1994, Game of the Year

[SvennoJ]

Jaicee said:

SvennoJ said:

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.

I had to pay for my own internet and phone bill as well. I played Everquest from 1999 on, first on dial up. So that was $9.89 a month originally for the EQ subscription (989 studios publisher), paying for ISP access (35 guilders a month), plus paying local phone costs which Everquest drove up to avg 200 guilders a month. Then you had to buy the expansions separately as well. So about $1,400 a year to play Everquest before expansions. $2,380 in today's money.
Plus I was playing on a 9,000 guilder PC at the time. About $4,000 back then, now $6,800.

But it was all possible because I got a good job while still living in cheap accommodations right out of university. My living costs were 10% of my gross income. My rent was 300 guilders a month ($136 at the time) including utilities. I didn't have much though, but enough to play games in!

Btw I always find it funny Americans complaining about sales tax. It was 19% for us in 1999, nowadays it's 21% in Europe! I live in Ontario now where it's 13%. But I also remember getting 6.5% interest on my standard bank account back then...

There are still some people keeping the tradition going


Most screens had this running