1994, Game of the Year

[Jaicee]

SvennoJ said:

Jaicee said:

That's still just stunning to read!  It makes perfect sense, since I know console gaming didn't really take off in Europe until the PlayStation came around, but it still just sounds so strange to me. No Super NES owners at all. Wow.

Nintendo games were very expensive where I lived (The Netherlands) while PC, C64, Amiga 500, MSX games were basically 'free' thanks to rampant piracy. Copy parties were shamelessly promoted everywhere. Whole events where everyone dragged their PC or Amiga to the event just to copy each other's games.

Playstation games were a lot more affordable thanks to CDs. Nintendo games also suffered from PAL conversion, or rather not converted, running slower (50hz) and with black bars (more lines in PAL 576 vs NTSC 480). You could buy imported Nintendo games as well, but those were 3x as expensive as Playstation games. The compomised PAL ones still 1.5x as expensive.

PC games also got all the shelf space with their extravagant boxes and were cheaper than console games in general. SNES was around, just expensive and compromised. Nintendo had no love for Europe :/

Wow, that really does sound different from what I experienced growing up! Kinda cool too. Copy parties?

I remember video games in general feeling a lot more expensive than now. People today gripe about games costing $70 in U.S. money. $55 to $80 was a standard price range for Super NES games in the mid-90s; the difference being that that was nearly 30 years of inflation ago. In today's American money, that would be equivalent to like $120 to $150 per game. And that's before the infamous Texas sales tax. I suppose many in today's generation don't remember that because their parents were buying their games back then if they were even alive yet.