Reminisce About the Late '90s

[Thief]

Man I fancied her.

Yeah, she looks real hot in that video.

[Iron Lizard]

I had just graduated high school. I had just got a 66 Pontiac Lemans in very nice shape and started dating a girl that that was way too hot for me. She had grown up with Sega though and actually still had her Master System with 3d glasses not that I was playing many video games. I also was in band. We were getting quite a few gigs which were pretty hard to get in Tucson then. As far pop culture went that was absolute pits. Kids were everywhere with with dyed tips, wearing Jncos driving Honda's with fart cans. Fast Hondas are pretty common now but back then they were far and few. My brother had a 92 5.0 Mustang and would give those kids rides and scare the shit out of them. That was when a 14 second car was still fairly fast. Nasper was like magic. The freaking coolest thing ever. We used to bring our computers to our friends work that had a t1 connection I believe and steal gobs of music. He did tech at a hospital and worked all night long alone so yeah lots of music and teenage drinking. My other buddy wanted to go to strip club, one of the few that let kids under 21 in, for New Years. Glad I missed out on that one. My mom picked up what we then called a "digital phone". That also was like magic. I used to go to lot of concerts everything from Malignus Youth to the Aquabats. The Phantom Menace was the opposite of Napster and Digital Phones. So very bad. We waited so long for that. Oddly enough it still sucks but seems no worse than all that followed. I feel like Grandpa Simpson writing this.

[Devil N]

Let's see, 1999... that was a year when I was fully immersed in computers and video games. I was 15 at the time, and very eager to learn anything I could about computers. It was also the last full year where I was still on dial-up internet. We got cable broadband somewhere in 2000, so in 1999 I was still very much limited in how much time I could spend online, chatting with girls of my age and downloading anything I could at 2 kB/sec. Strangely, it also meant I managed to get a lot of things done, because there wasn't this constant distraction that you get with unlimited internet access.

The two games that dominated 1999 for me were Final Fantasy VIII and Quake III Arena. Living in Europe meant Final Fantasy games always came out at least half a year after the American release, so I had all the opportunity to get psyched by all the media that sites were releasing of the game. Sometimes that meant waiting an entire afternoon for a postage stamp-sized video of 30 MB to download, but man was it awesome when it was finally done. FF8 got me so hyped up that I even bought an expensive magazine with a demo disc of the game on the day of release just so I got to play the game a few hours earlier. Ironically, the full game was something of a disappointment to me. Sure, it looked and sounded fantastic, but the game never explains itself well, both in terms of story and gameplay, and it mostly left my 15-year old brain dumbfounded. It wasn't until years later that I managed to appreciate FF8 for what it was and properly finish it.

Then there's Quake III, a game that single-handedly defined the online gaming scene of that game. It's also a game that was continuously teased throughout the year, up until its release in early December. There were various pre-release demos distributed over the internet, primarily intended to test the networking code. That meant I had to regularly keep our PC and its dial-up modem on all night to download an 80 MB installer. Needless to say my parents weren't very happy with the telephone bill at the end of the month. But it was glorious. Sure I had to contend with a 250 ms ping time, constant packet loss and overall jerky gameplay, but I managed to get good at the game like that. Even joined a few clans throughout the year, though I quickly discovered that competitive gaming wasn't really my thing. I mostly play for the fun of it and man, did Quake III deliver that in spades.

Quake is also the game that got me into game programming early on. I had already played around with Quake 1's scripting language called QuakeC for a while. When the Quake III test demos arrived, people quickly started reverse engineering its assets and releasing tools to convert those into editable files. During the summer vacation I spent hours using those tools to port a large amount of Quake III's art and gameplay features over to Quake 1, turning it into something of a Q1/Q3-hybrid game. It was loads of fun to do, worked remarkably well and set me up for bigger and better things in the near future. Sadly I lost the entire thing in a hard drive crash back in 2003, when online cloud backups weren't really a thing yet, so that's one of my creations I'll never get back. Quake III is also the game that got me my start into C programming, by modding the game code that was open sourced shortly after the game's release. Though technically that's probably something that happened mostly in 2000.

In all, 1999 was a pretty good year for me. With all the hobbying, tinkering and gaming that I did, it's hard to believe that I did just fine in school as well.

[edit]
Awww, I managed to forget the release of The Matrix and the impact that movie had. Maybe something for a followup post.

[j_factor]

1999 was the year Beatmania and Dance Dance Revolution took off in arcades here, and interest in fighting games was clearly on the decline, despite Third Strike. I remember the Dreamcast launch very clearly, but I wasn't interested in getting one because I'd been a Saturn owner until the end and switched to Playstation only a year prior, and Playstation was keeping me busy. However I did play a lot of Sega's arcade games still, and I was pretty impressed with the Naomi and its games. I also was one of the few to get a Neo Geo Pocket Color soon after the US launch. My impression of the hardware was kinda middling tbh -- the screen is a lot better than the Game Boy Color, but otherwise, it's more powerful but not really impressive. I had a very positive impression of the games though. I wished it had more games, but literally most of the games that did come out were high-quality. I had a Game Boy Color too, but I barely touched it. I was a bit old for Pokemon and couldn't get into it; otherwise its library was extremely lacklustre IMO. I was never a huge PC gamer, but I played a lot of Starcraft, System Shock 2, Caesar III, and Civilization II. All that said, the lion's share of my gaming was on the Playstation. It had a great year, and I was still exploring its earlier games too. I didn't dislike the Dreamcast or its games, but I didn't really feel like I was missing out either. I also never had an N64, and I most definitely didn't feel like I was missing out there.

[DrBackhands]

I can't remember if this is in '98 or '99... but my family lived in Orlando at the time and we were visiting Disney's EPCOT as we so frequently did. If you've never been to EPCOT, behind the large "Spaceship Earth" ball that is so iconic, there are two buildings that act as a permanent world's fair known as "Innoventions" (innovation + invention). If you want something that perfectly capitulates 90's futurism, look it up on YouTube, the area music alone is a soundtrack to that whole decade.

Anyway, Sega and Disney had an interesting partnership at the time such that since it's inception, Innoventions frequently showcased Sega products. In '99 they underwent a huge renovation to accommodate the coming Millennium, and I believe this was the first time they added a section dedicated to human health and technology. In that section, there was a video projected onto a screen explaining the possible relationship between video games and brain tumors, though I could be remembering some details incorrectly. In that video, to explain gamings role in this relationship, they used footage from the very recently released Sonic Adventure for the Dreamcast. Since I was a die-hard Sega fan as a young child, I was appalled to see Sonic's name linked to brain tumors. It bothered me for the rest of our time at Epcot that day, and to be fair, it's probably not the best marketing strategy on Sega's part. And that's my '99 memory!

[JCU]

Y2K!

[Team Saber Rider]

October 1999 >>> I started to work for Nintendo of Europe and stayed there for 6 years.
Had many great Soul Calibur fights on the Dreamcast in our storage room.

[QuickSciFi]

October 1999 >>> I started to work for Nintendo of Europe and stayed there for 6 years.
Had many great Soul Calibur fights on the Dreamcast in our storage room.

This deserves rep. So... here you go.