this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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Apples and oranges.
'90s equivalent to "them goshdang tiktoks and fortnites" isn't Half-Life and Ocarina of Time, it's Television. The Simpsons or DBZ. Or those awful "classic" animated shows from the '80s that were designed from the ground up to be toy ads. "Impulse control" my ass, most of y'all were glued up to the TV screen like a moth to a lamp and only got consumption impulses out of it. Calling young people "brain dead zombies" is such an "old man yells at cloud" moment, look at yourself.
There's more culture than ever being created now thanks to the incredibly lower barrier to entry. There are more incredible microtransaction-less indie games made in the last 10 years than the exhaustive library of most gaming consoles back then. Celeste, Outer Wilds, Expedition 33, Baldur's Gate 3, Tunic...
The existence of slop is a constant across generations, and clinging to an idealized past is such a foolish endeavor, and will cause you to lose out on so much relevant cultural discourse happening right now. How many classic video games from the '90s might a queer kid growing up nowadays look up to? How many?? How many had, oh, I don't know, a goddamn female protagonist? And don't say that Samus counts. What a lame-ass culture to let our daughters grow up in.
I mean, as a 90s kid, and tech dork... yeah, I largely did drop TV almost entirely, in favor of console and pc gaming, and exploring the early public internet on a 56k modem.
I would imagine most tech dorks of the era did as well?
Like, as soon as I learned how to block ads on the internet, then later on youtube, as well as uh, obtain audio visual media without cost... I did that regularly, never looked back, began to actually not be able to stand TV due to ads everywhere all the time.
And yep, I am still calling anyone who watches ads for anything, anyone who buys into incredibly exploitative business models that waste your time, money, or both, yep, I've been calling them idiot consumer zombies since the 90s, consistently.
You are right that there are more non bs indie games now. That is great! That is good.
Are more games more diverse now?
Yes! Also good.
... But I've had basically the same opinions on all this since the 90s, I am not rembering an idealized past, I am one of the nerds thats been this way the whole damn time.
They call Gen Z the digital native generation, but this omits the ubernerd Millenials such as myself (and others from other generations) who forged the way, who were early adopters from a young age, who were digital visionaries that forged the path before the ecosystems got to be more user friendly, more accessible, more mainstream.
Like uh, without potentially doxxing myself, of those indie games you list?
Yeah, I know a few people on one of those game's dev teams, personally, met them online when I was first like like 13, back when multiplayer games had server browsers with private custom servers, some of those also had their own websites and forums, all we had for voice comms was ventrilo... I met these people way back, have regularly voice chatted and gamed with them for... 20 years?
I myself have been modding (as in making mods) for that long as well, I literally taught myself how to code so that I could do it, before I got out of high school, before any high school offered coding classes, before Adobe bought out Macromedia, and flash games on Newgrounds were all the rage.
Not to try to gatekeep nerddom with some kind of official checklist you have to measure up against, but I think you are considerably underestimating the potential nerdiness of a lot of really dedicated nerds from that era, and thus writing them off as 'old men yelling at clouds'... when we've been yelling at those same clouds since we were kids, then we went on to actually implement the changes we deemed necessary, as best as we could when up against the corporate and financial behemoths constructed by Boomers.
My public high school in Southern California had programming class in the late 1970's. Nerds been nerding for a bit. Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta yell at some clouds, now where did I leave my onion belt...