Anyone else experience this as a kid: There was Nintendo and SEGA... everything else was mysterious
Sorry for the wierd title, I'd like to talk about an experience that I'm assuming that many of you had when we were young. Starting with the NES era (1986 onward) I remember growing up and there was basically Ninendo and Sega in my world, and that was it (well, until the PSX arrived.) Actually, Sega didn't even appear on my radar until the Genesis came out, but that could have been because I was just very young and I didn't get to go over to friends homes that much to see master systems. Anyway, the thing is, my peers and I were all aware of systems like the Turbo Grafx 16, the Atari Jaguar, Neo Geo AES, 3DO, etc. but no one had one. These were "lesser" devices that we'd only heard of or read about on occassion. Regardless, no one owned them and only a few kids had even seen or played on these systems.
Part of the reason, I assume, is because I never saw any of these systems or games at the local K-Mart or Wal-Mart. I assume they weren't in my market, which was a small city that had probably around 100,000 within the metro-region.
Anyway, now that I'm older and a collector, I see that this stuff is out there and can often be found in just about any retro-game shop. However, most of my experience with these games and systems is completely new because, as a kid, they simply didn't exist in my world and they were "mystical white stags" that legend said existed somewhere but my friends and I had never seen.
Did this happen to any of you? Especially those of us in the US which had most of these systems... somewhere.
Part of the reason, I assume, is because I never saw any of these systems or games at the local K-Mart or Wal-Mart. I assume they weren't in my market, which was a small city that had probably around 100,000 within the metro-region.
Anyway, now that I'm older and a collector, I see that this stuff is out there and can often be found in just about any retro-game shop. However, most of my experience with these games and systems is completely new because, as a kid, they simply didn't exist in my world and they were "mystical white stags" that legend said existed somewhere but my friends and I had never seen.
Did this happen to any of you? Especially those of us in the US which had most of these systems... somewhere.
Comments
But yeah, it's definitely cool that there are basically brand new old consoles for me to explore.
They were a hard sell compared to the twin Titans.
No one I knew actually had one, though.
Had no idea SEGA was a thing
I also never knew there was a Sega Master System until I became a collector. If you had told me there was a Sega system in the same generation as NES I would have called you a liar.
There was a department store called Best that had demo CDI and 3DO machines. I recall playing some sort of terrible Flintstones non-game, and Total Eclipse
I knew Jaguar from magazines, specifically because of AvP
It was years before I had any idea what TG-16 was
I had friends who had a Master System. I didn't know what it was at the time,
Same here. My friends all had Atari and / or NES but one of my childhood friends move in and had the master system. I remember my friend Erik introducing me to Jermey by telling me "this is Jeremy, he has a Sega". I was like, what is a Sega? It was a fun break from Nintendo. I can't recall ever seening a master system in KMart, only Nintendo.
Then they came back with the Jaguar and it seemed like a joke.
None of my friends gave a crap about CD-I and 3DO, but we saw them at department stores.
I remember seeing a Walmart video display promoting TG16 pretty heavily. It was gone the next time I came to Walmart and I don’t remember ever seeing games for sale. One of my friends from school had a TG16 (traded a Genesis to his brother for it). I got to play a bit. Devil's Crush made a lasting impression.
Also I never remember the magazines having feature articles on the games. Maybe you'd see a 3DO or Neo Geo review in a little box or Gex would be on the cover because it's multiplatform, but those games would never get multi-page articles or anything. Maybe I just selectively skipped over them, who knows.
It's surprising that living in the place that I do, as much of a small hole in the wall as it is, I had so much exposure to electronic gaming as I did. Almost never from the same place, of course (most of the folks I was friends with weren't friends with one another), but I got enough glimpses in enough windows as to what was going on during that time to keep up.
I felt bad for him he didn't have a Nintendo but of course he defended it with all his heart.
That's just what you have to do when you're a kid who didn't have the Nintendo console. He felt bad for himself too.
It wasn't until I joined these forums that I learned about some of the other stuff.
By '87, I discovered the NES when some neighbor kids as well as one of my cousins got one. I wouldn't get my own until late '89 when my uncle gave me his. This period also introduced me to gaming magazines, which began to broaden my horizons a bit. Through it I learned of the existence of many things that I would never manage to see in person).
The only place I ever remember seeing Sega Pico being carried was Ames department store. Never at KB Toys. Did Toys R Us have it?
The only place I ever remember seeing Sega Pico being carried was Ames department store. Never at KB Toys. Did Toys R Us have it?
Toys R Us had everything back then.
During the middle 90s, I had a friend that had a Neo Geo, which we played a lot of Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting on, and another with a 3DO, which was pretty much a Road Rash machine.
Good times.
Sega CD was one of those elusive experiences that I always heard about but never got to experience because none of my friends had one, none of the local stores carried it, and even the big city malls just didn't have it on display (or had it looping a demo you couldn't touch). Heck, I remember finally playing Sewer Shark in 1998 but to this very day I don't think I have ever booted a Sega CD game (mine doesn't work).
I rarely got the chance to go to the mall in the city but that's where I saw some of those other things. Can't say I ever saw Neogeo but Sears had TurboGrafx and Sega CD; Macy's had CD-I, 3DO, and Sega CD; K-B Toys had Jaguar; Babbage's (now GameStop) had Jaguar and CD-i, etc.
Surprisingly, I recall Toys R Us having a long aisles of full of cool stuff on display but I don't remember seeing anything specific other than Nintendo/Sega back in the day. Even among those places, Turbo-CD/Duo, Jaguar CD, etc was practically non-existent. I'm guessing that most of the people into AES, Turbo-CD, JagCD, etc to follow new releases and have a collection back then were rich kids and adults who could afford to mail-order whatever they wanted.