10 Signs You Were A Gamer In The 90s

Can you name all 151 original Pokemon?

May 28, 2013

Image via Complex Original

The 90s was a great time to be a kid and a gamer. Some might argue it was the best time for gaming—there were no micro-transactions or online passes, and heavy hitters like Nintendo, Sega and Square Enix were knocking them out of the park with every release.

Talk to any gamer in their twenties now about their top favorite games and it's practically guaranteed they'll go into a nostalgia-tinged rant about a Mario, Pokémon or Final Fantasy game from the 90s. And rightfully so, since those were some of the best games ever made.

You already know if you were a true gamer kid in the 90s. You feel it every day when you think back on all those Saturday mornings filled with Pokémon cartoons. Occasionally you can still feel the outline of your Gameboy Color in your pocket, even though it's not there. And sometimes there's nothing you'd rather do than get the old gang together for some Goldeneye 007 multiplayer.

Here are ten more signs you were a gamer in the 90s.

You thought Mew lived under a truck.

Back before the internet could tell you the answer to any question instantly, games used to have secrets that weren't immediately discovered upon their release. The existence of Mew—the legendary 151st Pokémon—was one such secret.

Nintendo kept a lid on it for a while, but when it finally got out that there was another, secret Pokémon, kids went wild trying to find it. The best and most widespread rumor was that for some reason the all-powerful Mew lived under truck on a shitty dock. It was impossible to move the truck, and it was utter bullshit, but that didn't stop us from trying, did it?

You know what this is.

Kids today can't even fathom why a Game Boy Camera would exist, but back in the 90s it was an essential tool for any gamer. Why? Cell phones, much less cell phones with cameras and games built in, wouldn't exist for years still, and the Game Boy Camera allowed us to take pictures wherever we went.

Of course, they were awful, pixelated, black and white pictures. But how could we live without it? And with a Game Boy Printer, we could even print them out. You know, because that was totally a necessary thing that we had to do.

You remember the button combo for a fatality.

Back in the 90s, before companies could charge you extra for content that should have been included in games in the first place, there was a thing called "cheat codes." They involved pressing a series of buttons in a nonsensical order until something unexpected happened. Most games had them, though none do today.

In Mortal Kombat, when the announcer yelled "Finish him," you could enter specific button combos and your fighter would perform a brutal, horrific, grotesque, wonderful "fatality" kill. Of course modern Mortal Kombat games are still brutal, but back then you couldn't just look everything up online. And we had the fatality combos, of course, and we're pretty sure we can still remember at least one of them.

You never played every level in Super Mario World.

Mario games today feature branching paths that allow you to skip entire "worlds" so you have to go back and play them once you inevitably fight Bowser in the last level. But in the 90s, things were a lot less transparent.

You could skip swathes of levels at a time in Super Mario World, but only if you had a keen eye for shortcuts and the patience to hump the top of every green pipe in the hopes it would send you down to some subterranean secret. Hell, you could beat the whole game in a dozen levels if you knew what you were doing. And if you were a kid gamer in the 90s you definitely knew what you were doing when it came to Super Mario World.

You thought these graphics were incredibly realistic.

If there's one area where games have definitely improved in the last couple decades, it's graphics. We can admit that. Even though we love the old-school pixelated look of modern, retro games like Fez, for the most part games look better today.

Especially when you look at games like Final Fantasy 7 that were trying so hard to look realistic back then. We thought they looked great at the time, but now it looks more like the artist's dog ate the graphics and threw them up the night before the game was due and they didn't have time to redo them.

You actually looked forward to new Sonic games.

Few characters have fallen further in the world than Sonic the Hedgehog. Now when Sega announces a new Sonic game most fans just roll their eyes and go back to player Call of Duty, but back in the day a new Sonic game was a big event.

This was back when Sega was making consoles, too (that's right, kids—it used to be Sega vs. Nintendo, not Sony vs. Microsoft! Microsoft wasn't even a thing!). And Sonic actually rivaled Mario in terms of popularity—or that's what Sega fanboys would tell themselves, anyway.

You thought first person shooters were perfect with only four players.

Sure, some gamers in the 90s were playing Quake deathmatches on PC, but most kids had only just discovered first-person shooters with Goldeneye 007 on N64. But what a discovery it was!

There was nothing better than binging on Goldeneye multiplayer and pizza all night with your three best friends. And why would you ever need to play with more than four players at a time? Those were simpler days, for sure.

You have scars from the palm blisters.

In the 90s, we would have bought literally any game with "Mario" in the title. That's probably how weird spin-off franchises like Mario Tennis and Mario Golf got so damn popular. In the midst of all this came Mario Party—a virtual board game with a slew of mini-games that tasked players simply with rotating the N64 controller's damnable, hard plastic joystick as quickly as possible.

Most kids quickly figured out that the best way to do so was with your palm, and then immediately afterward figured out how much blisters in the middle of your hand fucking hurt.

You know this character's name.

There is literally not one single gamer who grew up in the 90s and did not swear that either The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time or The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was the best game ever made. Some even preferred Ocarina of Time, and that's okay. Live and let live, right?

The real tragedy is that kids growing up today literally don't even know what The Legend of Zelda is, and if they do, they definitely think that this character is Zelda. When you come across these kids today, don't correct them by telling them that that's actually Link; just make sure their parents know what fuck-ups they are for not exposing their kids to the classics and walk away.

You knew you had lucked out when you rented the same game two weeks in a row and it still had your save on it.

Cloud saves are definitely the future, but before game systems went online—hell, before they even had hard drives—your saves had to be stored on the game cartridges themselves (it's baffling that the 3DS and PS Vita actually still do this). There was no better feeling (maybe besides getting a Charizard in a pack of Pokémon cards) than going back to Blockbuster after school on a Friday, renting the same game you got the week before, and discovering that your save file was still on it.

Often you'd wind up with a different cartridge, or you'd find that someone else had rented the game and overwritten your save. But when you got to keep playing without starting over you felt like you'd won the damn lottery.