kid who absolutely adored Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask, I maybe had more pure moments of joy playing Breath of the Wild than I had with either of the N64 classics.

So in answer to the question of what do I miss the most...well it's the obvious old man answer (I turned 31 on Sunday), but it's the innocence. It's the not knowing/caring about crunch and abuse, or about fee-to-pay games that rely on whales. I miss the fact that my reflexes are getting worse, and that my patience and ability to mentally and emotionally commit to a game has gotten worse. I miss not knowing any better, or not knowing what I was missing out on when I choose to play one game at the expense of so many others.

I miss how exciting it was just to get a new video game, in the days when I had much more time than money. Now I'm just one of countless people who has dozens, if not hundreds, of games in their Steam account that they've maybe never played for more than an hour, if ever.

Renting games. I'm sometimes surprised by the amount of classic games I played, but it's all thanks to rentals.

And my old EGM "mags."

Beating Darkwing duck on NES for the first time was mind blowing. I did not realize at the time that you could actually finish a game. I thought that all games were just kinda endless loops of levels

I'm not saying I'd go back to doing it again, but the ritual of coin-op arcades.

The relatively low buy-in meant in a place with a bunch of machines was a feast of ripping open Schrödinger boxes to find out whether you had found a fabled cat with power, or just mild regret.

Each era of gaming had its own feel. If 1972 to 1978 was a kind to early flight; with Odyssey, Fair Child F, Atari Stella being primitive and experimental. Then 1979 to 1989 was the Barnstormer era where people just did shit and had fun before all the rules and corporate shenanigans happened. And, the 1990s were when games matured and the modern shape of the industry emerged.

I'll tell you this. The 1970s gaming culture was fun and was for everyone, similar as it is today. Also, so much of 1970s gaming was 'adult' even for the kids. The first place I every went to that has ore than two arcade machines was a bar (In the 1970s a kid could enter a bar, not legally...but NOBODY gave a shit!) We drove cars with no seat belts, we smoked in front of babies, and kids could beg change of their bar fly parents who were in a bar. In 1976 my birthday was in a sports bar/family restaurant (also a new thing). It was called "For Pete's Sake" they had two projection TVs and they had six arcade machines - Speed Race, Gun Fight, Moto-Cross, Night Driver, and Sea Wolf. The bar had the precursors to arcade games - electro-mechanical shooting gallery and driving games.

That is the thing I don't think young people know. Before there were video game arcades there were these places where you could play games. They would have the precursors to arcade games, electro-mechanical shooting gallery, driving games, and sports games. This could be everything from foosball and air hockey games, to pool tables and Ice Hockey (like 'foosball' with hockey players). Mechanical gamer were very sophisticated, in fact if you compare early video games to the mechanical games that mechanical ones could be WAY more fun.

I have a lot of memories from that era, including reading videogame magazines like EGM or Next Generation, but the one I remember most fondly is probably playing FF7 with my best friend.

Accidentally breaking a game is fun. I beat Vigilante on the Amstrad CPC because the lives counter glitched out. I could stumble into it accidentally, and reliably.

arcades

I live one town over from the biggest arcade in Europe. I've spent many a night there on the Super Turbo/Tekken Tag cabs

I do miss the demodiscs and the shareware CD's. While free weekends, beta's and demo's are still available, and refunds on online stores is now a thing, there's something about going through a disc and finding gold between the scraps. This CD has stuff on it, and you are going through everything on there eventhough you know that you won't find anything worth playing for over 10 minutes. I think this is how i stumbled upon games like Septerra Core and Deus Ex.

I also miss the education software that was clearly produced by companies that were not typically placed inside the gaming realm. I doubt many of them were actually good games, but there's still something soothing about going through a forest and just getting a bunch of wildlife info thrown at you :D

And then there's the more regional game-scene that made certain games feel super important to you, but the world at large has no interest in. Games like A2 Racer , AmsterDoom , Red Cat Games, MielMonteur

There's a lot of stuff. I remember spending all my vacation spending money during certain trips, more or less, in arcades/pinball while my parents asked me if I didn't want to buy something at some point. The E3 issues of gaming magazines, especailly the ones that had page after page of lists containing small descriptions of every game at the show. Buying/sellin games at a local game store that was partially a watch repair place run by two brothers with questionable reputation (one sold home brew alcohol to minors, as an example) and outlandish excuses whenever a game they said would come had not arrived yet. Going over to a friend's place to play that one game you didn't have. My mom renting some early Sega console with a couple of games when I was home sick. Etc

Most of my gaming in the 80's consisted of watching my cousins/friends play on their consoles/Amiga or reading various gaming magazines that people had bought to school.

We ended up getting a PC around 95 and from there it was all about shareware from the local computer shop. Then one fateful I was at a my cousins house and his next door neighbor said you have to come check this out, so we all huddled around in his study with his PC hooked up to his HiFi speakers and experienced Quake/Quakeworld Deathmatch online for the first time.

Pretty much everyone that night became hooked playing Quake - deathmatch, capture the flag, rocket arena, clan arena, team fortress... if it was Quake related we were there.

I still have vivid memories of my dad trying to call home and being super pissed off with the phone line being engaged all the time. Quake era Australia buying/getting blocks of internet time was the norm and I would consistently be burning through those hours as quickly as possible!

After a long stint with Quake 3 I pretty much stopped playing games - probably for close to 10 years.

For me gaming in the 90's really felt like we were on the edge of something big - especially on the PC. Every new release seemed to be pushing things forward.