How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/how-i-launched-3-consoles-and-found-true-love-at-babbages-store-no-9/

by zepearl • 5 months ago

79 32 5 months ago

I lived through this, and it captures the era well. I'm trying to see through young eyes, but I can't stress how new things seemed every year during this era. Nowadays, there doesn't seem to be as much progress, just better iteration.

ecshafer• 5 months ago

I am a bit younger but I agree. Going from the SNES/Genesis to Playstation/N64 with 3d graphics was amazing. It was like having an arcade machine at home. Going to the PS2/Xbox and then 360/PS3 was again a massive jump. Every console jump was a very noticeable improvement in graphics, so it became a big deal. PS4/PS5/XBONE these were just such minor improvements, there is no big wow factor.

pipes• 5 months ago

The snes to N64 jump to me is definitely the biggest. It wasn't just graphics, the gameplay completely changed too. By the end of the snes era I had grown out of games due to endless platforms and 2d fighters (I was 13ish). I was 16 by time I started playing them again. Wave race 64 was just mind blowing. And like nothing else I'd played before.

sylens2• 5 months ago

I sometimes wonder how many people got convinced to go into tech after playing a game like Mario 64 as a kid.

bombcar• 5 months ago

The leaps and jumps were amazing - compare SimCity to SimCity 2000 and Simcity 3000 - all a few short years apart.

Sometime around the Wii (being just a souped-up gamecube) or thereafter it stoped being generational leaps and started being refinement.

dangus2• 5 months ago

The best example I’ve come up with for progress in this era is to look at the release schedules of Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, and X, and compare their graphics.

Completely insane.

lee_ars2• 5 months ago

Good times, they were. Good times indeed. (And we're still married, too!)

MobileVet• 5 months ago

Thanks for this… great trip down memory lane. I also worked at Babbages during the 1993 academic year. I probably spent my whole paycheck there! I definitely considered myself lucky, I didn’t find a wife but it sure beat McDonald’s!

mchaver• 5 months ago

Great story and very nostalgic. I remember pre-ordering an N64 with my brother and getting it on launch day with Mario 64. We were blown anyway. Then Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, FFVII, Panzer Dragoon Saga and so on. Great time for a video game nerd to be growing up. What are some of your favorite games on more modern consoles?

heraldgeezer• 5 months ago

I mean the PS2 was a bigger hit than the PS1 and anything Nintendo put out so that analysis wains.

The jump in graphics was massive.

dangus2• 5 months ago

Yeah a bit of some odd analysis in the article with who won those console wars.

Speaking of graphics, it’s still worth pointing out that the PS2 was the weakest console of its generation in most respects save for its unique data streaming capabilities, but it did beat the GameCube and Xbox by a year. (We aren’t counting the Dreamcast here)

The PS2 sold itself easily with the integrated DVD capability.

The GameCube had very strong capabilities, but I think it was hamstrung by smaller disc capacity and Nintendo’s difficult developer situation. Sony had the customer and they were easy to work with.

I also think from a marketing standpoint, the small size and toy-ish appearance of the GameCube made it look less appealing to older demographics. The controller didn’t look as serious, either, and the C-stick was a dumb move.

Nintendo wouldn’t give in and make the normal standardized controller that we all agree is the end-state until the Switch, although you can’t fault them for the massive success they enjoyed with the Wii.

ErneX• 5 months ago

I’ll never forget the PS2 US launch. I visited the US for holidays and landed just the day before launch. I thought I was going to be able to get one unit the next day if I asked in a few shops if they knew they were going to have stock. After my sister took me to a few it was clear it was going to be next to impossible, some were going to get as few as a dozen of them and those were already reserved.

But in the last Best Buy we visited the person I asked about the launch told me the same as all the other stores we visited before but said “you really want one?” And he pulled out his wallet and started digging into a bunch of papers and gave me a receipt of his own PS2 reservation at another chain (I think it was Electronics Boutique?) and said “keep it, I don’t feel like getting it now I’ll just get one down the road”, he didn’t want any money for it, we insisted profusely, even though his reservation had like 15 dollars already paid. I was so lucky.

That other store was doing a midnight launch, they even had police in the parking lot keeping an eye. Picked up the console with Ridge Racer V, Tekken Tag Tournament, Kessen and a 2nd controller if I recall correctly.

Good times.

georgeecollins2• 5 months ago

Can you imagine what it was like to work on the PS2? Everyone knew it was going to be huge and it was so hard to get the dev kit. I remember I had to fly somewhere with my prototype game and my development PS2 hardware. That was not long after "911" and TSA was very strict. They were like: what the hell is weird piece of electronics. Those were very exciting times.

kevinsync• 5 months ago

The very first time I ever flew was very shortly after 9/11. TSA hadn't been created yet, but the airports were still nervous energy and chaos from what had happened. I remember my carry-on was like a thick plastic grocery bag with a couple dozen vinyl records and I may have had a very small backpack with god knows what banging around inside (loose items, a crappy cell phone, likely some booze LOL). Got to the airport at the last minute and had to run full speed to get to the gate looking like a crazy person. Surprisingly nobody really batted an eye, and man oh man how things would change in just a couple of months!

ineedasername• 5 months ago

Decent people doing nice things for strangers. Always nice to hear.

ginko• 5 months ago

In the end, the console wars of the late 1990s were won by Nintendo, which built on the momentum of the Nintendo 64 by launching the GameCube in 2001, along with an arsenal of handheld systems

Does the author live in a parallel universe where Sony didn't completely dominate gen 5 & gen 6 sales?

The limited amount of storage on the cartridge means that the textures laid over the game’s polygons are blurry and often hideously ugly.

The cartridge storage wasn't the limiting factor here. The problem was the unified RDRAM memory architecture of the N64 which turned out to be too slow for texturing. Instead developers had to use a 4KiB bit of onboard memory which was just too little in hindsight.

nebula8804• 5 months ago

Does the author live in a parallel universe where Sony didn't completely dominate gen 5 & gen 6 sales?

Difficult to ascertain. Sales wise of course Sony will sell more. It was N64's 388 worldwide games vs Sony's 4,074 titles. More games than you could possibly try + Lower prices + higher install base will lead to more game sales and frankly I have seen so many more "experimental" titles on Playstation.

Never thought i'd be playing as a beach ball escaping a maze while eating watermelons and listening to egyptian trance but it happened on Playstation.

https://youtu.be/OcaNdzEXch8?t=7

Plus Sony always felt like a "global" console. They expanded the user base to not only non gamers but a truly international audience (latin america, middle east etc.) It was probably the modchips that made it happen but still.

But "winning the console war" is more than just raw sales. For example, of that extremely small 388 titles it is astounding how many of those games have won numerous prestigious awards, were genre defining, moved its genre in a direction that all others copied, or are still cited as one of the best games of all time.

The N64 really laid down an entire historial footprint for the millennial generation despite its significantly smaller sales. I guess a lot of that is down to Nintendo and many of their games demonstrating why they have been in a league of their own. But the console also had superb titles released by third parties as well.

acomjean• 5 months ago

The PS2 was also a dvd player, in a time where many didn’t have one. It was my first dvd player (I bought a remote to make it more usable).

chocochunks• 5 months ago

I think it was just a joke based on that store's sales where N64 was dominating at the time...

boyanlevchev2• 5 months ago

While they don’t mention this, if you include the Gameboy, the author isn’t wrong - Nintendo did “win”

ErroneousBosh• 5 months ago

I used to work for a Sony retailer in Scotland when the PS2 was launched, and we were all incredibly annoyed they wouldn't give us one to demo.

"But you sell TVs, DVD players, and audio systems, not games consoles, you won't sell any of these"

Well not if we can't demo it we won't!

Despite this being the prevailing attitude at Sony - "don't sell them in shops where people are already spending five figure sums on home entertainment" - it did really well.

The one thing where I think they really missed a trick though, was their 200-disc changers. They had a CD changer and a DVD changer, massive units (we had a DVP-CX850D on demo), that took 200 discs like the name suggests, plugged into your TV and audio system, and you could select which one you wanted to play from an on-screen menu.

I think they really biffed it by not offering that chassis with PS2 guts. Just think, you've got your library of films, audio CDs, and games, all in one unit tucked neatly out of the way. It would have been expensive but it would have blown the market apart.

And, like the CX850, it'd still be about 700 quid on eBay 27 years later.

sylens2• 5 months ago

What a great trip to the past this was. I'm sure this is the rose colored glasses talking, but I do miss how video games weren't quite so mainstream in the 90s and early 2000's. Launches were smaller but felt like much bigger deals. There wasn't wall to wall coverage of every game all the time, so you could still easily be surprised by one that you had bought.

georgeecollins2• 5 months ago

I love this essay for how it captures point in time.

brainzap• 5 months ago

you can observe Microsoft Gaming fall apart over the next 12 month.

RunSet• 5 months ago

Correction: The illustration in the article labeled "Sony’s original Playstation" does not show the original playstation controller.

For comparison purposes that is shown in the following image:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_(console)#/media/F...

Stevvo• 5 months ago

"In the end, the console wars of the late 1990s were won by Nintendo"

The facts/numbers do not match the author's conclusion. Playstation won, even if it did not in the author's memory.

Grazester• 5 months ago

There was no disputing it. Sony won the 5th and 6th.

boyanlevchev2• 5 months ago

N64 vs PS1 no contest. But I don’t think they misspoke (even if the author didn’t really mention this explicitly in the article)

The Gameboy (plus color and pocket) outsold the PS1, and was more of a phenomenon. Also, the 90s saw the rise of Pokémon, which is the highest grossing media franchise of all time.

quickthrowman2• 5 months ago

This might be a very strange question, but did DJ Screw ever shop at your store? I’m a huge fan of chopped and screwed music, just wondering if him or anyone associated with him bought games from you.

treebeard901• 5 months ago

I've always wondered who the target audience is for chopped and screwed mixes... What about it is appealing to you?

quickthrowman2• 5 months ago

I grew up listening to 90s hip hop, so I’m familiar with some of the songs DJ Screw used in his mixes. There’s something meditative and transcendent about rap slowed down to 60 bpm combined with the repeated phrases and chopping/rewinding to extend the song and emphasize certain parts. He’d play two copies of a song and one would be a beat or two ahead, which lets you cross fade back and forth to make words repeat, he’d rewind certain lines three or four times to emphasize it, he does a decent amount of turntablism/scratching too. All of the manipulation is basically an on the fly remix with a lot of room for creative freedom.

Here’s a chopped and screwed song I like by DJ Screw

https://youtu.be/zykDlxp-hQQ

Vaporwave is basically the same set of techniques applied to 80s pop and elevator music, the song below is vaporwave but it’s more or less a chopped and screwed version of Tar Baby by Sadé

https://youtu.be/ZJrmzPavcDo

lee_ars2• 5 months ago

No, but we were way down in Clear Lake, by NASA. DJ Screw would have visited one of the other Babbage's inside the loop!

How I launched 3 consoles and found true love at Babbage's store no. 9 (2013)

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