Who here experienced the amazing 4th gen console wars ?

[Pyro as Bill]

d21lewis said:

I was hoping for some more awesome/petty war stories but it seems like everyone was too old or too young or just didn't experience it.

In retrospect, it was relatively short. When the SNES entered the fray, it almost felt like the fight went out of Sega. They battled for a couple of years bringing great games like Sonic 2 and Streets of Rage 2 but it really seemed like they quickly abandoned the Genesis in favor of add-ons and the Saturn.

The seventh gen went on a lot longer. But for those of us who remember it, the 4th gen was probably the gold standard for console wars.

Computer v console

Our IT teacher would always brag about his hard drive and and other computer specs and mock us console kiddies for our less eclectic taste in games. Lemmings was his game of choice and it was such a cerebral game that he and no-one he knew could complete it.

One of the gaming mags did their annual cheat special that was an inch thick and had walkthroughs for every big game including .....Lemmings. The magazine had completely sold out so when Mr Boffin found out about the magazine, his adult nerd powers of being able to backorder a magazine failed him. Me? I knew about it a month in advance because I bought console mags not lame computer mags and had it on pre-order and so when it arrived and no-one else managed to get a copy, I basically became a Wizard.

Part of the backstory is that he claimed he didn't go to these copy orgies that the geeks held and he was completely above board. Lemmings was being ported to everything and more and more people were playing it. He wanted to lend the magazine but so did everybody else so I kept saying I couldn't find it or he gave me too much homework that week which made me forget to bring it again. In reality it was been shared around between friends with priority given to anyone who owned Lemmings so we could take turns torturing him.

Someone would go into an IT lesson, start a conversation up about Lemmings then laugh at Mr Brains because he got stuck on such a simple level and then torture him further by purposefully mis-remembering the solution the level. He would send notes to my form tutor requesting that I be allowed out 5 mins early to drop off the magazine at his classroom. I probably could have got some sexual favours he was that desperate.

We pushed it too far when, at our form tutor's suggestion, we gave the magazine to the girls so that they could pretend they played Lemmings and torture him even more. All the laughing was giving the game away and he caught us passing the magazine around the class.

He confiscated it til the end of the day while he used the school photocopier to copy the pages he needed like some filthy pirate would.