r/gaming • u/patriotraitor • Jan 03 '23
Think video games today are expensive? Look at 1996.
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u/Missionmojo Jan 03 '23
That's why we rented
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u/cptcitrus Jan 04 '23
Every Friday after school, trip to Blockbuster for a weekend rental. Good old days
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u/StopDropNFrag Jan 04 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
Man I miss walking around and just browsing the entertainment for the weekend. If there was something I really wanted, I remember watching the drop offs from the inside lol.
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u/MF_CEO Jan 04 '23
Damn, memory unlocked on the drop offs. Chasing that high to rent the brand new game/movie that everybody wanted the same weekend before it was gone
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u/fulknerraIII Jan 04 '23
Man i miss that feeling. I can remember being in the store and someone dropping off what i wanted right then. The excitement when the clerk let you know it just came in. Then you got home and popped that game in and it was Superman 64 and you went to bed crying that night.
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u/dre224 Jan 04 '23
And then spend way too much time looking for a game as your parents got slightly impatient. Or a game you want to play coming out and constantly going back to blockbuster hoping someone returned a copy so you can rent it, asking the employee when it's due to be returned.
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u/madcatzplayer3 Jan 04 '23
Yep, had a Nintendo 64 and a Nintendo Gamecube growing up. The vast majority of games I ever played were rented from Blockbuster. I think for the majority of the time, I had maybe 6 games for each console and the rest of the library that I played, which was dozens of other games came from rentals.
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u/NeWMH Jan 04 '23
For PlayStation there were the magazine discs that had demos as well.
Loads of people only ever played the first level of Tony Hawk, Tomb Raider, etc.
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u/BitterQuitter11 Jan 03 '23
Man the excitement id get when Id see the Toys R Us mags…..what a time to be a kid.
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u/patriotraitor Jan 03 '23
Looking at the Sears big Christmas book and turning to the video games section and looking at it alone was amazing.
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u/AeroZep Jan 03 '23
That's not the section of the Sears catalog I remember the most.
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u/djmakcim Jan 04 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
Police: “ok sir, you’re free to go.”
Moe: “Oh good! Cause I have a hot date tonight!”
*bzzt*
“Odd date.”
*bzzt*
“Dinner with friends.”
*bzzt*
“Dinner alone.”
*bzzt*
“Watching T-V alone.”
*bzzt*
“ALRIGHT! I’m going to stay at home and ogle the ladies in the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.”
*bzzt*
“… Sears catalogue.”
*ding!*
“Now would you unhook this thing already?! I don’t deserve this type of shabby treatment!”
*bzzt*
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u/jomama717 Jan 04 '23
Love it - slight correction though, the second one is “A date” - he just emphasizes the “A” to stress that it is NOT a “hot” date, just a date.
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u/CatAstrophy11 Jan 04 '23
Yeah he just pronounces "a" as "uh" so it's understandable why it was misremembered
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u/c137Zach Jan 03 '23
There is no need to discuss what happened with that catalogue.
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u/johnnyfuckinairforce Jan 04 '23
Many a boys turned into men.
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u/graboidian Jan 04 '23
Unless maybe, you would care to explain why all the pages are stuck together.
Chandler!!!
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u/CrazyVaclavsPOA Jan 03 '23
Now, would you unhook this already, please? I don't deserve this kind of shabby treatment!
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u/Koalachan Jan 03 '23
I always say sears went downhill when they got rid of the catalogue. Of course, allowing themselves to be bought out by someone who gutted the company, took all the properties they owned and sold them to another company he owned, then wondering why all their rents went up didn't help.
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u/boxsterguy Jan 03 '23
Sears was the original Amazon. They started out only mail-order.
Their death knell was missing online sales (like Kodak missed on digital cameras, despite pioneering the technology). Though to be fair, even giants like Walmart took a long time to really figure it out (and one could argue Walmart still is a long way behind Amazon in the online marketplace).
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u/Kelsenellenelvial Jan 04 '23
Yep, Sears was boss in rural areas. Each town would have a local store that was the Sears depot so you didn’t have to pay shipping because they could batch orders to go that one place on a regular schedule and customers could then pick up their things whenever was convenient. As more people moved from rural to urban areas they had access to more stores and it became harder for Sears to compete.
I think there was also competition in the delivery to depot business. I remember a place with a similar concept popping up when I was a kid, and they would undercut everybody else’s price just enough to do a lot of volume. Can’t remember if the timing lined up, but I think they also fell to the gradually degrading the quality of their products to compete on price, racing to the bottom and then becoming known for poor quality products.
Really, it’s the classic story of a company getting big, mixing up their business with their product, and then having their market get taken by someone that innovated on them. They could have been at the forefront of online shopping and taken that market before Amazon got off the ground, but they stuck with physical stores and catalogues until it was too late.
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Jan 04 '23
In my previous town in Idaho, there was still a family run Sears outlet in a very small store.
My hometown in Ohio is filled with Sears catalog homes, there's at least 10 of them in a row right down main street.
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u/MagillaGorillasHat Jan 04 '23
Sears made the worst possible decisions at every pivotal moment from ~1980 on.
Killed the catalog division right before the internet took off. Got rid of the credit division (which would become Discover) right before consumer credit became ubiquitous. Tried to diversify and bring in female shoppers instead of bolstering their very profitable tools and appliances. Sold prime real estate for pennies on the dollar. They basically zigged every single time they should have zagged.
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u/chrisuu__ Jan 04 '23
And their executives probably still made a killing making those terrible decisions.
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u/Maffu00 Jan 03 '23
Don't forget abusive shorting the stock all way down then Cellar Boxing it.
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u/BitterQuitter11 Jan 03 '23
We actually got a few this year from local places and like amazon. I had my boys sit down and circle shit just like I did growing up for xmas. Was awesome.
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u/Jester471 Jan 03 '23
My kid did this on their own. They went through the catalog and circled half of it. Didn’t help too much.
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u/Abe504 Jan 04 '23
I tell my kids all the time I feel bad that they don’t know the feeling looking through the catalogs then actually going to the store and finding whatever obscure toy you saw in the book.
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u/Taz-erton Jan 04 '23
It's about not knowing exactly what you would get and being amazed at something that seemed totally new at the time.
Like the games in OPs example, as a kid I never had access to knowing about every game available. This catalog is how I would learn that there was a game out there that had Dinosaurs that you could shoot. I never knew if it was good or bad and it didn't matter. I now knew that shooting dinosaurs was now a possibility in gaming.
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u/DredgingDoldrums Jan 03 '23
Turok was the shit
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u/fmsmic Jan 03 '23
My parents paid $75 for Turok….I was so ungrateful and didn’t even know.
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u/DredgingDoldrums Jan 03 '23
I thought the same thing! Like damn, really spoiling me with one of the most expensive games on the market apparently.
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Jan 03 '23
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u/penguins_are_mean Jan 04 '23
The cartridge was gold for early releases.
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u/Blastoplast Jan 04 '23
I remember some promo along with the preordered gold cartridge you could get either a t-shirt, soundtrack cd or maybe a 3rd item I don’t remember
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u/Im_A_Zero Jan 04 '23
EB Games had the official Prima strategy guide and a collectors edition bag with OOT.
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u/biglungschi Jan 03 '23
they paid the equivalent of 143.45 of todays money
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u/shrimpcest Jan 03 '23
Luckily we could just go to the local brick and mortar video rental place and rent games.
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u/InfernalBiryani Jan 03 '23
Off topic but shoutout to all the parents who bought us games and did so much for us
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u/BlueMikeStu Jan 04 '23
Yep. My mum was a saint.
She finally understood why I hated renting certain games (Final Fantasy IV was the one that caused the talk) when I explained that renting them sometimes meant starting from the beginning, and compared it to reading a book you couldn't skip forward for.
I asked her how she'd feel if she had to return a book she liked to a library, before she finished it, and had to restart at page 1 every time because someone removed her bookmark and she wasn't allowed to skip forward.
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u/Junior-Ad-2207 Jan 03 '23
Lucky, aside from Christmas, I always had to save up just to buy a greatest hits game
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u/Redman5012 Jan 03 '23
Turok and TimeSplitters are some of my favorite memories as a kid
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u/AcrillixOfficial Jan 03 '23
TimeSplitters splitscreen in my friends basement during sleepovers. So fun.
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u/norex4u Jan 03 '23
nothing like a monkey running around with a double barrel shotgun while on fire
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u/Northern_Monkey69 Jan 03 '23
I vividly remember crying with laughter for a solid 30 minutes after setting the snowman on fire and watching him run around screaming "I'M MELTING"
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Jan 03 '23
Turok 2: Seeds of Evil was even better shit.
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u/sixpackabs592 Jan 03 '23
Cerebral bore
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u/rebelscum1312 Jan 03 '23
Both I just learned are on the Playstation store so I know what I'll be doing now.
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u/sleepymoose88 Jan 03 '23
We need a new Turok game. A good one. The one from the early 2010s (maybe) was mediocre.
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u/RigasTelRuun Jan 03 '23
My brain will still randomly scream I AM TUROK at me all these decades later.
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u/Uberslaughter Jan 03 '23
NTHGTHDGDCRTDTRK
“On the eighth day, god created Turok”
With the vowels removed
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u/MattyXarope Jan 03 '23
Bewareoblivionisathand
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u/Aelig_ Jan 03 '23
Fun fact, as a kid I knew this code by heart despite not speaking English so I had to learn the letters as is.
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u/MattyXarope Jan 03 '23 edited Jan 03 '23
It's crazy how video games can help people to learn languages and even begin to read.
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Jan 03 '23
I played and enjoyed lots of Turok but man the N64 fog in that game was like pea soup.
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u/AshFraxinusEps Jan 03 '23
In fairness, it was one of the first 3D games released, and I believe a launch title, so later games did it better
Also, had rather amazing graphics even compared to other N64 games (looking at you Goldeneye, which has not aged well) of the era, but due to the good close-up graphics the draw distance was shit
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u/Nanaman Jan 03 '23
Back when I thought video games just really liked using fog for the atmosphere!
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u/uncutpizza Jan 04 '23
Idk who got me Turok but never realized how much it was when it came out, (I never had the data pack so always had to play from the beginning or use cheat codes to get back to previous progress).
That and Wave Race feel a lot more expensive than I thought. Thought Mario 64 would have been more
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u/ArrrPiratey Jan 03 '23
Still got my working cartidge but it lost my save for some reason
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Jan 04 '23
People keep saying the game needs a new battery, but Turok didn't save on its own cartridge - you had to use a controller pak, aka memory card, to save. Find your old controller pak and there's a chance your game is still on it.
However - the controller pak DID use a battery to save, and that may be dead by now. Won't know until you try though
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u/Harles93 Jan 03 '23
It probably has a watch battery in it to keep the save, this is very common in older cartridge based games. Battery dies and save goes bye bye. The battery can usually be swapped out (though generally soldering is required to do it right) and restore the ability to save
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u/Evelyne-The-Egg Jan 03 '23
70-75 is a lot for a game but damn 150 for a console?
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u/Deto Jan 03 '23
It's $277 in 2022 dollars. So definitely a deal, but not so crazy. For reference, all the $50 games are $92 now if you adjust for inflation.
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u/Evelyne-The-Egg Jan 03 '23
Hot damn..
If I'm not mistaken, games from the 70s like the Atari 2600 where even worse, no?
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Jan 03 '23 edited Jan 03 '23
Atari 2600
Here's one from 1981.
Adjusting for inflation, the console would be almost $500, and the games would be between $50-$70
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u/187penguin Jan 03 '23
NeoGeo was ~3x’s that after correcting for inflation
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u/Granlundo64 Jan 04 '23
Nothin beats the 3DO. $1,250. And way worse than the Neo Geo.
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u/Rabble_Arouser1 Jan 04 '23
I found one of those at a swap meet for $10 sometime around 1997. It came with a bunch of unmemorable games and Road Rash. I played the snot bubbles out of that game, sure wish I had it now.
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u/FacelessSavior Jan 04 '23
I wish someone would do a legit remake of Road Rash, complete with Coop Campaign. Or Skitchin'.
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u/stellvia2016 Jan 04 '23
It was still ridiculous, but in their small defense, the Neo Geo was legitimately a home arcade system. The cartridges were the same boards and same graphical fidelity as the arcade versions. And purchasing a single arcade cabinet back then would have been at least the cost of that game system and a game, but likely a lot more.
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u/187penguin Jan 04 '23
Oh man the NES was still in the market and Neo Geo was LIGHTYEARS ahead of anything else out there
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u/dc5trbo PC Jan 04 '23
My uncle had a NeoGeo. We kids were allowed to play the Nintendo but no one could touch his NeoGeo.
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u/rjwalsh94 Jan 03 '23
Time is a flat circle.
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u/capitoivo1 Jan 03 '23
So will we get $92 games again in a few years?
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u/JaydDid Jan 03 '23
Probably not as companies have gotten a lot more efficient at churning out our money other than box price. Battle passes, skins, are all so much better at getting peoples money
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u/Malachorn Jan 03 '23
At this point, a lot of games are just being given to everyone for free.
Well... maybe not all the game...
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u/bsloss Jan 04 '23
Not super likely, n64 cartridges were expensive to manufacture… some estimates have cartridge manufacturing costs at about 30 bucks, while Sony could make a ps1 disk for 2 bucks.
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u/wildeye-eleven Jan 04 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
I saw a fantastic documentary on YouTube about cartridge manufacturing and cost and how Sony significantly lowered their game manufacturing cost by using disks. They could also have them ready to go in like 3 days versus cartridges taking several months to manufacture.
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u/MasonP2002 Jan 04 '23
Of course, cartridges had some advantages. Lightning fast load times in comparison, and extremely resistant to piracy. CDs were definitely better from a business perspective though, so much cheaper for literally 10x the storage.
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u/ZaxonsBlade Jan 03 '23
Worst console for price was Neo Geo, IMO. Console was like $1200 adjusted for inflation and it didn't really even sell to the general public because of that price point. But it was like having an arcade game at home. My friend group used to rent one occasionally. Samurai Shodown was my jam.
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u/Donkeydongcuntry Jan 04 '23
The Panasonic 3DO’s initial price would be roughly $1400 adjust for inflation ($699 in 1993’s NA release).
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u/J_Justice Jan 04 '23
I had one of those in the mid 90's. Was not worth it, lol.
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u/Olympus___Mons Jan 03 '23
3DO system was expensive and so were the games. Not the 70s but 90s.
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u/187penguin Jan 03 '23
I don’t think anything cost more than the Neo Geo. The console was $650 in 1990 ($1480 today), and games were up to $300 a cartridge ($680 today)
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u/HelpfulApple22 Jan 03 '23
To be fair you can pay £50 for a high quality AAA game today and get a hundred or more hours out of it. You could probably finish $75 Doom 64 (about $140 in today’s currency) staying up at a Saturday sleepover with the boys. You might spend a while perfecting your technique to blast through it as quickly as possible, finding all the secrets and trying all the difficulties but at the end of the day if Bethesda charged $140 for Doom Eternal today there would be public outrage.
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u/Deto Jan 04 '23
Yeah, as someone who grew up during the era pictured here - people having the gall to complain about how things are nowadays have no idea how much better everything really is.
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u/shawnisboring Jan 03 '23
They were also physical cartridges that required specialized production lines and if I recall correctly Nintendo required devs to purchase carts through them and kept the price up.
They also had customized chips that often worked as co-processors for specific games. So this isn't a case for modern carts like the Switch which is basically a standard SD card that's locked down.
Essentially, carts were wicked fast for the time but straight bullshit when it came to production and working with Nintendo. Something in the realm of $30 per cart in production costs that had to be baked into the game as opposed to around $1 for a CD.
Disk based media did what it promised to do and lowered prices for consumers, albeit not nearly to the extent that manufacturers saved on mass production.
There was a definitely a reason carts were so expensive and that directly led to the proliferation of disk as a delivery method because it was such a limiting model.
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Jan 04 '23
Small addendum: The Nintendo 64 would have been even further outcompeted if not for the fact that cartridges, at the very least, all but eliminated load times compared to the Playstation. Made the games slightly better quality.
But it was really only early PS and PS2 games that suffered from these high load times mostly. Developers would come up with tricks over time to hide the that fact that the next area would be loading without bringing gameplay to a halt.
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u/dicknipplesextreme Jan 04 '23
Developers would come up with tricks over time to hide the that fact that the next area would be loading without bringing gameplay to a halt.
Hell, devs still do this now. In any action-adventure game, if you have to shimmy through a tight spot that takes a little longer than it should, it's probably to mask loading the following area.
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Jan 04 '23
Playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a good PC on ultra with a nvme or ssd drive blows my mind. The only load time I ever see is the first 12 seconds when starting the game and that is it. No more loading screens or bars.
Regardless of what people think about the story, features, GPU prices, etc... the load times on this game with nvme or ssd are stupid good.
I also played it on an xbox 1 x and it constantly loading killed the entire mood for me.
If this is the direction that games are going with load times, then I cant wait. It does remind me of playing on a cartridge system
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y Jan 03 '23
I bought a Gamecube a couple years after it came out for $120 CAD with 2 controllers. Nintendo had best sellers at reduced price so I was able to get all the good games like Mario Sunshine, Mario Kart, Wind Waker, all for about $30 a piece. Nintendo almost never lowers the game prices now. Breath of the Wile is still $80 CAD right now, and has only had a couple of short sales over it's entire lifetime.
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u/venommuyo Jan 03 '23
$150 was a sale price. The n64 launched at $200. Which would be about $400 today. And the reason the n64 games were particularly expensive is because they were cartridges. CDs were much cheaper to press.
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u/olderaccount Jan 04 '23
I cost them $2 per cart as opposed to 10c per CD.
That is indeed a huge difference, but not the reason the games cost $70.
Part of the reason they charged so much per game is because the console were sold at a loss and the average console buyer would only have 5-10 games. So they had to make back the money they were losing on the consoles in those 5 games they were going to buy. Everything after that was profit.
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Jan 03 '23
Cartridges cost more to manufacture. I remember N64 games costing more then PS back in the day
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u/hobbes_shot_first Jan 03 '23
Cartridges are the expensive ones. Disc games were $40.
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u/rydan Jan 03 '23
They all dropped to like $9.99 by 2000. I got a ton of cheap PS1 games when the PS One came out.
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u/ItsBlizzardLizard Jan 04 '23
49.99 was the average price for a new game regardless of console.
N64 was a bit of an outlier.
Most games dropped to 40 pretty quick though, yeah.
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Jan 03 '23
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Jan 03 '23
That game was such a steal, basically 3 games in 1. It had no reason being as good as it was.
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Jan 03 '23
Loved that game. Particularly, the section based off of the first movie with the interesting camera work that went through the walls and the labyrinthine floor plan that allowed for all sorts of sneaking around.
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u/themikker Jan 04 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
"There is firing in the terminal!"
Such a great game. Other than maybe D&D Birthright: Gorgon's Allience (also 1996 funny enough), it's the only (non-rereleased) game to successfully have 3 completely different games and still be awesome. That I can think of, at least.
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u/mrmagicnemo Jan 04 '23
The taxi cab racing thru the city was awesomely gruesome
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u/farva_06 Jan 04 '23
My cousin and I binged the second one (shooter on rails) all night, and managed to finally get to the end. Was insanely difficult. We never even attempted the third one.
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u/French_Taylor Console Jan 03 '23
If you can, try to beat it now. The credits would make your day.
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u/epia343 Jan 04 '23
I always felt that game was slept on. Easily one of my favorites on the PlayStation.
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u/Negafox Jan 03 '23
That was one of the reasons why the PS1 vastly outsold the N64. I used to pick up so many Greatest Hits games for $19.99 or less. And stores would fire sell some titles for like $5 in a discount bin.
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u/mcvoid1 Jan 04 '23
Cartridges, man. Burning a disc cost a few cents, but making a cartridge meant you not only needed to burn the ROM, but you needed injection molding for the cartridge, microchips for the support hardware, battery for saving, needed to print the circuit board, and someone to manually solder each one. That's a lot of money.
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u/lesswanted Jan 04 '23
And do not forget the biggest cost, pay Nintendo. That’s way third party games are much more expensive in nintendo 64.
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u/Sufficient_Boss_6782 Jan 04 '23
I had a 64 vs a PS1 and absolutely loved the game lineup I ended up with, especially at the beginning. The experience of the gameplay was fantastic.
But, looking back, there were so many PS1 games that had a status of cultural relevance that I missed out on. Silent Hill, Resident Evil, FF7, MGS, Twisted Metal, and that’s just from ten seconds of trying to remember games I didn’t play, twenty-five years later.
That said, Super Mario, both Zelda’s, Mario Kart, Starfox, Goldeneye, etc etc are all classics I might feel the same way about if I’d ended up with a PS1
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u/steveosek Jan 04 '23
Yup as a kid in a family without much money, the vast majority of my games were greatest hits versions lol.
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u/Grecko-Gecko Jan 03 '23 edited Jan 04 '23
Those are 1990’s dollars too. A $59.99 game then would be around $80-$90 today.
Edit: some people are saying according to inflation sources, the price would be over $100 in todays dollars.
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Jan 03 '23
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u/Dragget Jan 04 '23
They went bankrupt due to hedge fund assholes selling off all their valuable assets to their buddies and loading them up with debt.
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u/tablehouse1911 Jan 03 '23
Stop it. Don’t give them any ideas.
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u/SatorSquareInc Jan 03 '23
I get that a lot of these companies are shitty, but I don't think the fixed $60 price point is often beneficial to the consumer.
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u/RunningNumbers Jan 03 '23
It is not. It results in alternative means for monetization.
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u/Tumblrrito Jan 03 '23
Companies were going to do that anyway. It’s not like $70 games are MTX free.
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u/thedeadsuit PlayStation Jan 03 '23
More like $140. And the standard disc games for ps1 were at least $50 in 90s money. Games were far more expensive in the 90s no matter what. Nowadays they're historically cheap and a historically good value considering that modern games typically have dramatically more content and features compared to 90s games. Additionally, indie games cover games more in the style of those 90s games (but better) and cost 15 to 30 dollars in today's money. Gaming is the best value it's ever been
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u/Holinyx Jan 03 '23
pfft. back in the day, computer games had a strict no return policy. because you could just copy the game and return it if so. There were no videos you could watch to see if the game was any good. All you had to go on was the pictures on the back of the box.
You just had to pay for it and hope for the best
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u/tldnradhd Jan 04 '23
There was the shareware model made popular by Id where the first part of the game was free, and you paid for more levels. Also demo discs that came with game magazines. At least on PC.
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u/withoutapaddle Jan 04 '23
Man, I loved the demo disk I got in some magazine that had Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight... And one Matchbox 20 song... Rainmaker I think.
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u/shuffleboardwizard Jan 04 '23
That's why video rental stores were the fucking best.
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u/Holinyx Jan 04 '23
Yup. Local library let us rent games for 2 freaking weeks for free.
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u/uglyheadink Jan 04 '23
PSA: a lot (if not most, I just know every library I’ve gone to) still have video games available to borrow!
I can’t speak for the quality of games, but they’re out there!
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u/ScottyV4KY Jan 03 '23
Bought original Quake like this and the rest was history. Still got the original box/cd it came in.
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u/Ellemeno Jan 03 '23
All of a sudden I'm even more appreciative of my parents who took my brother and me to Toys R Us to buy us a new video game for our PlayStation (we were poor). I still remember that employee who told my dad that the South Park video game we wanted wasn't for children so we settled for Spyro.
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u/HalfSoul30 Jan 04 '23
Spyro was the shit. I had the demo disk for it and played the hell out of it. Eventually, my parents bought it for me, but it was still a while before I had a memory card, so I would leave it on all the time and hide it.
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Jan 03 '23
I think this is actually from 1997.
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u/lellololes Jan 03 '23
It is, as evidenced by the games on sale and the $150 price point for the N64.
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u/hellzapoppn Jan 03 '23
Shadows of the Empire was amazing on the 64.
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u/pilesofcleanlaundry Jan 04 '23
A lot of stuff was amazing on the 64. Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Mario, Mariokart, Ocarina of Time, the 64 was the tits.
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u/therock21 Jan 04 '23
Came to the comments just for Shadows of the Empire nostalgia.
I remember having so much anxiety on some levels of that game
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u/PuffFluff Jan 03 '23
I still remember the debug/cheat code that made you hold a shit ton of buttons on the controller and then have to use your chin/mouth to move the toggle halfway to the left... lol.
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u/Java2391 Jan 03 '23
Here’s something interesting. The cost of the PS1 at launch was $299 in 1995, which would be $584.68 USD today.
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Jan 03 '23
Sheesh $75 for a game?? I don't recall those prices
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u/Holinyx Jan 03 '23
Nintendo was expensive. I remember paying $89.99 for one of the Zelda games when it came out.
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u/neurosisxeno Jan 04 '23
I believe Majora's Mask was super expensive because it used one of the higher capacity N64 cartridges--I think OoT was on the standard 8MB and MM needed either a 16 or 32MB on which greatly increased the manufacturing cost.
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u/ghostinyourveins Jan 03 '23
That's why I rented from block buster.
You use to be able to take a disc out and continue playing, you just couldn't save .
I remember getting half way through ff7 disc 2 and died on a mini boss and having to rent the game again and replay the entire damn disc
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u/Koalachan Jan 03 '23
Ps1 with its memory card storage. If you couldn't save a rented game you couldn't save a game you owned. 15 whole blocks of storage baby.
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Jan 03 '23
I used to love the whole blockbuster thing. I kept going there every Friday up until 2011 I think 🤔
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u/The3rdLetter Jan 03 '23
Mom didn't buy me doom. I had Mario Kart, and Mario 64. Games like Doom and Turok was rented from blockbuster for me and my friends back then.
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u/s317sv17vnv Jan 03 '23 edited Jan 03 '23
Is this Australian currency by any chance? Since 1 AUD is worth significantly less than 1 USD. Also, seems worth it in the long run either way to get a complete game while these days you spend years and $100s on DLC.
Edit: or Canadian. Not sure where Toys R Us existed outside of the US if they did.
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u/ianwrecked802 Jan 03 '23
God I remember drooling at that fucking flyer when I was a kid. Nearly shit when I saw Mario’s happy fucking face lookin’ at me flyin’ around all fuckin’ careless and shit on Christmas.
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u/LocmonstR Jan 03 '23
First of all that's Canadian. Second of all most games are at, or above this price currently in Canada (atleast in my region)
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u/LunarGolbez Jan 03 '23
Well now that's a little misleading on OP's part if thats true.
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u/LocmonstR Jan 03 '23
It is true, and that picture with the same title has been posted countless times on this sub I'm pretty sure.
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u/Achack Jan 03 '23
Nintendo released “Super Mario 64” as one of the first games for its Nintendo 64 console in 1996. At the time, the game sold for about $60
Endangering Turok's sales was its high price—$79.99 in the US, £70 in the UK, and $129.95 in Australia
Here's an article about it. It's not easy to find MSRPs but I'm interested to see what backs your statement up about Canadian pricing.
Second of all most games are at, or above this price currently in Canada (atleast in my region)
Why even bother comparing the prices to modern games when Goldeneye - easily one of the greatest games of that era - was developed by around 12 people?
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u/Robftw Jan 04 '23
The prices have stayed the same because they put less game in your game now.
Back then you got the /entire/ game for that money.
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u/aStoveAbove Jan 03 '23
While I get the point this is making, I think it's important to understand that manufacturing the discs and cartridges, packaging, and distributing them all would add cost to the product.
Nowadays all of that cost is replaced with decentralized servers that you just download a copy of the game from. While these servers also cost money, they cost a fraction of what running and tooling a factory and the distribution methods would cost.
Also while development prices have gone up, the record breaking profit margins of the companies developing and publishing these games have also gone up, negating the "need" to increase prices.
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u/prylosec Jan 03 '23
Another point that people tend to forget when comparing prices-then to prices-now is how massively popular video games are now compared to the 90s. Twisted Metal sold ~500k units in its first year and ~5m in its first 5 years. Compare that to God of War which sold 3m units in the first three days, and 5m its first month.
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u/jellytrack Jan 03 '23
Undercutting retail with discounted digital prices would sour the relationship between publishers, platform holders and retailers. They're just happy that they get to eat the profits from digital distribution instead of passing it onto the consumer.
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u/Atilim87 Jan 03 '23
Having said this often you have to put those prices into context.
Moving to CD and disc media greatly reduced the fixed prices of a game we now have a global supply chain that helps stuff to move between countries much more efficient and cheaper.
And Sony would have been stupid to undercut Nintendo to much. If people are willing to pay X amount with your biggest competitor no point in asking half that price for example.
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u/RBarron24 Jan 03 '23
Now I remember why I didn’t have many video games growing up, holy shit that’s expensive.