Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 443: Years in Review Revue - 1982 & ’92

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

The Retronauts East team finally finishes what they started at the beginning of the year by talking about the rest of 1982's gaming milestones before moving ahead a decade and very nearly not finishing a discussion of 1992. Like you're SO surprised. Edits by Greg Leahy, and cover art by John Pading. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

You're listening to Retronauts a part of the HyperX Podcast Network. Find us and more great shows like us at podcast.hyperx.com. This week in Retronauts. Oh well, whatever. Never mind. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish, being a little bit a historic by referring to Nirvana's smells like teen spirit in an episode about the video games of 1992, because really that was a 1991 hit. But it was so big that it just kept going into 92, kind of like the super NES, which I didn't. didn't get until 1992. So that's when I was playing Super Mario World. But anyway, none of that's

relevant. This is, once again, one of our annual roundup episodes. And we started back at the beginning of the year, at the end of 2021, I think, with a look back at 72 and 82. And Jared Petty was on that. He's not with us today. Some other guys here in his place. But that was kind of the embodiment of our annual roundup episodes in that I very carefully planned out everything and said, okay, I structured this in a way so that we're going to get through all this stuff. We're going to get through 1972 and 1982. It's going to be great. We're going to cover this entire outline I put together.

And of course, we did it because we talked about 1972 for way longer than I thought would have been possible for a year that had like two video game things happen. And yet, here we are. So no, no, it's fine. It was good information. You really rose to the occasion and ruined my planning. That's really kind of the binge Edwards experience all around. Great info and a monkey wrench in the works, a spanner in the works. So yes, well done on that. It was very informative. If you have not listened to that, please go check it out. But it does mean we need to talk about a little bit of 1982. And it also means I need to once again rethink how we approach the year roundup episodes because back in the day when we were at oneup.com and it was just like me and Chris Kohler and Scott Sharkey and Jen Frank sitting around BSing in a room for an hour, somehow we were able to cover not just like looking back 10 years, but also the fives as well. And we could round up entire year, like, you know, decades worth of game coverage in a single

episode. And I don't know how that happened. I haven't gone back and listened to those episodes, I'm afraid there's like some sort of witchcraft involved. But in any case, the witchcraft has worn out. So I'm continuing to rethink how we can do these so that we don't spend the entire year just recapping 10 years ago. And so my approach this time is instead of putting together a big list of all this stuff for us to talk about, I've talked to each of our participants and said, just pick three topics for the year 1992 and one topic for the year 1982. And maybe, just maybe, we can actually get through all of this. Then we can, you know, the episode that Bob recently published for 2002, you can go back and listen to that. And you have

like this whole chronological sequence. We'll see if this actually works. This may also be an endeavor doomed to failure. But here to sink or swim with me, who do we have on this episode? Returning from last time, we have two people. Let's see. We'll start with the Spanner in the works. Hi, that's me, Benjohn. That's you. Designated Spaner. This time, it's going to be the opposite of authoritative bench. It's going to be the old unplanned, unprepared bench, just like that. So that's the one that's even more disruptive, actually. So everyone buckle in.

Also, who do we have here based still in Raleigh? Still in Raleigh? Well, North Carolina. It's all part of the big mass. We're all at home now because Amacron is terrible. Right. We all call like Jersey City part of New York just because. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm really chapter. I'm really tough. Raleigh's way over there. It's too far to go, except I guess I occasionally truck over there for retronauts when there's not too much pandemic. Anyway, so the triangle. I'm Ben Elgin.

And yeah, I think we're all flying by the seat of our pants on this one. Because, you know, we kind of vaguely remember 1992. So we'll see what happens. Vigley. Okay. And then finally, stepping back in to fill the slot that Jared Petty filled last time because he was stepping in for this. Anyway, who else is here? Oh, my God, I'm back again.

That's much later in the decade. But, you know, I just, I wanted to do it. It's Chris Sims. Hi, you're in my hyper-color T-shirt here to talk about the 90s. Welcome back. Apologies to all the people who do not like me being on the show. No, never apologize. Make them eat worms.

That's how God intended it. All right. So, yes, the Retrodots East Power Quartet is back in action, and we're going to do the things we usually do, we'll just talk about video games and get distracted. So please look forward to it as we meander our way through the remainders of 1982, and hopefully all of 1992. And if we don't make it, then too bad.

You'll just have to go back and relive those yours yourself to see what you're missing. So last time, we were going to talk about all of 1982 and we did not. We got through the arcade stuff, basically. So I would like for us to revisit each one massive topic for the year in 1982 and then move along and say, okay, let's just cut our losses. There were home console video games. There were computer games. There were lots of things happening in 1982. And some of them were not good. And that's what we're going to start with. We're going to talk about the U.S. console industry crash, which we have discussed many times here in various facets. But one thing that I think is worth noting up front is

that this was a U.S. console industry crash, the Atari crash, the Atari Shock, as they call it in Japan. And it didn't really affect much of anything else. It didn't affect the computer market that much. It affected arcades in the U.S. But outside of the U.S., people were like, huh? Crash? What's that? No, we love video games. We're playing. in video games. We have so many video games. We can't keep up with video games. So, you know, the following year, Nintendo launched the Famicom in Japan. And Japan was like, damn, video games are really good. And they never looked back. Whereas in the U.S. in 1983, the console industry was like, yeah, let's not exist anymore. And everyone jumps shipped to computers. And, you know, in 1985,

like there's a publication that's been scanned by Frank Sefaldi and put online called the computer entertainer magazine, I believe. And if you go through and look at reviews in that publication, it was like the only U.S. publication at the time that was actually covering video games because everyone was like video games, those are dead. But this one publication was doing it. And they would go entire months, like four or five months at a time in like 1985, 84, without reviewing a single console game because there were no new console games

being released of note. Like the occasional little thing came out for the 2,600 or in television. But that's it. That's it. It was just like these sad little stragglers until the NES came along and rebooted everything. And that is because of the console market crash at the end of 1982. So I have been monologuing a whole lot in this episode. I'm going to stop sucking the oxygen out of the air and step back and ask, what do you guys know of this console?

market crash. Yeah, take it away. This is Benj. We've talked about this a lot, I think, and some other things. Usually people call it the 83 crash, but it's true that the seeds were sown and planted in 1982. I think, if I'm not mistaken, Atari released some bad financial information in 82 that sort started the thing rolling and you'd have to check my Atari 800 article on Fast Company for that

and Atari bet a lot on video games they overproduced a lot of titles they thought that their train would just keep on rolling and they're also meanwhile they were supporting a home a home video I mean a home computer division that was never profitable and so when something slipped you know it was built on a house of cards and it just collapsed basically so yeah i mean a big part of the problem wasn't just Atari it was the fact that they were owned by warner time Warner and the uh yeah the Atari market was not as strong as Atari and time Warner thought it was and you know there were a lot of other factors there happening um in 1981 Activision or I guess 1980 Activision appeared as a third party and in

1982 I believe the courts said yeah that's cool you can you can make games for Atari without you know, paying anything to Atari. So then all of a sudden, everyone is like, damn, we want some money too. So they started making games, most of which were really, really terrible because they didn't have Atari's and Activision's skill. You know, they didn't have the knowledgeable programmers for that stuff. So the market was flooded by this sudden surge of terrible games. If you, if you look at the Atari 2,600 release list, you know, 1977, 78, 78, 79, up through 1980 are really, they're pretty scant release lists, you know, a few dozen games a year because they were all coming from Atari and then Activision. But then once you get to 1982, all of a sudden it's like hundreds of games. And there was a lot of confusion there. So that didn't help. And the fact that so many of them were so bad was a huge turnoff. It just, you know, a lot of factors added up to make the $2,600 very unprofitable. And the result is that in 1982

Warner Posted its greatest losses in history And I think it might have been like the single most money losing quarter of any business in the history or something to that point You know the Atari acquisition Was the biggest corporate purchase to that point

So I believe if I'm not mistaken It was basically like the greatest bloodbath In American business history I'm sure by now there's There's been much more horrible things, but these were still innocent early days. It didn't help also that there was a recession happening, you know, the post-Ragan election and just the market just kind of going soft and sinking after the bad times of the 70s. So a lot of things added up, but all of a sudden, you know, Atari was just this huge albatross around Time Warner's neck.

So Time Warner was like, we got to get rid of these assholes. That happened in, I think, 1984. But in the meantime, everyone was just losing money, hand over fist, including retailers who were like, we're done with this crap. No more video games for us. And yeah, it was just a bad time all around. Yeah. So in 82, like, you know, I was six. So I wasn't like super aware of market forces.

But definitely, you know, it was the case in that era that they're just, and that 82 in the years after it, that there just wasn't, you know, hype around home video games is a thing. I was vaguely aware of some people who had Atari's from before, and there was some cool stuff on them. But there wasn't going to be new stuff coming out for a while. In my house, we had a home computer, the TI, which also had the advantage that my parents thought it was educational because you could program on it. And there wasn't like, you know, the kind of schoolyard video game chatter that we think about until the NES launched later.

And then suddenly it was like, oh, home video game consoles are something to talk about again. Yeah, 82 was the boom year for the 2,600. Like, that's the one where I think that were all the, like, food companies and media companies all had their video game divisions publishing for the 2600. And there was just a huge glut. And then there was the bad Warner News, of course. And in November of 82, Attire released the 5200, which we did an episode where we talked about that. And it was just too little, too late, too weird, too old. You know, like, a bad idea all around, yeah.

Bad idea all around. That didn't help them. You know, that could have been like if they had released a really compelling new console, maybe the year before or something, they could have possibly pulled out of it. But it was just not a good timing and not a good console. So they were, I don't know, other people have gone much deeper into the Warner management issues at Atari than I have. So, you know, they would know better about what kind of. crazy stuff was going on there.

Yeah, and it's not like, you know, all of America rose up as one and said video games are bad and we hate them. You know, you still had big arcade successes. You know, Dragons Layer came out in, well, 83. And everyone loved that. They thought it was the coolest thing until they actually played it.

But, you know, it was really cool to look at and watch other people play. You had stuff like the Saturday Supercade cartoons on Saturday mornings that included Kuberd and I think Donkey Kong. There was like a pole. position cartoon. Yeah, it was a, you know, video games were still a force. It's just consoles became very unpopular among people who wanted to make money off video games as

opposed to play them. And so that whole thing kind of became scarce for a while. And it changed the shape of really, I would say, the games industry by driving companies like Calico, who had just entered the market in 1982 with the excellent Calico vision, driving them away. breaking up Atari, scaring away toy companies like Mattel and Milton Bradley from video games and basically creating this vacuum

into which Nintendo and Sega stepped and gave them kind of dominance over the global console gaming market. So yeah, kind of a momentous occasion. Go ahead. Think about also the Commodore 64 was released in August of 82 as well. So not only did we have

you know, the home computer revolution going on the same time, those machines could play games. But then Commodore comes in, undercuts all that stuff with a fairly powerful system for about $600 at first. And then, you know, we talked about in other episodes, the

price wars that Commodore started, that drove Atari and TI down to nothing, their computers down to really low prices. And so there were, I was researching, when I was researching the Atari 800 article, I found these, these press articles from, you know, 80 to 83 saying, like, why buy a game console when you get a computer for the same price, you know?

But none of those devices were profitable for any of those manufacturers to make up. So it was like completely unsustainable, ridiculous market situation. It was bad times, but on the plus side, there were still computer games. People still loved computer games. So, Ben, we're going to pass the mic to you to talk about your pick for the most interesting thing about 1982. So, yeah, so I waffled on this one when I was picking is what my heart wanted to talk about was alpiner on my TI 994A, which was a ridiculous game with huge spring. rights and voice work. It was kind of crazy that it existed in 82. But I also thought we should really touch on the fact that on computers in 82, we had the second installment of both Ultima

and Wizardry come out just because of the huge impact that those franchises went on to have. In fact, I was looking at the 92 list, and both Ultima and Wizardry had their seventh installments in 92. So they both kept trucking on through the next. decade. But beyond that, they had this enormous influence, even in Japan. I mean, maybe even especially in Japan, where, you know, Ultima and Wizardry are kind of the bedrock on which console RPGs would be built for a long time to come. And I'm no expert on the actual games. I didn't play either of them back in the day, and I've only seen little bits of them even to this day. So if anyone else has more direct experiences with the franchises, feel free to

chime in, but I just thought, I thought it'd be important for us to, the touch on that is something that really kind of seemed like it was solidifying itself in this year, and that was going to go on to be so influential. Yeah, we've had interviews on this, uh, the show with both Richard Garriot, the creator of Ultima, and with Robert Woodhead, one of the co-creators of wizardry. Yep. So if you were interested in learning more about kind of what those games were about and what inspired them, you can go back and listen to those episodes from about I want to say four years ago, four or five. It's been a while now, now that time means anything anymore.

But yeah, both of those series were really foundational for both computer and console RPGs. You know, I would say console RPGs a la Dragon Quest probably draw more direct design inspiration from Ultima. But wizardry was kind of the inflection point for, from which a lot of Japanese game developers kind of became enamored with role-playing games. And you still saw a lot of those elements being carried over. Wizardry inspired the Black Onyx, which was the first game designed, the first RPG designed specifically,

well, maybe not the first, but the first, you know, notable hit design specifically for Japanese audiences in the style of wizardry and was a huge influence. You know, so both of those games really shaped kind of the Japanese market, which has always been more, you know, on the console side, dominant for RPGs, but lots of Americans and Europeans played them as well. And we're like, oh, these are cool. Let's do our own. Yeah.

I remember talking about this, too. It's really cool. I love Ultima and Wizardry. They're great. It's all I can say. All right. So it sounds like Ben, you don't want to go like super deep into the details here. So I will pass the mic to Benj to talk about his pick for 82.

Ray, I was hoping you're going to go with Vectrics. Okay. Well, we could briefly talk about the metrics. Nope. Nope. One or the other. It's got to be one or the other. I feel like we have. I'm propelling us through at rapid speed. River Raid is interesting because you're talking about the crash in 82, which I think really happened in 83.

But think about River Raid was released in December of 82. And that's like the banner game for the 2600 is one of the best ones ever released other than like pitfall and whatever. But, you know, It was programmed by Carol Shaw, Atari's first female video game developer, and I interviewed her back in, I don't know, 2011 or something on Vintage Computing, my blog, and she described

the origins of Riverade, and it's a really neat thing. I think she first wanted to make a space shooter based on Scramble, and then Alan Miller, who was one of the founders of Activision, who was kind of like her boss at the time said, there's too many space games. So can you make it about something else? And she chose a jet fighter. And then she figured out that because of technical limitations,

the vertical scrolling would be better than horizontal scrolling. And then she realized she could mirror the play field from left to right, and it looked like a canyon or a river. And those sort of limitations birthed this game, which is really interesting. And she managed to figure out how to sort of procedurally generate the riverbank. So it's always the same,

but there's a generator that generates it on the fly, so it didn't have to be stored bit by bit, bite by byte the design of the map. It's like iterated and generated on the fly as you play it. So it's really a very, very clever design. And it was very successful. I mean, I think it sold millions of copies. and it's a great shooter.

It just feels so good to play. Have you guys ever played River Raid on the 2600? Unfortunately, no, that's one of those that I keep, you know, I've always heard about and have just never, never played because I just personally have a hard time going back to the 2,600. There are some games that I have, you know, gone back and tried out like Hero, but those have been on other systems. So someone needs to get, you know, like give us an NES or master system port of River Raid.

And then I'll try it. And they sold, she showed me, Carol showed me this plaque she has where she got this silver cartridge. It says, presented to Carol Shaw in recognition of sales and excess of one million units, June 27, 1983. So sold a million units in less than a year. That's like six months on the market. So it was a huge hit. It was a really good game. Apparently there's an Android port I'm seeing online.

that probably wouldn't be the best way to play anything but yeah the fun thing about river rate is all of the activation games had really just a really high level of um polish you know like they play well the controls are good the graphics are good even for their limited you know scope and river raid has a really nice feel to it the plane as you move it around sort of has a momentum and it swipes, side swipes around kind of tilts and stuff as you move it. And it just feels good. It's a great game. I think I personally name it as like maybe the best Atari 2,600 game.

And I'll talk about the Vectrix real quick. The Vectrix. No, it's Chris's turn. Chris, 1982. What's up? I mean, to stay pretty on brand here, I, the thing I want to talk about is Sword Quest. Oh, okay.

There you go. Yeah, SwordQuest kicked off in 1982, and the reason this is on brand is that I co-wrote with Chad Bowers, the SwordQuest comic adaptation that came out a couple years ago. And I still think it's like a fascinating story. And such a brilliant attempt to do video games and comics and real world puzzles and have an action. physical thing that you could get at the end of it that just failed

spectacularly but that I think would have worked really well five years later Well, I think it would have worked really well like a year earlier too

because it was it failed spectacularly in large part because of the video game crash and the fact that there was just no value in finishing out that series. Yeah. Also the games are

not good. I was about to say sure. Are any of the games actually interested? No. No. Which I can say because that comic is published. The comic's very good, I should say. It is actually one of my favorite things

that Chad and I ever wrote as a writing team. But it has very little to do with the video games themselves and more to do with the experience of having those things that you would obsess over. Because it's all the stuff that I loved. It's riddles and hidden word puzzles and figuring things out and making

connections. So it's such a cool idea. And if you don't know, there were going to be four video games, Earthworld, Fireworld, Waterworld, and Air World. And in each one, they came with mini-comics that were done by arguably the most popular comics creators of the day. It's Roy Thomas, George Perez, this is 82, so it's Roy Thomas George. Yeah, it's all-star work right there. Yeah. And I guess that was, that was probably there was a DC connection because of Warner, right? Did Warner own DC at that point?

Yes. Okay. And you would play the video games. You would get these weird clues that would be like two numbers. It would be like seven, four. And so you would go to page seven, panel four, look for a word that was hidden in the art somewhere, which I imagine was spectacularly difficult because it was mini-comics in 1982. So we're talking, you know, the size of a video game box, really not like standard comic size. And then once you had gotten all the words, you could decipher them, arrange them into like a sentence and send.

that in and you would win. And if you got all four of them, there would be like an ultimate contest where you could win a jewel-encrusted sword, a real-life sword, which is great. Because back then you could just give children's swords.

That's a, that's, I think we need to get back to that. But yeah, like, obviously the Atari shock, which I think is a great name, happened. And the fourth game never came out. The whole thing kind of imploded on itself.

No one knows what happened to the sword. Yeah, I was about to ask. The rumor was that the, oh, I forget his name. He was the president of Atari for a long time. He had it like hanging behind his desk, which is a very like comic book thing to do. It was like, I have this dangerous reminder of my failure. He should hang it over his desk pointing down. like a sort of Damocles.

Oh, that was good. But yeah, like, it seems like such a good idea, and I hate that it happened then. Because I think you're right. Like, if the crash hadn't happened, there would have been more to it. But also if they would have done this with like, I can see them doing this with NES games so easily, you know, where you could have much more detailed, like, riddles and clues being. Yeah, they tried kind of to jump on that with Treasure Master.

for NES, where basically if you got a high score, you were entered into a contest to win treasure of some sort. But it wasn't nearly as ambitious. It was much more modest. I mean, it was, you know, some, I can't remember who made Treasure Master, some crappy third party, I think. So the game wasn't good

and they didn't have the resources that Atari had at the height of its Warner fueled power, or so they thought. So instead of linking together a bunch of games, it was just like, hey, play this bad platformer, get a good score. And maybe you could win some stuff.

Right. Because you want it to be Nintendo doing it, right? Like you wanted to be Capcom or Konami or somebody. You want this to be a Castlevania thing or a Mario thing. Yeah. And, you know, Nintendo, to their credit, they did promote Final Fantasy through Nintendo Power with this big contest where it was like four people would win crystal balls. You know, like the elemental crystals and go to some castle or something.

And those, I think some of those crystals have shown up on eBay and sold for enormous amounts. I'm sure if one of them showed up now, it would be 10th of thousands of dollars because there's only four of them, you know? But, but yeah, like the idea, the idea has been explored, but never, never as ambitiously as with the Sword Quest games. And looking at the screenshots of the actual games, like it looks very, you know, adventure, like original adventure influenced, which I guess, I bet it is like not the best timing, you know, if it had been earlier and it had been an adventure like, you know, another cool adventure game, great, or if it had been later, you know, it could have spun off into something like the adventure games that were on NES, but I'm sure that like a bad adventure like coming out at this time with the

glut of other games was just kind of the worst timing for trying to put out something like that. Yeah. And don't forget, we did a whole micro episode about this topic in 2017, which is Chris's first episode, Retronauts Micro 59, the return of Target's Sword Quest. Oh, back when we called it Micro. Is that my first episode? I think so. Oh, that's nice.

Yeah. Guess what? Here's a cool programming note. Five years ago today was the first Retronauts East session with me and Jeremy and Ben talking about the Apple 2. So it's got five years. Yep. And now here we are not able to be.

in the same space so that we don't die. Cool. Love it. You know, I was about to say, what's changed in the last time? Yeah. Anyway, what a long, strange trip it's been. But let's leave behind 2017 and 1982 and move along to 1992 here in this year of 2022. What's even happening? Thank you. Hi, we're Ellen, Stephen, and Mark. Hosts of Nice Games Club, the show where Nice Game Deves talk gaming and game development. Topics include programming, design, tools, and more.

We also do interviews and one of our game jams. Listen to Nice Games Club, wherever you get to your podcast, you get there, or at nicegames.com. Lute drop incoming. Get to the drop at HyperX.com for storewide savings. It seems like everything these days is getting more expensive, and HyperX is doing its part to fight the battle with deep discounts across all categories of HyperX gear. Head there quick, though. Once March ends, so does the Madness. It's the HyperX Lute Drop 2, going on now at HyperX.com. Need some adventure in your life?

What Mad Universe is a podcast where two guys delve into the history of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, and the impact it's had on pop culture. Everything's the same politically, but we have Raygun. The actual motive isn't to explore something that's quote scientifically possible. But neither is Star Wars, and I know there's arguments about that, but I would definitely consider Star Wars science fiction. You haven't read Dune! No, I haven't. You can never be the Quizette's Hatterack.

What Mad Universe on the HyperX Podcast Network. Okay, anyway, that was 82 in its rocky tempestuous glory. And now we jump ahead 10 years and things were pretty different in the video game space. There was no real Atari to speak of. Yes, there was a lynx, there was a jaguar. But really, Atari was this kind of wispy shadow of it. its former self, bounced around from owner to owner, their console was about to be turned into a dental tool. It was just rough times. Instead, Nintendo was at the top of the heap. And

actually, they had already been kind of supplanted a bit by Sega, who was eating their breakfast and laughing at them. And that's actually, that's where I want to come in and talk about Street Fighter 2 for Super NES. Of course, we've talked a lot about not we, this group, but we retronauts as a collective, have talked about Street Fighter 2 in the past year or so because the game celebrated its 30th anniversary last year, because we're old. And so we've touched on Street Fighter 2 for Super NES, which is specifically what I want to talk about. But in the context of 1992 and, you know, the history of video games, that's a significant release because it really gave Nintendo a second wind in the 16-bit space, you know, Sega launched the Genesis several years before

the Super NES showed up. And it was so much more impressive than every, you know, all the other consoles on the market at the time that, you know, it gave Sega a lot of an opportunity to really build up a fan base, you know, with smart game releases, great marketing. And so when Nintendo launched the Super NES, it was seen as kind of like, well, yeah, okay, you can play these games you've already played and they're going to be slow and pokey and not as cool as, you know, John Madden on Genesis. And Street Fighter 2 was where Nintendo kind of pushed back against that, although technically it was Capcom, but Nintendo, you know, had a great partnership with Capcom at the time. And so for more than a year, Street Fighter 2 was exclusive to Super NES.

And that was the hottest game in the world at that point. So all of a sudden, you know, everyone who was kind of like, uh, Super Nintendo, all of a sudden was like, whoa, Super Nintendo. I got to own that game. And that game, that's sold out repeatedly, even though it was the most expensive game on the market at the time. People were like, hell, yes, I'm going to spend $75 or $80 on this video game and get a new system to play with it. Because how else am I going to play Street Fighter 2, the hottest game in arcades at home with such, you know, arcade accurate graphics and sound and so forth? So it was a, it was a big win for Nintendo. Yeah.

Yeah, like looking at the list of 1992 stuff, like that's definitely. one of the main standouts that you see because we're in a spot where we had the Super NES launch already passed and it had an amazing launch lineup but there's kind of a bit of a low to and I think the mind-blowing launch

stuff and then like when it really came into it, some people had had a while to develop for it but then you're looking at the list of stuff that came out it's like oh, Street Fighter 2 yeah, that was big. Yeah, I think if you weren't there and following video games at the time

and you know reading magazines especially it's it's easy to kind of think oh well it's not that big a deal but no street fighter two and mortal combat were all the people cared about like if you look at eGM or game pro it's something like two thirds of their covers for several years were street fighter or mortal combat it was just like those were inescapable everything was about those fighting games and you know, kind of the other fighting games that really wanted to be them but weren't. It's difficult to explain the scale of that game. I'd compare it to something like Fortnite now, but even that's a little different because that's, that's kind of a, I don't know, how would you describe it?

Like, everything has kind of spun off into its own little pool. So yes, Fortnite is huge and millions and millions of kids play it, but it's not dominating the media the same way that Street Fighter 2 did. It's just, you know, it's in the background. no like fighting games are not have never been you know one of one of my main genres are not something i collect or delve a lot into but i own street fighter two on super nintendo because everyone owns street fighter two on super nintendo it was like it was a must have for the system yeah i um street fire two is incredible i considered it like the beginning of a new era that

like there's the super maria brothers era kind of that started in 85 and stuff street fire two is sort of a new era of like a dominant game style and genre and everything for console games and for arcade games and just think about how Street Fire 2 breathed new life into arcades too you know the previous year but yeah the Street Fire 2 itself is just like the colors the graphics the characters were just irresistible for me I was 11 in 92 and I just thought it was so cool you know and the backgrounds and the music and it's just and the controls and the moves, the special moves, it has, it brings some sort of fantasy elements into fighting, you know, like with fireballs and crazy things. And so there was something for Americans

was very unique and interesting about it, even if Japanese people may have been used to, like, fireballs or anime things. For Americans, it was a very different type of feel to it. No, I mean, you didn't really have anything super comparable to Street Fighter 2 prior to Street Fighter 2. In the U.S. or Japan, you know, for us, Street Fighter 2 definitely kind of seemed like it came out of nowhere. It was just like all of a sudden there was this amazing looking game in the arcades because most of us did not see the original Street Fighter because it was expensive and clumsy, and we've talked about that on the show. But, you know, there was this kind of lineage that built up to Street Fighter 2 that kind of really started with Kung Fu, but at no point, you

know, in the early days of the NES, when I was playing Kung Fu at a friend's house, do I think, oh, yes, someday this is going to give us the biggest game in the world. But yeah, the detail, the thing about Street Fighter 2, there's a lot that, you know, kind of feeds into its success and its appeal, but it's very easy to grasp the basics. Like there's two characters, there's two joysticks, you versus a friend, that's it. There's no distractions as just you two beating the crap out of each other. But then every character has their own ability. their own nuances, their own different way of handling. And then there's all the special moves.

There's the secret combos that weren't even, you know, originally intended to be part of the design, but they worked out so well that they become a huge factor in fighting games. And it's just, you know, a lot of pieces, components that really fed into one another and worked together complimentary in a great way. And, you know, the home version, the super and yes version of Street Fighter 2 was really impressive. I mean, it wasn't arcade. accurate. The characters were a little smaller. It dropped frames of animation. Uh, the backgrounds

were in his detail didn't have as much, you know, complexity to them. But even so, it was close enough that at, you know, at no point playing Street Fighter 2 on Super NES was I like, wow, this really sucks because it's not quite as good as the arcade game. The, the actual attitude people had was, wow, I can't believe I'm playing this on my home console. And that, that game was, you know, It was just like what everyone wanted to play for a while. Of course, you also had, you know, Capcom kind of relived Atari's failings by overdoing it with Street Fighter 2. You know, you had Street Fighter 2, and then you had Street Fighter 2 turbo less than a year later. And then you had Super Street Fighter 2.

And then you had like the Sega Genesis versions, which were slightly different. There was a PC engine turbo duo version of Street Fighter 2. There were PC versions. It just, you know, they spread it to. thin and kind of wore out its welcome. And then you had competing fighting games that were just quickly iterating as well. So you had kind of like a little mini fighting game crash, sort of a reflection of what had happened with Atari's 2,600 a decade earlier.

But in 1992, holy crap, Street Fighter 2, wow, on my Super NES. I want to say one more thing about Street Fighter 2 that amazed me. It just came to my mind is that, you know, up until Street Fire 2, when I considered one-on-one fighting games, I thought of something like karate chess. champ that was grounded in real martial arts with martial arts rules, you know, and things like that. And Street Fighter, you've got all these different fighters with different fighting styles from different places around the world.

And there's no rules because it's street fighting. You know, you can do whatever you want. And it just, it was so much fun. It's like letting go. It's like, screw the rules. You can just beat people up however you want, you know. I felt like that was a really liberating moment for fighting games. It's difficult for me to think about, like, games from.

this era and not have Street Fighter 2 be the first one that I think of, you know? Like, it is, it was huge. And growing up in a small town, like, we had one arcade that was at the mall. We had an Aladdin's castle at the mall. And they had one Street Fighter 2 machine. And I don't know when people were getting to the mall to play this game. So when it came out for Super Nintendo, it was such a huge deal, especially because, because there was a similarly limited number of video stores in town. So it was, you had to really scrap to rent it quickly.

But yeah, like it was such a huge deal. And I remember like being on vacation when I was 10, and drawing a comic of Batman fighting Blanca and Dalsam and his stretchy arms. Like, like they were that big in my head. They were like Street Fighter was the equivalent of Batman to me, which, as you may know, is a big deal.

Yeah, definitely. It's a world's foremost Batmanologists. That's a big thing. No, right? That's big talk. Okay, anyway, so Street Fighter 2, I don't want to, you know, beat this into the ground. That's what the Street Fighters do. That's their job.

So let's move along. Ben, what is your first pick for a notable release of 1992? What shaped the world? Oh, gosh. Well, again, looking at the list, the next one that jumped out of me was Zelda. We got linked to the past releasing in. in the U.S. in, I think, April of 92. And, like, Link to the Past.

I mean, I'm talking to video game nerds. What do you even need to say about Link to the Past? It, like, constantly shows up on lists of the best games of all time. And it just sort of, it solidified what the Zelda series was going to be for the next several decades. It set the formula. You know, it came back to, from the more experimental Zelda, too, it came back to being more the layout of Zelda one, but obviously with a ton more layers on top of it, and just it sort of set what Zelda does and also what, like, adventure games do.

And, you know, we still see that the kind of formula that it sets of, you know, find a new item, use that new item to solve puzzles as you go explore and open up new areas. So it's obviously one of the, like, big seminal games of the era. And it's just so much fun. I played the hell out of the link to the past. I probably put more hours into that than anything that wasn't a really long RPG at the time. Yeah, Link to the Past.

It's awesome. What do you guys think? I agree. I think it sucks. I'm kidding. That is not true. It is an extremely excellent video game. I have a memory, a very keen memory of playing a link to the past for the first time.

It was probably a Friday night when we usually went to Blockbuster to rent a new game before the weekend or something like that. My mom would take me. And they had a used copy of a link to the pass for sale, a previously rented copy. And it was probably like 93 or something. I don't know. And so I bought it and brought it home and it was dark in the room. And I put it in my super NES and turned it on. and the

you know triangles came in the triforce and that was crazy and then that kind of gave me chills a little bit and then it opened up in this scene you know dramatic music and yeah the sound design is the sound design is amazing

you tell stories like C3PO it's great can we get just the entire last soundtrack from a little bench real quick yeah sure digger, digi, digi, digi, digi, do you wake up in the middle of the night and your uncle's missing or whatever and you're hearing voices in your head, Zelda calling you. And the rain, the rain stuck with me, this rain on the roof, the rain sound. And you go outside the rain and you have to figure out how to get in the castle.

And then the fact that you go into the castle and you still hear the rain on the roof and it gets quieter as you descend down the levels. I mean, it just gave me chills, and it was so environmental storytelling. It's an incredible work there that that one experience of playing it for the first time has always stuck with me as one of the most profound video game experiences of my life. Yeah, there's just an amazing level of details put into this game, even though it's a very kind of cartoony presentation. But within that format, it took kind of, you know, everything the new 16-bit system could do to add in details in terms of layers of sound and layers of visual effects.

And then systems, speaking of Bench was talking about playing it in the dark. And I'm like, hey, dark world. So that was amazing. I doubt that it's the first game to do like parallel worlds. But it was certainly one of the biggest. And that's another thing that's been, you know, taken and developed on by all kinds of games since. But just having these two overlapping layers of the same world map that you can travel back and forth between and not just as more places to go, but as a way to set up puzzles.

You can get to places in one world by going places in the other world and then coming back was just a fantastic layer on top of the exploratory system that was set up in the original Zelda. Yeah, and like just the idea of like the high rule of link to the past is not small. And then you find out that there is a second. one that is the same size. And that's a pretty huge deal. Yeah, you go through a bunch of dungeons. Yeah, you get

through a bunch of dungeons and collect powers and stuff and you feel pretty upgraded and then you go on to take on what seems like it's going to be the final boss. And then he ducks through a portal and you're like, oh, this was about a quarter of the game that I just completed. And it's actually, there's like eight more dungeons

and I've got to do all this other stuff. That's so amazing. You got those three pendants, but now you need them them seven maidens yeah it's incredible and one of my favorite things about a link to the past another memory i have is that when i first got the flippers or whatever zora's whatever it is i don't remember whether what device lets you yeah you get the flippers yeah okay well lets you get into the water and swim around but i thought wow i wonder if i can go through this bridge here and then you go under the bridge and you discover well is this a spoiler i don't know you just cover it's this

of a guy, living under the bridge, you know, the bridge zooms into the whole screen and like, that just blew my mind. And of course, there's a bottle there. There you go. There's my tip. So, yeah, I mean, I feel like in some ways, I feel like this is a really early precursor to the open world, you know, format of games that we have going on now, where there's just, you know, you're going around this large area doing stuff, but there's also just other stuff around. And it's not necessarily on the critical path of the game. And I realized, This has always been an adventure game thing, too. But it seems like just the way that Link to the Past does it

is a precursor to the way all kinds of open world games do it today, where there's just cool stuff tucked around that will help you out if you happen to find it. Yeah. Yeah, the structure of a Link to the Past really, it didn't just inform the Zelda series, but I would say that once the 32 and 64-bit generation arrived in games went 3D, it became kind of,

the baseline of how games were designed. You know, you really moved away from linear platformers, and you moved to games like, you know, legacy of Cain Soul Reaver, which was very, very based on, you know, the dual world design of a link to the past. You had, um, dark, God dang it. I can't remember the name of the series.

It's, uh, sorry, not that one. It's, um, it's, okay, anyway, there's, there's a bunch of games. games that have, this was a terrible example. I'm not really making a case here. But just like, this is a part of gaming's DNA now. It's just the structure and design is so effective and so compelling. And yeah, having stuff tucked in little places, you're like, oh, I can see that, but I can't get it. How am I going to get it? And having, you know, power ups broken into little pieces. So, oh, I got a heart piece. Wait a minute. I don't get a new heart for this. It's just a

fragment of a heart piece and then forcing you to, you know, expand your collectability. Like, honestly, games kind of took that too far in the 32-bit generation. And I think they've been reeling it back for a while. And then I guess it expanded again with, you know, Assassin's Creed where it's like, go find a million feathers out in some damn place. You know, it's a give and take. There's this fluctuation in design. But all of it is very, very.

It owes a lot to a link to the past, is what I'm saying. I agree. It's incredible. It's a masterpiece of game design. It's so good. They went and made it again on 3DS with Link Between Worlds, which is the same thing, only different. And it's also good. Between Worlds is my second favorite is all the game.

Yeah, I liked it a lot. So good. But a lot of it being so good is it's very much a link to the past, but more so. You know, it's just building on that and adding. some new things and and doing another game in the same form. All right. Well, that's enough about Zelda. Why don't we talk about some other stuff? Benj, what's your first pick for momentous moments in 1992?

Well, momentous moments. Let's see. I think that would have to be Super Mario Kart, which came out in Japan in August 92 in America and September of 92. Really going to heavy on the Nintendo here. Yeah. Well, I guess it was a good year for Nintendo,

if you think about it. Mario Kart, Super Mario Kart was weird for me because when I first played it, I rented it, and it was, I thought it wasn't that great at the time. I thought, this doesn't feel like a Nintendo game. The graphics are a little weird and whatever, but little did I know that it was the start of something absolutely huge. Obviously, it started the cart racing genre of taking a bunch of characters

and putting them on carts and stuff. And obviously, also the Super Mario Kart franchise. franchise, the Mario Kart franchise, that's very big and popular now. And it was technically impressive because, you know, it uses that Mode 7 effect that F0 used to render the tracks. They're like flat sprites almost, they're stretched out and, you know, tilted in perspective. And it has, it's a really cool game design because it lets, you know, players who aren't necessarily great at racing games, have fun. anyway because there's power-ups and things that can trip up the computer players or trip up a good human player, you know. And I don't know else, you know, I honestly don't know anything about

how it was developed or who I see like Miyamoto is the producer, according to Wikipedia, directors were Sujiyama and Kano, Hideki Kano. And I don't know much about it. Do you guys know how it was created or any of its backstory? I mean, we've had episodes on this, so we don't need to go too deep into it. But, you know, I think the appeal of Mario Kart, Super Mario Kart, is that it works on both the design and a technical level. Like, on a technical level, it was very impressive because it basically took the F0 engine and made it multiplayer, which is something the original F player, F0 could not do because they only had the means to display a single rotating mode 7 background on the screen at a time. But they introduced the DSP-1 chip. I think that was the chip that they used in Super Mario Kart.

And that allowed them to do a split screen where you had basically two Mode 7 effects. So you had the top screen, the bottom screen. And you could have two people play at once, you know, with their own viewpoint of the race track. That's like a Mode 14. I know, right? It's so many modes. So, you know, that was, you know, very impressive on a technical level. But also, you know, just in terms of design, there had been racing games where you

you could blow stuff up and shoot things, you know, RC Pro Am on NES, racing destruction kit or set on Camador 64, you know, that idea was around. But this, you know, gave you characters and put you kind of behind their perspective. And it used familiar iconography, you know, turtle shells and mushrooms and stars and fireballs and things like that and put you in settings taken from Super Mario Brothers 3 and Super Mario World, and it just felt like immediately intuitive and accessible. If you knew the Mario games, you knew exactly what everything was going to do here, and just use these great kind of character metaphors for functions of a racing game. And by giving you different speed levels, you could start at 50cc, which was very pokey and

slow and kind of easy for everyone to compete with, going all the way up to 150cc, which was very fast and the AI racers were extremely cruel and would do terrible things to you. You know, it gave it a really kind of low floor for entry, but a high ceiling for mastery. So it's just, you know, excellent game design all around. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like it was kind of the same thing that happened later with Smash Brothers and fighting games where it took an existing genre that, you know, people would get really intense about it and just made it

into something that was more approachable and accessible and kind of more of a party game set up. Yeah, we probably shouldn't talk about Smash Brothers on here, though. It makes people angry. Yeah, well. That's because we know nothing about it. What's that?

Super Mario Kart did use the DSP 1. I looked that up. So you were right, Jeremy. And I have this weird false memory. I can't figure out. It was one of like one of these Mandela effect moments where I was trying to play multi-player Mario Kart to play a cup, but I could have sworn you could only play one-on-one. But apparently you can play, you know, multi, like a whole cup with two people.

So I, gosh, what's wrong with me? Memory is such a horrible thing. Also, to my memory, none of my friends played Super Mario Kart. Nobody really knew what it was. I see that it was like a multi-million seller or something, but Mario Kart 64 was what really propelled the series into stardom, in my opinion, like, from my perspective. So I don't know what you guys

saw. Yeah, I played, I played some Mario Kart, but I definitely played a lot more Mario 64, although at the point Mario 64 came out, I was in college so then I had, you know, roommates to play with, so that was also part of it. Also, there was nothing else to play on 64, so what were you

going to play? You're going to play Mario Kart. Yeah. I also feel like, I mean, the other thing, the other thing that strikes me about Mario Cart, just in general, is it's one of those things, you know, it's obviously one of those things that started a genre where it worked really well and everyone else looked at it and said, huh, this worked really well. We're going to make our own thing that's basically exactly the same thing only with our IP instead of their IP.

But I don't think anyone ever... In fact, forget the hookers. The what now? Just a Futurama reference. Sorry. Keep going. Sorry. But, yeah, I don't think anyone ever really managed to improve it. Like, you know, there's lots of other cart racers out there, but there's none that I think

of as standing out as being better or even as good as the contemporary Mario Kart installation. I don't think everyone ever really managed to do anything more with it than what Nintendo was doing. Yeah. There's crash. I like the

crash racing on the PS1. I thought that was pretty good. Other than that, I don't know. Konami crazy racers was pretty good. Anyway. Yeah. I want to like Mega Man's racing game, but I don't. Yeah. Anyway, so Super Mario Card. All right, let's move along to Chris Sims.

What is your first pick for momentous moments of 1992? Well, to keep the Mario train going, I kind of want to talk about probably the weirdest Mario game, Mario Lemieux hockey for Mega Drive. It's weird that it's first of he doesn't look like he should in that one. No, I want to talk about Super Mario Land 2, the six golden coins. And we've talked about this before. I know I've talked about it.

get around to playing the super mario land games until maybe like eight or nine years ago but like into the 2010s you know and i was surprised at how weird they are because it's it's mario you know you know Mario you've played a Mario game you know how he's supposed to work and then you get into Mario land and it's just a little bit off and you get to Mario Land 2 and it's just like okay this is now a recognizably

Mario but very different game and I think that's really cool and obviously it comes down to as I would find out later it's like you know R&D1 R&2 like different teams but the idea of kind of pushing

the boundary of what Mario is and like what a Mario game is and getting to do it on the Game Boy which I I feel like as much as the Game Boy saved Nintendo in a lot of ways, it was, Mario Land was not the priority, you know?

Like, they could get away with it because it was not the marquee title that Mario World would be. And I really think you can see it go in some weird directions, which is why it just becomes Wario Land by the end of it. Yeah, morphs into Warrior Land. Yeah, and it was developed by a different group inside, Nintendo you know I think it's R&D3 I can't remember

it was the people who did it was R&1 R&1 okay so R&1D1 it was the group that was responsible for the Game Boy and it wasn't it was like Yokoi's group instead of Miyamoto's group so they had free reign to do things that were

ridiculous with those characters and I've tweeted about there's some like Mario I don't know whether it's Warri Land or Mario Land too that has some like hills with frownies faces on it. I think they're kind of trolling the smiley face clouds in the Super Mario mainline console games. But yeah, it's a it's a funky, cool, weird game. And I enjoyed the fact that Mario Land 2 took that series into a more recognizably Mario direction, like you said, Chris.

So my take on Mario Land 2 is that I really need to play it someday. It's good. Yeah, no, I genuinely, I genuinely, I'm not kidding. I genuinely want to play it and I just haven't gotten to But I didn't have a Game Boy yet at the time when it came out. I didn't get on that train until later. And then when I did eventually get a Game Boy, it came with an inherited copy of Mario Land 1. So I've played that. But I just never ran into two.

So it looks really weird and fun. Yeah, I want to try it out. There's a colorized version now, like, you know, unofficial. That's really cool. If you get a chance that plays on the Game Boy color, if you play it on an emulator or something, I recommend that. It's really cool.

All right. So, we've been talking a lot about Nintendo stuff and Mario stuff. And I feel like we should give some oxygen to Sega but no we're not going to do that just yet we're going to hand the mic back to Ben to talk about more Mario stuff yeah so there were there were three Mario things that came out this year that weren't the main Mario game so

we just did Mario Kart and Mario Land 2 and the other thing that I really had a lot of fun with from this year was Mario Paint which is an extra weird one because it's really not a game this was kind of a weird foray for Nintendo into more like home computer like stuff to the extent that it was bundled with a mouse and it was just this really cool experimental thing

so like this was actually also I think it was a co-collaboration between Nintendo R&D1 so the Game Boy people were doing some experimental stuff with Mario and also intelligent systems who obviously did a lot of stuff with Nintendo They had just done the Super N-E-S version of SimCity. They did Super Scope.

They were going to go on to do, or they did do all the Fire Emblem stuff. But anyways, they put together this thing that's really more like a bundle of cool little utility programs than a game. So obviously, it's Mario Paint. You can paint with it. You've got like stamps and stickers and painting tools. But then there's also the music subsection where you can compose your own tunes. And then there's some other stuff that really obviously was just tucked into there to show off the mouse. Like the one like actual game thing in there is the fly swatter game where you use your mouse to control fly swatter and swap flies.

But yeah, it's just this cool little creative thing. People made awesome stuff with it. Did you guys have this? Do you guys make things in Mario Paint? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I love Mario Paint. Just so awesome. And 92 was a pretty good year for Nintendo.

I mean, this was a great, the heyday of the super NES, these creative things coming out, like the Super Scope you mentioned, and the Mario Paint. My brother did some really cool musical compositions on Mario Paint, and then I made little animations to go with them. And then they, I think they suggested either in the Mario Paint Nintendo Power book or somewhere else that you could record your creations on a VHS tape to play them back later. you set borders and it's just a really fun creative tool and that fly swatting game is funny because I tried to play that again recently like a couple years ago I was playing it and I just couldn't I got so good at it some reason it never stopped and I started getting nervous I'm like how long am I going to be playing this because it keeps going and like are you still playing it right now yeah I'm still click click click but it was hard for me when I was good anyway Chris

Yeah. This is one that I had growing up. I think this was my sister's big Christmas present in 1992 was Mario Paint. And it's so interesting. It's very existence is fascinating. I recently watched a really good video on YouTube about the kind of creation and making of Mario Paint that reminded me of all the stuff like how every letter in Mario Paint on the title is, If you click it, it does a different thing. You know, and it doesn't, it's that classic thing of it doesn't tell you that, but it encourages you to kind of poke around and see what's in there. And there's a lot of stuff that's in there. I really think it, it does kind of redefine what, what Nintendo was doing. And to me, I think that I appreciate about Nintendo, the only corporation that is my friend is that like, that's only because you're not uploading their music.

to your YouTube channel. And also, I don't know anything about Smash Brothers. So there's that. But a thing that I appreciate about them is that it seems like they try to do something beyond just making video games with every generation. And, you know, like sometimes it works. Sometimes it definitely does not work. I think, you know, the ultimate example of it works is the we. and the ultimate example of

it doesn't work is the Wii you even more so than the virtual boy I think yeah yeah but like I appreciate that they're always kind of pushing the boundaries of what what their stuff can be and I think again they did that with Mario land too

and Mario Paint pushes the boundaries of what a Super Nintendo could do right like it's not yeah it's not a game it's kind of a game it's not a game it is a game but it's not. Yeah, and like I want to talk a little bit about like the legacy of this and where it went because in some ways it looks like a little bit of a dead end because, you know, it was clearly pushing the Super Nintendo towards like kind of the computer console market,

like the old things that were computers and consoles with its, with its mouth and with its ability to do all these painting tools. And like that didn't really directly go anywhere. Like I was, you know, you think about what else did they do with the mouse. And I mean, you can look it up and actually there's a list of, of like several dozen games that are technically compatible with it, but half of the other games I've never heard of, and the other half are games I've never seen anyone actually use the mouse with.

It's not something that really got picked up. It didn't move towards being a computing device. But on the other hand, it actually has a lot of legacy to it. So one of the other things the intelligent systems went on to do is the WarioWare games, which have an obvious throughline from this in that you can be creating your own stuff. there's drawing tools to help create your own levels and then it expands on it with actually being able to make them interactive

and that obviously this and that both influenced the later Super Mario Maker which is again going in the direction of having the tools that you would have on a computer to create stuff and yeah so it had had I think it had a lot of legacy not you know the mouse itself didn't last

but the idea that you can create your own stuff on a Nintendo console is definitely something that stayed with us all the way to today. I had forgotten that until I watched that documentary, I had forgotten that the undo dog

from Mario Maker showed up in Mario Paint first. That that is a return. I love that. I love that too. I love that. I did recognize that reference and I thought that was great. Also, they should bring back Mario from Mario Maker 1,

who I don't believe is in Mario Maker 2, and that is a tragedy. Mario was great. So you're going to say Mario Lemieux. One thing I was going to say about the mouse is that my favorite super NES game to play with the mouse is Sidmeyer Civilization. It's a really good port that I came. Okay, yeah.

So there's a bunch of games that support it, you know, but are they worthy of playing with the mouse? Mostly the strategy type ports, I think. There's a great game where Wario puts a bucket over Mario's head and you have to save him from dying. Yeah, Mario and Wario That's pretty cool Quality Fair

All right All right, so wow, that's a whole lot of Mario Let's talk about not Mario I've got something Yes, binge, go for it Save me the trouble of having to save us. I was going to either talk about the Super Scope 6, but since we've been talking about Nintendo so much,

we have to talk about Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which came out in 92. At least I think it did. I haven't actually researched that. I'm just going from memory here. But Sonic 2 was huge. I mean, it was the Super Mario Bros. 3 of the Sega Genesis, like, you know, like a really good high-quality platformer game.

and it introduced tales, which is cool because another story alert. When I was a kid, I had a friend who lived down the street who was, I don't know, three or four years younger than me, and he was the only kid in the neighborhood with a Genesis. And when Sonic 2 came out, he got that. And around that time, his mom died of cancer, and it was really sad and tragic. but I was coming, I would come over to play with him because I was, you know, he's basically my best friend, but also I felt sorry for him because he didn't have, his brothers were a lot older than, anyway, tangent. So Sonic 2 was cool because I didn't have a Genesis controller. So I brought over my Atari slick stick, you know, one of these Atari 2,600 joysticks, and plugged it into the second controller port.

And we just discovered by accident that you could control tails with the second controller somehow. Wait, with an Atari controller? Yeah, with an Atari stick. Luckily, the button on the Atari stick is like the B button, I think, on a Genesis stick. I had no idea you could plug an Atari controller into a Genesis. It's the same port. It's not all that useful considering the limitations. But, yeah, there is some cross compatibility.

It's neat. I have learned something new. So we played, you know, I was. that great at Sonic ever. So he'd play the first player and I'd play Tales and I'd help him beat all the bosses and it was just like an amazing weird time. Like we had so much fun on the backdrop of this horrible tragedy in his life. But it was, you know, Sonic 2 is seared in my memory because of that.

I don't know if you guys know anything cool about Sonic 2 other than that. Well, just to assuage your conscience, I did double check it. And yes, it was released in November 92. Actually, like three days apart in Japan and North American Europe, which seems kind of notable for that. era. It actually almost had a worldwide launch. Yeah. That is interesting. That short duration. That was the first one I think that was developed in the U.S. by a collaboration between Sonic Team, the newly formed Sonic Team and Sega Technical Institute. Yeah,

Sagan Technical Institute. Mark Serney was involved in it. So, yeah, it was an international production. I think Sonic was such a big deal in the U.S. compared to Japan. Like, it was popular in Japan, but it was huge here, and in Europe, that SIGA was like, well, we see where the bread is buttered, let's shift the knife to that side of the table. That was a weird metaphor. But yeah, so the Technical Institute was founded by Mark Sarni, who was an Atari alum. That's funny. I've actually asked Mark Sarni about Sonic 2, and I just completely forgot. I asked him about it one time. That's so cool. Yeah, it was a collaboration. I'm just, all this is coming back to me. This is what I'm talking about.

not no preparation it's but I just wiki wiki did and it sold 8 million copies which is pretty impressive so there you go genesis Genesis okay well I'm going to keep the Sega love going by talking not about Genesis but talking about Sega's true power the arcade 1992 saw the debut of the Model 1 arcade board in the early part of the year and with it virtual racing. And I feel like this is one of those things that when you look back at it, if you weren't there, you're kind of like, eh. But, you know, virtual racing, it's a pretty simplistic game. It's, you know, a Formula One racer. It has very simple, like, flat shaded polygon graphics. There's, I think, one track, one car. There's just not a whole lot you can do

in the game. But holy crap, in 1992, this was mind-blowing. Sega ran it on these big monitors, like super high resolution for the time. You know, the game ran at 60 frames per second. It was super crisp.

It just looked, it looked like the future. It was like those scenes from Tron with the light cycles, but you were controlling. And for the first time, you know, it really felt like you were in control of like a true immersive 3D video game. And, you know, there had been 3D racers before this, stuff like test driving, test driving, stuner, you know, you had things like that that were okay.

But this was Sega really putting its technical prowess and its design prowess together. And, you know, they compared it internally and in their marketing to hang on, which was, you know, I just recently covered that in my video. series. And Hang On was a huge deal in 1985 because it combined one, you know, the the superscaler arcade hardware, which they had just created, which created the illusion of 3D by creating lots of sprites that could scale very cleanly to create the illusion of depth, of motion, of, you know, movement into a 3D space. And also they gave you the option of a really cool ride-on motorcycle cabinet where you controlled the game by tilting your body. Just, you know, it was Sega just really flexing, I think, and saying, hey, you know, we may not be as big in arcades

as Namco or Taito, but look at all the cool stuff we can do. And it really, it really cemented Sega as a powerhouse in the arcades. And they rode that, you know, that reputation and just kept pushing arcade boundaries further and further. And you get to the model one, which was really an evolution of the, I can't remember what it's called, like, visco object or something, hardware. Like, they were really into the idea of 3D. And Virtual Racing was a realization of arcade hardware that could push like three times as many polygons as anything else on the market at the time. And at the same time, you had use Suzuki as the key designer. That dude, loves him some racing.

He loves racing so much. I wish I loved anything as much as you, Suzuki, loves racing. Only my wife. That's the only thing I love that much. And she's not a thing. She's a person. So that doesn't even work. Anyway, the point is, like, this was a super passionate designer

with a love for technology and a love for the subject, putting together the most just bonkers, amazing piece of arcade hardware anyone had ever seen. And this, you know, Street Fighter 2 was huge. And Virtual Racing was never that big. But what this did was just essentially cement Sega as the dominant innovator and technical powerhouse in arcades for another decade. Like this, you know, they built the reputation of this.

It's so bizarre that they didn't look at this and say, that's what we should base our next home console around. No, they went with the Sega Saturn, which was intended to be a 2D powerhouse. I don't understand it. What were they thinking? It was so, just such a huge miss. But here in the arcades,

like no one compared to Sega. And virtual racing, you know, Thubi Gat, Virtua Fighting, virtual or Virtua Fighter, Virtua Tennis, virtual bass fishing, whatever. I don't know. There's, yeah, Virtual Cop, there's all sorts of it was just Virtua. As far as as the eye could see. And no one did it like Sega. This was, you know, like they were so

amazing in 1992. They were, you know, neck and neck with Nintendo, maybe even ahead of Nintendo on the console front and then just demolishing everyone else in arcades. Just no one could even compare. Sega was like, this was Sega at the peak of their game. And it's, you know, I'm not a big Formula One racer racing fan. I think it's really boring. But this is still a really cool looking game because it's it's got that like sort of retro timeless look to it if that makes any sense like it's so dated that it becomes cool again it's just yeah it's a really great piece of software and hardware anyway you know that's me gushing enthusiastically about Sega if that doesn't if that doesn't mute the nintendo not's complaints then screw you you're

you don't deserve to listen to this podcast what sells virtue erasing to me is the frame rate I mean, there had been 3D Polygon, polygonal, whatever that word is, games before on home consoles, probably in the arcade. They weren't always the smoothest experience, but VR, I mean, virtual racing was just so smooth, like buttery smooth 3D polygons. Like, you can't not love it because. Yeah, it's just, it's just the best actual real-time 3D stuff that anyone had seen to date. And, you know, it's still, it still looks pretty good. I mean, it's, you know, it's obviously, by today's standards, it's an extremely low poly aesthetic, but like Ben just saying, it's really smooth, the design sense is really good, it still looks nice. the non-Nintendo discussion.

I believe, Benj, you had a non-Nintendo console that you want to discuss. Do we call this a console? It's a device. Yeah, that's a great debate. So the device at heart here is the Phillips CDI for CD Interactive. It's a multimedia console, I guess you could say. I had a Twitter debate once about this, like asking how to categorize it, because they sort of categorized. these multimedia consoles as a separate thing from regular video game consoles in marketing.

And I think that one of the most obvious pieces of evidence is that Nintendo actually allowed the publication of games on this platform, showing that it wasn't considered to be a competitor, like a direct competitor of regular game consoles. It probably had something to do with price and obviously the fact that it completely sucks. But anyway, so sorry, CDI fans. The funny thing, what I really want to emphasize about CDI that I think a lot of people overlook is that it was an attempt to make a standard CD format for interactive CDs, interactive games. Like you would have like a single VHS player that everybody owns and everybody can put a tape in and play it. This would be like a CD console where just like a music CD for all time, you buy music.

It'll play in this year's CD player. It'll play in next year's CD player. This was a standard called Green Book. You know, there was this rainbow of standards made by, I think it was a collaboration between Phillips and Sony. And Red Book was like audio, yellow book was CD-ROM, something like that. And the screenbook was an interactive standard. So I think it's funny that they attempted this. And obviously, the reality of the technology evolving so quickly

that this couldn't be a practical standard that would last more than a couple years, you know. And in reality, you know, in practice, I think the hardware couldn't support a lot of great experiences that weren't static screens like slideshows and menu clicking type things. Because that's what a lot of the titles ended up being. I had a, I bought a CDI used in like 99 with like 50 games for, you know, really cheap, like on eBay. And it had some of those, uh, Nintendo, like Wanda Gamelon. I had three, I had Hotel Mario, Wanda Gamelon, the Zelda games. And I didn't have Zelda's adventure.

Do you still have those because you could retire on those now? Yeah, it's sad. I sold them in like 2003, I think. What I always say about the CDI is it was so depressing. pressing. It's the only console I ever sold, you know, like of any of my collection. I like, I hoard technology. I hoard games. But the CDI, when I look at it, it made me sad because the games were just abysmal. Like, they're so slow. They're like two frames a second. The controller options are terrible. It's just a basically a completely failed platform that's impractical.

And every single game of the 50 games was terrible. Like every single one. There is no redeeming game or the platform. There are some people on Twitter now who, like, I've asked, you know, are there actually any games? And there's some people who say, maybe this one. But if you really play it, you know, no, it's not actually good. But I just think it's fascinating. They tried to, you know, make it a standard.

So there were some, I think there were some other companies that created CDI players. But the funny thing is how far Phillips milked the CDI idea. They did keep trying for several years. They even built them into TV sets and kept. releasing new versions of this console thing that weren't technically better, but were different shapes and stuff. And it never took off. So what do you guys think? I don't know that I've ever actually interacted with one in person. I've seen some play-throughs of some of the games, which are, in fact, pretty terrible. I mean, I think the main thing about this is it just goes to show

for how long companies have been trying to angle themselves to be the company to confront. your entire media center, right? To be your entire media experience, to be your music and your video and your games. And I don't know that anyone has ever gotten it right. I mean, later on, the consoles themselves got into this business. You know, all the modern consoles will also do your video streaming services, but it's kind of clunky and most people just do them through their TVs now.

The TVs will do that, but it won't actually play your games. You know, Steam wants to be everything now, but I don't know. It's hard to be all things to all people. It's hard to get it right. something suffers yeah that's a good point there were some competitors to the cdi one was the tandy v iS video information system which i also owned for a brief period of time and and sold because it was depressing but you know and gosh commodore tried like a cd tv kind of multimedia console and all these they were part of this multimedia boom where they said oh we can fit a lot on a cd so let's try to

compress video down stick it on there and uh audio and you can have lots of pictures. And so there was always like an encyclopedia for everything. I think there's even an encyclopedia on the Sega CD, like release. I can't remember. But Sega CD came out that in 92 as well. But I don't know if we have time to talk about that because that's true. We don't.

But Chris, what's your next pick for 92? Maybe we can rush through and tackle a few more things. What was my next pick for 1992? I don't know. You didn't send it in the email, so we don't know. I like to surprise you, and clearly I like to surprise me as well. Every day you should give yourself a little gift. And this time your gift is, what am I going to talk about?

Yeah. Listen, 92 was a great year for very bad licensed games. You had Hudson Hawk. Okay, here we go. You had all these things that I read about in. Nintendo power. I remember Hudson Hawk coverage. Yeah.

bizarre. First of all, bizarre that that game got a, if you have seen Hudson Hawk, bizarre that game got on any as tie in. Well, you know, they,

when they licensed that, they did not know what the movie was going to be like. They were like, whoa, Bruce Willis action movie. This is the next die hard. We've got to get on this.

We have to license us and make a video game of it. And then I'm sure when they saw the rushes or whatever, oh my god what have we done we can't make a video game out of this um have you have you played it jeremy oh god no no like all these horrible license games i was old and wise enough to say i am steering well clear of these things i don't actually want to talk about hudson hawk for the nintendo but i just want to know if there's like a midi like a like a chip tune version of swinging

on a star and there has to be right i don't know that i couldn't say it's this was a european developed game. So there's probably a chip tune version of it that has so many like swirling RPGs in it that you can't even tell what it's supposed to be. Yeah, that the the boomo scene style music. Yeah.

But very briefly, I did just want to talk the actual game that I want to talk about because we've been talking about Nintendo so much and I feel like it's fun to spread the wealth around. Streets of Rage 2 is a good one. There you go. aka bare knuckle too

that was the one with the aliens in it right I don't know I'm not actually good at it so if there are aliens I know there's a scene I want to say it's in streets of reach too you go through it's not actually aliens you go through like a film set and dudes and alien costumes come out and attack you but you're basically fighting your way

through an aliens brawler for a little while it's really great wild I have talked before about how I was a pretty diehard Nintendo partisan growing up, just so I didn't have a genesis. And in my head, Rache kids had Genesis. Because the only person I know

who had a Genesis also had a Super Nintendo. So he was clearly wealthy. But as an adult, this is another one that I went back to and kind of like developed a real appreciation for Streets of Rage. Because I've always liked beat-em-ups. You know, like I was a big,

the big two for me on Super Nias as far as non-Nintention. like first party titles were Street Fighter and Final Fight. My brain kid wanted to say Fatal Fury. That's a different game. And I remember getting really excited when Blockbuster had their own special version of Final Fight that had Guy in it. You can play Sky. But going back, like, Streets of Rage is, and I am sorry to have to admit this, the better series.

It is the better game. I agree. I don't think there's a lot of contention about that. I think everyone acknowledges that Streets of Rage is better. Just young 10-year-old Chris is screaming at me right now, but no, Streets of Rage is better. My thing is, and I mean, use O Koshero music. What can you do? Maybe that has something to do with it.

Like, I cannot tell you why it's better, but I've played both of them and I know that Streets of Rage is better because I enjoyed it much more and Streets of Rage, too. I feel like there should be like a smash brother. of beat-em-ups, you know, where... King of Fighters? No, what you would do is you would pick who you play as. You play as like Mike Hagar, but then all of the enemies would be characters from other beat-em-offs.

That would be fun. I feel like there's some sort of Mugan-esque-type fan game that does that. Oh, yeah, Mugan. I wouldn't be surprised. And also, Goku's in it. Dreats of Rage, too, is excellent on the B. X-95 Genesis. Oh, I bet.

I heard those are very well made. Yeah. Not that I'm making him right now, but it's what this is, I built two of them just so me and my kids could play streets of rage together. You know, it's a really fun experience. It's, it's always a good moment to share the streets of rage with your kids. It is. They love the rage, as we call it. The apostory rage.

You kids want to play the rage? Yeah, Daddy. Okay. All right. Okay, so we've, I think we've, uh, I think we've, uh, I think we've given some air to Sega. So we've, uh, I think we've given some air to Sega. So that's good. I don't feel so guilty anymore. Um, but let's, let's, let's really quickly just, just, um, but let's, let's, let's really quickly, just go through our final picks, each of us, for best of 92. And actually, I think mine and Ben's are kind of complimentary. And mine actually ties in with one of the very first things we discussed, which was Zelda.

So one of my favorite things of 92 was Soulblazer, which was basically a Zelda-esque game. But to me, it stands out because it attempted to do more with its narrow, than just be like, go save a princess. It was, it's kind of a morality play. You're fighting a, a world that's been sold off,

basically. You're trying to restore it. A dean or a king, a greedy king has sold the entire world to a demon, all the souls of the creatures within it. And not just humans, but like snails and tables. It's a little weird.

It's kind of. animistic. But throughout this journey, it really kind of forces you or want you to reflect on the nature of good and evil, on the nature of like what is the meaning of life. It poses some very big questions. And at the same time, it is a pretty fun action RPG where you are basically building out the world as you rescue the souls that inhabit it. Because as you, you know, rescue the souls, then the things that these creatures and people are linked to become liberated as well from the demons' clutches. So it's a really unusual and interesting game, but very cool. And I don't think it has a Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack, but it was, you know,

part of the whole quintet cycle that included Act Razor. So the music in Soulblazer is very much of a piece with Act Razor's music by Koshiro. So it just kind of brings everything full circle. Yeah, it wasn't Koshiro. It was Takakawa, looks like. But, yeah, similar style. Wow. I need to play Soulblazer more.

You do. Sadly, it's like, it's like 300 bucks now for just the cartridge. It's crazy. That's okay. You can play for free on the Raspberry Pi. Oh, you're a pie guy. All right. Actually, I've got a mister at home.

Yeah, it doesn't. look like it ever got officially re-released? Like, who owns that stuff now? Is it, I mean, but I don't... Yeah, the publishing rights were Enix, so Square owns some of it, but I'm not sure what happened to the rest of Quartet's, or Quintets stuff. Yeah, you know, you don't, like, that stuff has not, you know, even with all the stuff that's been re-released over the last decade, you don't see that stuff anywhere, which is a shame, because there's a ton of really good stuff in there that needs to escape and be played. Yeah, they've, they've held on to, like, Ancient was the one, the company responsible for the

Act Razor remake. So they must have co-licensed that with Inix. But I don't know. I don't think Agent was involved in any of the other games. Because that was Kosciro's company. And he kind of split off and did his own thing. So I don't know what happened to the rest of Quartet's quintet stuff. Why don't I keep saying Quartet?

I keep, you know, you lose Quichiro. You're like, oh, it's just four people now. Yeah, I don't know. But I would like to see this game and, you know, Teranigma and so forth come back. And actually they were talking about, you know, potentially wanting to remake Terranigma when ActRaser was remade. So maybe there's hope.

Maybe we'll see the Soulblazer illusion of Gaia Terranigma trio make their way back into the world. That'd be great. Freedom from the demons of greed. All right, Ben, what's your call here? So one thing I wanted to talk about was actually things we didn't get in 1992.

Because one of the things in the zeitgeist around that time, at least for Super Nintendo kids who were into roleplaying. games was all the stuff that Japan was getting that we weren't. We did obviously get Soulblazer, but 1992, Japan saw Final Fantasy 5, Japan saw Dragon Warrior 5, Dragon Quest 5, sorry, and Shin Megami Tensei was 1992, and none of that stuff came out in English, most of it not until the next generation of platforms at the earliest.

And that was just, you know, that was a thing in this era that the Japanese companies were just not convinced that they could sell RPGs to the U.S. And so we would get some of them and then skip over. I mean, obviously everyone knows, you know, we got Final Fantasy 4 as 2 and then skipped to 3 as 6 eventually, but 5 just slipped through the cracks. Similarly, we just weren't getting the Dragon Quest. And it was, it was just, you know, the subject of much hand-wringing, I remember. through that whole era like why are we not getting these things how can we play them i picked a few of them up on actual super famicom carts which you know you can play in a super nintendo um so i actually have a super famicom copy of final fantasy five and uh second densetsu three uh i barely read any

japanese but that didn't stop me from trying so i don't know i just wanted to pick that because it kind of it stands out to me as as a feature of console gaming in that era just a frustration that we had to live with. Oh, yeah. It was weird. I didn't know what we were missing, honestly, you know? Yeah, I mean, there wasn't, I mean, we had, yeah, the internet was kind of just getting started.

There wasn't really much of that, so it was a lot of it was word of mouth. And, you know, sometimes the game magazines were poured on, on what was going on there. Yeah, there was a lot of talk about Final Fantasy 5 in particular being localized. Yeah, there was Final Fantasy 3. And then once Final Fantasy 6 came over as Final Fantasy 3, they were like, well, now we're going to release it as Final Fantasy Extreme. They didn't do that either. We did eventually get both of those games, Dragon Quest 5 and Final Fantasy 5.

Obviously, all of these things have been translated now, at least all the big ones. I'm sure there's a few that have still slipped through the cracks. But, yeah, it took a long time. Like, the fact that we didn't get all those games fueled so much, like, early Internet media about retro gaming and stuff, because people were going back and trying to discover what we had not seen. played in America. And it's still going.

They were big kind of motivators for the advent of emulation and fan translations and that sort of thing, ROM hacking. So, you know, their absence pushed the medium forward in a way.

Yeah, I played, I first played Final Fantasy 3, the NES, Final Fantasy 3 in a fan translation because it didn't come out for a long, long time in any official English capacity. Mm-hmm. Do we want?

Benge, yeah, do you have one last thing to talk about? Yeah, I think we should talk about the Super Scope 6 because no one ever does. Oh, free the Super Scope 6. No one ever talks about it. Yeah, I don't know what that means, but I'll talk about it. The Super Scope is a peripheral, like, it's a light gun, but it's shaped like a cannon, so it cannot be mistaken for a real weapon, which is this is like after there were laws about that kind of stuff, you know. At some point, there was a consumer law that said, you know, toy gun.

have to have an orange plug in them. And then they had to be all orange and stuff like that, you know, if they look like a rifle. And so their way to get around that was to, you know, make a bizarre fantasy weapon cannon that looks like no real, no real gun. It was a super Nintendo colored bazooka, basically. Yeah. And Genesis, the minister, I guess, did something similar. It's a weird looking kind of scope canony thing.

But the superscope was neat. I got one from Kmart. I remember, I was so excited. It came with the Super Scope 6 cartridge. It has six games built into it. And they're like basically several variations of the same kind of game. There's Blastris. It's sort of like Tetris.

There's a game where you can blow away pieces of the Tetris blocks, I think, while they're falling from left to right or moving from left to right. And then there's Blastris B, which is sort of like columns. It has these falling colored blocks cubes that you can shoot them to turn the colors to different colors as they fall down and it's really neat.

And if you stack them in a row, they disappear. And Mole Patrol is one of my favorites because it's sort of like a whack-a-mole kind of thing where these little aliens pop up out of craters and you have to shoot them and, you know, you can't miss them. And there is Laser Blazer,

which is another sort of group of games involving futuristic spaceships and jet plane kind of setting missiles and stuff. So you're either shooting missiles that are coming at you or you're shooting down fighters. You know, there's different things. And it was a neat little collection of games. And the funny thing about the SuperScope 6

is I don't think I ever played another single SuperScope game after those other than maybe, later, 20 years later, I tried Yoshi's Safari or something with a ROM cartridge, but it just did not take off as a peripheral. Yeah, so I think

I had, I'm pretty, I know I had this at some point because I remember the Super Scope 6 games, and I'm pretty sure I also play Battle Clash, which is the one where you're shooting at Weird Mecca. Oh, yeah. In a first person perspective.

So I know I had them. I must have sold it at some point because I I don't still have a super scope among my old consoles. But, yeah, I definitely remember playing it. It was, I don't know, it was fun. I have my, I have my superscope, like, mounted on the wall over my door in my office, like some kind of like. Like the Atari sword. Yeah.

Like I tie this back together. You know, some people have, do you have a, Yoshi's head mounted next to it? That would be so awesome. That would be horrible. Yeah. I'm like a plaque. Oh, my God. The BX scope is my question.

Yeah, it would be like a big square box with a hole in it. It wouldn't be very good. A BX scoop. Yeah, like Ben just took a big piece of plastic and cut a square hole in it. Okay. Anyway, the superscope,

one thing neat about it is it's wireless. So it has an infrared emitter. And there's a little receiver you put on top of your TV set that sort of handles the communication aspect of it instead of a cord plugged into the console directly. But otherwise, I think it works basically the same as the light zapper, you know, on the NES. Same kind of principle of the blanking out and detecting a square on the screen, that kind of thing. And it's weird.

Nobody ever, nobody bought it. Oh, look, there's a, I just looked it up on Wikipedia. It said, in a congressional hearing on violence video games, Senator Joe Lieberman said that he thought the SuperScope looked like an assault weapon. which is just Fuss He's a little Confused man

Okay, Chris, do you want to wrap things up for us with one final thought? We've already talked about it, but like, it's linked to the past for me. Like, that was the best Zelda game until Link Between Worlds came out, and that is my hot take. That's not that hot a take at all. Yeah. Well, I am, as you might remember, I am the Okerian of Time Hater. You are? Yeah, I do not think it is a good thing.

open trap door rancor monster sorry I'm not jealous yeah like I said here's something that might be a hotter take for you Jerry Parrish since you are the arbiter of heat in this scenario I thought once

that it was weird that we haven't gotten more Zelda likes and I feel like we're getting a lot more now like over the past like maybe even three years or so I've seen a lot more but I always thought it would be easier to make

a game like Link to the past that was as good as Link to the past that it would be to make a game like Symphony of the Night that was as good as Symphony of the Night, you know? I don't know if that's true but I know that there are Metroidvania's that I prefer to Symphony of the Night

and there's like two games that I think are better than Link to the Past in that style after 30 years. I think creating interlocking puzzle dungeons and things like that is a lot more complicated than just giving you sort of the skill gating that you have in a Metroidvania game. It's a much more intricate design and requires a lot more consideration and in care of design. So yeah, I think a Metroidvania is kind of like the light way to do that, L-I-T-E, you know, just kind of a breezy way to give you a Zelda-ish experience, but to get the full Zelda, you really, it takes a lot of work. And I think that's kind of why

they went away from the, uh, the big puzzle dungeons in Breath of the Wild to little like standalone puzzles. Because you can create a standalone puzzle, you know, like a room that has a puzzle in it that you're supposed to solve. That's easy. But creating a contiguous space where you have like 12 puzzle rooms and they interlock with each other and they require you to backtrack between them and raise the water level or

lower a bridge or something that gets really complicated Zalta's design is not easy and I think that's why we don't see that many people try to do it because most people who try to do it don't do it as well as Nintendo sometimes Nintendo doesn't even do it that well

so yeah I think that's why I think that's just you know it speaks to what a great job Miamoto and Teziga and so forth did with a link to the past and just you know how tremendous a feat it was that

they took these kind of raw materials from the NES and said let's really create something intricate and not just you know like puzzle dungeons but also puzzle dungeons that span multiple dimensions of reality and

those two realities those parallel worlds interlock with each it's pretty amazing like that game works so well it does not stumble in any regard everything is on point but it's a rare achievement i i have to say that for a link to the past i agree i think i tweeted and i was just thinking about the last time i played through it was january of last year and i just tweeted it's amazing how modern it feels even now and i said the game is better than 90% of games released today, my opinion, and I still think that's true. It's just one of the, it's just a rare masterpiece. You don't really know how good it is until you actually play it. You can't

just like guess it or get the gist of it by looking at it. Like I can't even explain it to you, but the way it just comes together is something incredible. So there you go. It is a, it is a truly excellent game and one that I think pulls off the very difficult feat of holding up. up as a genuinely great game and a genuinely fun game to play all these years later. I feel like, yeah, 30 years later, and it's still something that you could fire up on the switch on the Super Nintendo collection that they have, and it would feel like you were playing a game that just came out on the e-shop. Yeah, yeah, and I agree with what Jeremy said.

I think that designing the sort of interlocking puzzle and dungeon and map exploration stuff that link to the past gets right is just really hard. there's just so many there's a lot of moving pieces that have to work together and feel good and it just it nails it and i think it's that's something that's really hard to recapture i i agree i think it's much harder than putting together a decent 2d metroidvania and the clones oh one last point is the clones it's like jeremy said it's so hard to do those puzzles if you think about like neotopia or crusader assenti which i was just playing yesterday or um i don't know like golden axe warrior or none of them really get the the Zelda formula right they think they do they've got this overhead

top down kind of like you stab things you know and you you kind of level up your guy but it just doesn't have this puzzle pieces linking together and uh that's a pun linking linking yes and that's why i like soulblazer so much because it kind of moves away from the puzzle design and it's much more, you know, structured more like a Metroidvania almost. And, and, you know, it's about combat goals and opening up new paths into the world. And also giving you magic skills, which is cool. Anyway, so, yeah, that's it. I think we actually did it. We got through all the stuff in 92 we wanted to talk about. So we can rest easy for another year. And then, you know, 11 or 12 months from now, I'll drag you all into this again. And the cycle starts anew with

the threes. So please look forward to that or not. Anyway, thanks everyone for your time. I know everyone has things to do with their time that should not be this, so I will let you all go. But first, let's all talk about where people can find us and experience our awesomeness on the internet. You can find Retronauts, for starters, on the HyperX Podcast Network and also at patreon.com slash retronauts to subscribe to the show. You can subscribe and get early access with higher bitrate quality, better audio quality. for three bucks a month or for $5 a month.

You can also get those early access episodes plus two patron exclusive episodes per month plus patron exclusive weekly columns by Diamond Fight with many podcasts attached and also Discord access, which is a lot of stuff for $5. So check it out at patreon.com slash retronauts. Chris.

You can find all my stuff by going to t-H-I-S-B dot com. That is my website, and it has links to everything that I do. If you would like to get more of my thoughts about video games, the only publicly available writing that I'm doing right now is on the War Rocket Ajax Patreon. It is a series of reviews called Castlemania, where I am reviewing every Metroidvania that I play.

And thanks to Jeremy Parrish for coming up with that name for the genre. And I just put up, as of this recording, I just put up a brand new one on the Ajax Patreon where I cover two recent games that I quite liked, Death Gambit and Cathedral. So check that out. Ben, what about you? You can find me on Twitter at Kieran.

That's K-I-R-I-N for random stuff. I don't have much else going up on the internet right now. If you need any desktop CNC milling, check out my day job at Bannum Tools, who indirectly sponsors retronauts by paying my salary. Excellent. And finally, Benj. I am Benj Edwards, and you can find me on Twitter at Benj Edwards.

Does that sound redundant? Anyway, also, I write history things on how-togeek.com. And I want to bring this full circle. I just realized Atari drop support for the 2600, January 1st, 1992. So that was the death of Atari classic. Wow, they died twice in this episode. Brutal. Brutal.

Anyway, thanks for listening. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on the internet as GameSpite on Twitter, as Jeremy Parrish on YouTube, and as Jeremy Parrish, wherever fine, limited run games are sold. That's it for this episode. We'll be back again in a year to talk about 1973 and so on. But until then, enjoy 2022. God, I hope. We hope we can enjoy 2022.

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