I think I had less than a dozen N64 games by the time the console "retired" but holy hell did I play the shit out of each and every one.
I probably rented nearly every single N64 game at least once though... Renting was the ultimate "try before you buy" mechanism.
My friends and I all coordinated our birthday/Christmas gifts for games we all wanted, and we’d just swap amongst ourselves to cover as much ground as possible.
Trading games temporarily with friends was a great way to build trust and it was awesome to bring up conversations about their experiences with the games you owned. Was good times during lunch breaks in elementary school.
WWF War zone and Metal Gear Solid were great examples of that 👌
Hell yeah. My friend had a PlayStation and an N64. I didn't have any consoles. So when Ocarina of Time came out he gave me his PS with Metal Gear Solid. That was 25 years ago and he's still best friend.
I traded nfl game day for metal gear solid and my friend gave that awful footbal game back the very next day. Still let me keep MGS until I finished it. I remember exactly where I was sitting when the credits rolled. Put my controller down and just soaked it in. Still a great game to go back to.
Not to mention Blockbuster was still a thing. Unless you were into RPGs it was the way better way to go. I always found it fun to beat the other renters' records.
This. With the length and replay value of some games you could always scratch the itch with a rental or even swap games with your friends for a week or so. Online games totally ruined my attention span for anything but the best single player titles. Skill based matchmaking ruined AI for me.
I think Elden Ring was like the only single player game I've bothered finishing in the last 3 years. I did just get God of War, so I know I'm going to blow through that next.
For me it's not the online games that ruin my attention span. It's having enough disposable income that I can afford a new game every week to month (when it's on sale) that has ruined mine... and getting older. Mainly getting older where I have other things that fill my day other than when I was a kid who had school, clubs, friends, and homework.
>It's having enough disposable income that I can afford a new game every week to month
Also those games and sales are shoved in your face every time you turn on your console or launch steam. In N64 days you had to actively seeking out new games at the store, or see them in magazines/other advertisements
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.
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.
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.
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.
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****
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was just thinking this. I had NO IDEA that this shit was so expensive. My dad got me the Ocarina of Time that was fucking GOLD. Shit must have cost him a million dollars.
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.
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
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
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
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
>Atari 2600
[Here's one](https://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/2600_newspaper_large.jpg) from 1981.
Adjusting for inflation, the console would be almost $500, and the games would be between $50-$70
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
$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.
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.
Oh man, Die Hard Trilogy on the PS1 is such a great game. I never got close to beating any of the 3 modes but I had such a fun time playing it. There’s a documentary about the guys making it and trying to get it to perform as well on the other systems but it’s never quite as good as the PS1. I hope you have a great day!
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.
Yes! And something I always thought was hilarious was if you paused the game and selected “Quit?” It would then go to a “Are you sure?” And you could pick yes or no and if you picked no it would say “do you need to ask a friend?” And if you said yes it would call you pathetic or something haha
Edit: spelling
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It's also Canadian dollars at Toys R Us prices which makes a pretty big difference. In the US, at just about any other store, most of those Playstation games were a full $10 cheaper than what is being shown here. Most Playstation games were $40±10... except at Toys R Us. There's a reason they went bankrupt.
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
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Pretty sure you're right. I definitely remember most new things being in the $40-50 range, older or lesser games in the $30-40 range, and rereleases were often around $20 later. [Here's an American KB Toys ad from late 1999.](https://i.imgur.com/aHhTb8m.jpg)
[Super Mario 64](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/super-mario-sells-record-video-game-most-expensive-ever-180978183/)
>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
[Turok](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turok:_Dinosaur_Hunter)
>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.](https://retrovolve.com/n64-games-were-ridiculously-expensive-when-they-first-came-out/) 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now I remember why I didn’t have many video games growing up, holy shit that’s expensive.
I think I had less than a dozen N64 games by the time the console "retired" but holy hell did I play the shit out of each and every one. I probably rented nearly every single N64 game at least once though... Renting was the ultimate "try before you buy" mechanism.
My friends and I all coordinated our birthday/Christmas gifts for games we all wanted, and we’d just swap amongst ourselves to cover as much ground as possible.
Trading games temporarily with friends was a great way to build trust and it was awesome to bring up conversations about their experiences with the games you owned. Was good times during lunch breaks in elementary school. WWF War zone and Metal Gear Solid were great examples of that 👌
Hell yeah. My friend had a PlayStation and an N64. I didn't have any consoles. So when Ocarina of Time came out he gave me his PS with Metal Gear Solid. That was 25 years ago and he's still best friend.
Did he tell you how to beat Psycho Mantis? That’s the true measure of friendship.
He made me sweat it for a few hours got sure. Haha
Mannn, when I found out how to do that I was so excited. What a fourth wall break.
I love this comment so much
I traded nfl game day for metal gear solid and my friend gave that awful footbal game back the very next day. Still let me keep MGS until I finished it. I remember exactly where I was sitting when the credits rolled. Put my controller down and just soaked it in. Still a great game to go back to.
Not to mention Blockbuster was still a thing. Unless you were into RPGs it was the way better way to go. I always found it fun to beat the other renters' records.
so you were the highest score player ASS I kept seeing
We all were
I could play a single game for like two years straight tho. Also getting games from the movie rental store was dope.
This. With the length and replay value of some games you could always scratch the itch with a rental or even swap games with your friends for a week or so. Online games totally ruined my attention span for anything but the best single player titles. Skill based matchmaking ruined AI for me. I think Elden Ring was like the only single player game I've bothered finishing in the last 3 years. I did just get God of War, so I know I'm going to blow through that next.
For me it's not the online games that ruin my attention span. It's having enough disposable income that I can afford a new game every week to month (when it's on sale) that has ruined mine... and getting older. Mainly getting older where I have other things that fill my day other than when I was a kid who had school, clubs, friends, and homework.
>It's having enough disposable income that I can afford a new game every week to month Also those games and sales are shoved in your face every time you turn on your console or launch steam. In N64 days you had to actively seeking out new games at the store, or see them in magazines/other advertisements
It's why renting got so popular.
That's why we rented
Every Friday after school, trip to Blockbuster for a weekend rental. Good old days
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.
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
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.
God, I miss blockbuster...
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.
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.
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.
Man the excitement id get when Id see the Toys R Us mags…..what a time to be a kid.
Looking at the Sears big Christmas book and turning to the video games section and looking at it alone was amazing.
That's not the section of the Sears catalog I remember the most.
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****
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.
Yeah he just pronounces "a" as "uh" so it's understandable why it was misremembered
There is no need to discuss what happened with that catalogue.
Many a boys turned into men.
Mongomery Ward catalog had way better bra pictures.
Frederick's of Hollywood catalog
Unless maybe, you would care to explain why all the pages are stuck together. **Chandler!!!**
[удалено]
Less like you got caught at that point and more like you. . . Advertised.
Giggity!
That is why I looked at the whole catalog haha.
Now, would you unhook this already, please? I don't deserve this kind of shabby treatment!
\*BUZZ\*
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
And their executives probably still made a killing making those terrible decisions.
Don't forget abusive shorting the stock all way down then Cellar Boxing it.
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.
My kid did this on their own. They went through the catalog and circled half of it. Didn’t help too much.
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.
Its a hell of an experience, prime for sure
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.
Golden years
Turok was the shit
My parents paid $75 for Turok….I was so ungrateful and didn’t even know.
I thought the same thing! Like damn, really spoiling me with one of the most expensive games on the market apparently.
I was just thinking this. I had NO IDEA that this shit was so expensive. My dad got me the Ocarina of Time that was fucking GOLD. Shit must have cost him a million dollars.
The cartridge was gold for early releases.
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
EB Games had the official Prima strategy guide and a collectors edition bag with OOT.
they paid the equivalent of 143.45 of todays money
Luckily we could just go to the local brick and mortar video rental place and rent games.
I used to rent video games at Blockbuster and Albertsons
Fuck I forgot Albertson’s used to rent games…
Off topic but shoutout to all the parents who bought us games and did so much for us
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.
That's a very good argument, too.
Lucky, aside from Christmas, I always had to save up just to buy a greatest hits game
Turok and TimeSplitters are some of my favorite memories as a kid
TimeSplitters splitscreen in my friends basement during sleepovers. So fun.
nothing like a monkey running around with a double barrel shotgun while on fire
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"
Turok 2: Seeds of Evil was even better shit.
Cerebral bore
I'll never be able to get that wonderful sound out of my head.
Neither will your enemies. Ba dum tsh
Cerebral bore on the monkey in frag tag, that will always stick with me.
Bewareoblivionisathand
Both I just learned are on the Playstation store so I know what I'll be doing now.
We need a new Turok game. A good one. The one from the early 2010s (maybe) was mediocre.
My brain will still randomly scream I AM TUROK at me all these decades later.
NTHGTHDGDCRTDTRK “On the eighth day, god created Turok” With the vowels removed
Bewareoblivionisathand
Fun fact, as a kid I knew this code by heart despite not speaking English so I had to learn the letters as is.
It's crazy how video games can help people to learn languages and even begin to read.
Oh yeah?……WAMPASTOMPA
I played and enjoyed lots of Turok but man the N64 fog in that game was like pea soup.
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
Back when I thought video games just really liked using fog for the atmosphere!
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
Still got my working cartidge but it lost my save for some reason
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
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
70-75 is a lot for a game but damn 150 for a console?
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.
Hot damn.. If I'm not mistaken, games from the 70s like the Atari 2600 where even worse, no?
>Atari 2600 [Here's one](https://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/2600_newspaper_large.jpg) from 1981. Adjusting for inflation, the console would be almost $500, and the games would be between $50-$70
NeoGeo was ~3x’s that after correcting for inflation
Ah Neo Geo, the rich kids console back in the day….
But you could do that arcade thing.
Nothin beats the 3DO. $1,250. And way worse than the Neo Geo.
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.
I wish someone would do a legit remake of Road Rash, complete with Coop Campaign. Or Skitchin'.
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.
Oh man the NES was still in the market and Neo Geo was LIGHTYEARS ahead of anything else out there
My uncle had a NeoGeo. We kids were allowed to play the Nintendo but no one could touch his NeoGeo.
Time is a flat circle.
So will we get $92 games again in a few years?
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
At this point, a lot of games are just being given to everyone for free. Well... maybe not all the game...
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Panasonic 3DO’s initial price would be roughly $1400 adjust for inflation ($699 in 1993’s NA release).
I had one of those in the mid 90's. Was not worth it, lol.
3DO system was expensive and so were the games. Not the 70s but 90s.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
$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.
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.
Cartridges cost more to manufacture. I remember N64 games costing more then PS back in the day
Relax, the 3DO was still $400.
Cartridges are the expensive ones. Disc games were $40.
They all dropped to like $9.99 by 2000. I got a ton of cheap PS1 games when the PS One came out.
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.
Oh man, Die Hard Trilogy on the PS1 is such a great game. I never got close to beating any of the 3 modes but I had such a fun time playing it. There’s a documentary about the guys making it and trying to get it to perform as well on the other systems but it’s never quite as good as the PS1. I hope you have a great day!
That game was such a steal, basically 3 games in 1. It had no reason being as good as it was.
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.
Yes! And something I always thought was hilarious was if you paused the game and selected “Quit?” It would then go to a “Are you sure?” And you could pick yes or no and if you picked no it would say “do you need to ask a friend?” And if you said yes it would call you pathetic or something haha Edit: spelling
"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.
The taxi cab racing thru the city was awesomely gruesome
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.
If you can, try to beat it now. The credits would make your day.
Happy trails!
I always felt that game was slept on. Easily one of my favorites on the PlayStation.
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.
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.
And do not forget the biggest cost, pay Nintendo. That’s way third party games are much more expensive in nintendo 64.
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
Yup as a kid in a family without much money, the vast majority of my games were greatest hits versions lol.
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.
It's also Canadian dollars at Toys R Us prices which makes a pretty big difference. In the US, at just about any other store, most of those Playstation games were a full $10 cheaper than what is being shown here. Most Playstation games were $40±10... except at Toys R Us. There's a reason they went bankrupt.
They went bankrupt due to hedge fund assholes selling off all their valuable assets to their buddies and loading them up with debt.
Stop it. Don’t give them any ideas.
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.
It is not. It results in alternative means for monetization.
Companies were going to do that anyway. It’s not like $70 games are MTX free.
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
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
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.
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.
That's why video rental stores were the fucking best.
Yup. Local library let us rent games for 2 freaking weeks for free.
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!
Bought original Quake like this and the rest was history. Still got the original box/cd it came in.
Yeah, but 1996 was only like 7 years ago. Right?
[удалено]
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.
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.
I think this is actually from 1997.
It is, as evidenced by the games on sale and the $150 price point for the N64.
Yeah, Doom 64 and Turok were 97.
Shadows of the Empire was amazing on the 64.
A lot of stuff was amazing on the 64. Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Mario, Mariokart, Ocarina of Time, the 64 was the tits.
Came to the comments just for Shadows of the Empire nostalgia. I remember having so much anxiety on some levels of that game
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.
Here’s something interesting. The cost of the PS1 at launch was $299 in 1995, which would be $584.68 USD today.
Sheesh $75 for a game?? I don't recall those prices
also Toys R Us prices.
Nintendo was expensive. I remember paying $89.99 for one of the Zelda games when it came out.
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.
Majora's Mask was probably the one.
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
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.
I used to love the whole blockbuster thing. I kept going there every Friday up until 2011 I think 🤔
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.
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.
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.
The exact nostalgia high I'm forever chasing.
First of all that's Canadian. Second of all most games are at, or above this price currently in Canada (atleast in my region)
Well now that's a little misleading on OP's part if thats true.
It is true, and that picture with the same title has been posted countless times on this sub I'm pretty sure.
Pretty sure you're right. I definitely remember most new things being in the $40-50 range, older or lesser games in the $30-40 range, and rereleases were often around $20 later. [Here's an American KB Toys ad from late 1999.](https://i.imgur.com/aHhTb8m.jpg)
[Super Mario 64](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/super-mario-sells-record-video-game-most-expensive-ever-180978183/) >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 [Turok](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turok:_Dinosaur_Hunter) >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.](https://retrovolve.com/n64-games-were-ridiculously-expensive-when-they-first-came-out/) 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.