I had a C64 as a kid, and I was an absolute outlier. I would have had an NES if my mom had allowed it. A couple of friends had C64s, but they were rare. And then I had an Amiga, which, well, I didn't know anyone else in my town who had one, though I was lucky enough to have a local Amiga store called "Amigo Computing." Even when I got to college, there was nobody else.

There are, of course, C64 emulators and mini C64s and those poor souls who long to keep the Amiga alive, but none of it is what I would call culturally relevant. See also: the 80s-90s BBS scene. Our own Jason Scott made that awesome documentary, which was awesome (even if I wasn't in it!), but nobody in the general public knows what a BBS is or was. So much information just gets lost to the sands of time and the myopic eye of commerce. And then on top of that you have the US cultural hegemony and what I consider toxic and weird AF gatekeeping about "real games."
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:32 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]

Gentrification seems like a not especially apt metaphor for what the author is talking about, but I hope that minor critique doesn't keep people from engaging with the article, because it's really an interesting perspective.

There's a lot of gatekeeping about what counts as a real game, and, for a long time, the games that counted were mostly the ones played by Americans and Western Europeans, mostly white men, on expensive PCs and state-of-the-art consoles.

You can see the same kind of dynamics play out in other kinds of media--movies, tv, pop music., etc., etc. And if something didn't make somebody a lot of money, there's a good chance it will be left out of the history.
posted by box at 2:46 PM on January 3 [2 favorites]

My c64 had about 300 (mostly pirated) games. I feel bad for NES owners honestly.
posted by Popular Ethics at 2:57 PM on January 3 [3 favorites]

It felt like NZ was mostly C64/Spectrum territory for gaming during the mid-80's to early-90's (tape/disk trading at school was massive - I suspect you picked your platform based on who had the biggest catalog of available games to trade/pirate). That type of thing was nigh on impossible with a console.

At the time, it felt like the best games came from the UK (Jeff Minter, Andrew Braybrook, David Braben etc). Then the Amiga and x86 PC's came along.

I'm not sure the NES or Consoles really took off and went mainstream in the home (Arcades were pretty big outside the home as a place to hang-out tho') here until the PS1. Then again, I was a poor Uni student so there was a awareness/knowledge gap between the C64 and being able to afford a PS1 or 2.
posted by phigmov at 3:12 PM on January 3

One of the great classic bits of non-Anglosphere video game history is Sega's relationship with Tec Toy, a Brazilian toy and electronics company. Unable to import its products into Brazil, they instead worked with Tec Toy to manufacture their consoles there. In addition to existing games, Brazil received exclusive titles in three categories:

1. Master System ports of Game Gear games that didn't already have them, since Brazil never got the Game Gear
2. Modified versions of first-party Master System games featuring Brazilian characters like Monica and El Chapulin Colorado
3. Exclusive games, mostly based on Brazilian properties like Castelo Ra-Tim-Bum and Sítio do Picapau Amarelo (Yellow Woodpecker Farm - not the only beloved woodpecker-related work in Brazil, which is why Woody Woodpecker also get an exclusive game)

There was even an official Sega game show, Play Game, best known for spawning the Brazilian Eggman/QUATRO MIL PONTOS meme, but which also managed to pull a Nick Arcade by having a final round that green-screened players into a video game - achieved using at least two Alex Kidd games with the player's sprites erased from the ROM. The rest of the show even featured an interactive interface coded for the Sega Genesis.
posted by BiggerJ at 3:44 PM on January 3 [3 favorites]

There is a common running joke in the UK retrocomputing/gaming scene, which is that Americans believe that video games went from Atari to Nintendo to PlayStation, and maybe there was something about home computers in there if you were some kind of nerd. But I noted in the year-end roundup of the Retro Adventurers (a podcast about old text adventures that is trying to avoid the US-centric "It was all Infocom" bias) that those of us who had Commodore 64-compatible systems into the early 90s noticed that all of the games advertised in the US magazines seemed to be produced by UK houses.

It's been a lot of fun (as an immigrant to the UK these past two decades) reviewing games that the British-born hosts remember from their youth, but which never made it to the US. Often the very platforms they ran on (such as the ZX Spectrum) were rare in the US.

A friend of mine who grew up in Brazil has fond memories of MSX systems, which I had to admit I'd never even heard of until he brought them up! It really seems like they defined what 8-bit home computing was in countries that hadn't had an Apple/Commodore or Acorn/Sinclair market battle in their front gardens.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:18 PM on January 3 [1 favorite]

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