In the nineties, we had fun as we could: beat the grass with sticks, threw knives into trees, watched Transformers on TV and read books about pirates. Plus, of course, we played – “on Dandy”, “on Sega”, “on a computer”, and who started in the eighties – also “on the Spectrum”. We got along without the Internet, and until the mid-nineties – and without a sensible press. Industry news reached us in the retelling of hucksters from stalls in clothing markets. But we overcame and still enjoyed our favorite games. Now I will turn on the grandfather with a stick mode especially for you and tell you how it was.
Codebooks
In most games of the nineties, cheats were built in – for immortality, for skipping levels, for various other nonsense. The developers kept them to themselves to make testing easier. All these secret combinations, like IDDQD or Konami Code, were printed in Russia in thin books with titles like “1000 best games for Sega Mega Drive”. There were also descriptions of secrets (for example, where in Sonic the Hedgehog 3there are entrances to bonus levels), tips for passing and any other information that the author of the booklet was able to dig up in the Western print and online press. The texts were often stolen (one of the publishers in the late nineties printed a dozen of my reviews, signing them with a false name), replete with factual errors and invented cheat codes, but it was from such trash journalism that I suddenly learned about the existence of the Japanese RPG genre in 1992 and games Phantasy Star 2. And without the books with codes it was impossible to play Mortal Kombat – where else can you get combinations for super attacks and fatalities? You won’t find a movelist in the game itself.
Tents with games
Today we argue about where it is better to buy games – on Steam or in the Epic Store, and in the nineties we bought them either from the trays in the radio or clothing markets, or in free-standing stalls. On the left they sell gum, on the right – Turkish sneakers, pickpockets scamper along the rows, bandits cover all this beauty, but the schoolchildren don’t care – they stand next to a pickup truck, in the back of which disks or cartridges are scattered, and rummage in search of new products. The beauty! Romance of the devastation of the 90s! But in those days, it was usually allowed to exchange used games for new ones with a surcharge. So it was possible for little money to try almost all the hits. And this was important because pirated games for Mega Drive in 1996, adjusted for inflation, cost about the same as licensed games for PlayStation 4 now ($ 200,000). rubles for the new pirate Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for the current money – 3800 rubles). And if you also remember the beggarly salaries from the nineties, you are completely surprised how our parents gave us money for at least one cartridge.
Just in case, the most famous markets with games in the 90s are Gorbushka in Moscow and Juno in St. Petersburg, as well as a tent near Kuznetsky Most. The latter has grown into one popular online video game store.
Collections 3000 in 1
Currently, games, with the exception of retro compilations, are sold separately. In the nineties, it was perfectly normal to sell several at once on one physical medium. PC fans will probably remember compilations like Best Flight Simulators or Best Strategies, where several dozen games could fit on one CD (most are disgusting outdated nonsense, but some are really good). But there was at least some logic in forming the list. Dendy was even more fun: on the shelves were cartridges with four or eight games that had nothing to do with each other. An incomprehensible platformer in Japanese, “Tetris” and a boring game about Rambo could go in addition to the coolest Contra. The worst, however, were collections in the spirit of 5000: 1, where formally there were 5000 games, but in fact – 4990 varieties of Battle City and something else in the appendage.
Castrated games
Photo by that.other.petra.guy
One nasty problem of the nineties is closely related to the theme of the collections – the castration of games by pirates. They tried their best to reduce the volume of data, so that more games could fit into the collection of the next “Best Strategies”, so they simply throw out the plot videos and music from them (some games because of this hang tightly somewhere in the middle). Already at the beginning of the 2000s, this story continued on the Sega Dreamcast, where the data from a custom 1.2 GB media had to be cut for regular CDs. Here it is useful to remember the pirate “russections”, which could make games completely impassable, and nothing could be fixed (there was no Internet, no patches) – just return the disc to the store and yell at the seller (if the physical form allowed).
Defective cartridges
On consoles with cartridges – Famicom / NES (from which Dendy was copied) and Mega Drive – in really long games (for example, RPG in the spirit of Final Fantasy or Shadowrun) it was possible to save. For this, the cartridge was provided with a non-volatile memory powered by a battery. On Dendy, pirates simply did not produce cartridges with saves (that is why they did not hear about Final Fantasy in Russia), and on Mega Drive sometimes everything worked fine (just put a fresh battery), and sometimes the memory was broken and did not save data. Well, and at the same time about cartridges: people from the nineties remember the ritual “blow off the dust” well. Poor contact between the cartridge and the console caused the game to fail to launch or freeze without warning.
Multiplayer by modem
The lack of the Internet did not prevent playing online games with friends, and for free. To do this, it was enough to buy a modem and call a friend, and then arrange a Deathmatch or Co-op for two. There were two drawbacks: the phone is constantly busy, and the connection keeps breaking. When it was completely annoying, you could visit a friend with a computer and establish a direct cord connection, “via a null modem” (even without a network card). The pinnacle of this whole story was LAN parties – you collect several computers in one place, throw the net and play with friends from morning to evening. I tried all these options, first with Duke 3D, and then with StarCraft: I played hundreds of hours, and I figured out how to set up a modem and a network card so that I could easily go to work as a system administrator. Of course, you could just go to the computer club and pay your uncle money, but much nicer,
FIDO culture
What if there is no Internet or it is too expensive? Communicate on the free FIDO network. It worked something like this: several times a day you (“point” – that is, a simple user) connect via modem to the entry point (“node”), the mail client automatically sends all outgoing correspondence (letters, messages, files, technical requests) and accepts all incoming. In the so-called “echo conferences” (an analogue of later forums and current groups in social networks) they discussed everything: there were “echoes” about games and science fiction. You read everything offline, write a bunch of answers to all posts, then call the node – and within a few hours you will be read by other users all over Russia or even from abroad, and tomorrow you will download their answers. Slowly, but you value every word and do not write nonsense.
During the heyday of FIDO, users exchanged games on floppy disks, plus games of several megabytes in size could be downloaded from FIDO or BBS. There was no need to pay for FIDO, but FIDO could be kicked out for bad behavior; three violations – and you will be thrown out of the “echo”, and if you completely misled the coast, you will be disconnected from the network forever. Good!
This was great
There are many funny things to remember about the nineties. For example, how some PC quests were protected from piracy by the fact that at some point the user had to, for example, enter the word printed on page 13 and line 34 in the official accompanying booklet. Or how gamers would print hundreds of pages of GameFAQs codes on a dot matrix printer and try in vain to execute Nudality in Mortal Kombat. There were other stories: once my classmate was hit on the head in the yard and taken away Mega Drive along with the entire collection of cartridges.
And all the same it was a great time, because in Dendy, as in the advertising slogan, everyone really played, and Russia really discovered the magical world of computer and video games.
