Video Gamers Podcast - [Bonus Round] Gaming in the 90’s - Video Games Podcast

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

The Video Gamers Podcast is back and video game hosts Paul, Josh and Ryan are going back in time to the 1990’s to chat all about one of the best decades in video game history. From top titles to personal favorites, gaming in the 90’s was something special and we break down the games, the consoles and the magic of what gaming in the 90’s was like.  Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: YayaArizona, Disratory, Cykasniber and Ole Jake Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/  Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod  Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. Hello fellow gamers! Welcome back to the 90s, the decade that spawned first-person shooters, platformers still reigned supreme, and 3D graphics became a reality. We are the Video Gamers Podcast, hosted by three lifelong gamer dads, and today we are going to be talking about gaming in the 90s. I am your host, Paul, and joining me, the arcade connoisseur, spending all of his sweet, sweet allowance at the local arcade playing fighting games. It's Josh. Dude, Aladdin's Castle was my jam back then, man.

I don't know. Look, I know there's some older gamers listening, man, and they're going to know Aladdin's Castle. It was the Disneyland. Don't got nothing on Aladdinaddin's castle man that was the most magical place in the world oh very nice i don't even know if i've ever heard of it i'll have to uh google that here all right and then joining josh and me he is a little bit younger than me and josh i believe he started out in the 90s as a two-year-old. It's Ryan. I'm young in age, but old at heart. An old soul.

Yeah, I'm an old soul. Oh, very nice. Also, he hasn't matured past two also. Oh, absolutely. Yes. 1990, Ryan peaked in maturity and just been plugging it ever since. You are. Oh, very nice.

All right. Well, today's bonus round is going to be very exciting. We've never done anything quite like this. We are not just going to be breaking down like the best games of the nineties. Instead, we just kind of wanted to talk about what the gaming experience was like for us back in the nineties. We are going to talk about some of our favorite games. We'll talk about just some general ways that we would game, how we would find games, things we enjoyed. Maybe we'll talk a little bit about arcades or what consoles we owned, all kinds of stuff like that. And before we do jump into that bonus round, Josh, I think you've got a couple reviews to read. Oh, man. Reviews, one of my favorite things about this podcast.

So if you want to make a Josh happy, leave us a review. I love them. I get so excited every time I see a new one. And we like to read them on the show because you all take the time to actually write the review. So we are going to take the time to read it on the show and just, you know, say thanks and kind of throw it out to the world. This first one comes in from Malafik from Canada and it's titled, God, I love nerds. And it says, guys, don't take it the wrong way.

I married one. Nerds are the best. I just discovered this podcast a few weeks back because of a hashtag Dragon Age Dread Wolf on Instagram. And it's the best thing that happened to me this year. Those guys are funny, so passionate and just the best to listen to. I subscribed two days ago and I've been listening to the squad cast at work since then. It's really the best plot twist. I'm not even that much of a gamer myself. My husband's been buying me all kinds of games throughout the years. And now I can say I really like RPGs and

some roguelikes, but that's it. Okay. I guess I'm a nerd too. Ryan, Josh, and Paul, if you guys see this and decide to read it on the podcast, I've played and loved Skyrim, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect series, Dragon's Dogma 1 and 2, Hades. But I would love to know if any of you guys have played The Binding of Isaac Repentance. I've watched my husband playing it for so long, and it was my first roguelike, and I love it. I would love to know what you guys think about it. P.S. I'm still too shy to say hi in the Discord channel, but loving the little community there as well. Continue the good work, Allison.

Oh, that's so nice. Yeah, nothing wrong with lurking in the Discord. Those are some fantastic games. Way to start gaming, man. Yeah, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Skyrim. Binding of Isaac, isn't that the one where you play as a fetus?

That one always seemed a little weird to me, so I actually never gave it a try myself. As much as I like roguelikes, I have never played the Binding of Isaac. I've seen video of it. I know it's Rebirth and Repentance. I'll be honest, I don't know Repentance at all. But if we were going to suggest a top-notch roguelike that we all love to somebody, what one would you guys suggest? Risk of Rain 2. Risk of Rain 2.

Yeah, that was way too much fun. Yeah, and so if you like roguelikes and your husband likes roguelikes, you two can play Risk of Rain 2 together, and it is an absolute blast. So I highly recommend that one. Totally agree. Yeah, and thank you for the review, Allison. And don't be shy. Our Discord community is fantastic. So but also we love our lurkers as well.

All right. And then one more quick review here. This one comes in from Clone21ZT. It's titled The Best. And it says The Best Gaming Podcast. Thumbs up. Controller. That's it. Clone 21ZT, speaking the truth. Love it. Well, thank you so much for the reviews, guys. Let's keep those pouring in. We love getting

those. It definitely helps people find the show as well. So we really do appreciate that. All right. So guys, gaming in the 90s. Let's try to put things into a little bit of historical context here. The 90s brought us the very tail end of the NES era. The Super Nintendo released in 1990. So we had the end of the NES, we had the full run of the Game Boy, the Super Nintendo, the Sega Genesis, and the Sony PlayStation. We also had almost the entire run of the Nintendo 64. And of course, there is PC gaming along with all the rest there as well. So I kind of wanted to start this out by just kind of asking you guys, you know, let's just kind of kick things off in a more general sense walk me through your guys relationship with gaming in the 90s and how were you playing games let's let uh josh go first so he doesn't forget you know yeah yeah wait i'll get wait what why

why am i here guys what is this i mean okay so you guys suck, man. Before we started recording, we were all talking about the years and how old we were when the 90s, like we were gaming in the 90s. And I was like, guys, I did the math. I figured this out. I was 12 when the 90s started, and I was 22 when the 90s ended. And then both of you guys were just like, what? And I was like, what? You were a little bit younger.

Yeah, and then you were like, oh man, you're so old. And I was like, yeah, all right, that's fair. I mean, for me, being 12-year-old Josh, and I had been gaming my entire life. I mean, legitimately, I started gaming when I was four years old. So for me, that decade of like 12 to 22 encompassed high school and college for me. So almost all of my memories in the 90 I gamed with my brother. We had an old TRS-80 home computer. We got an Atari, like the original Atari one year. Then we got an Atari 2600 for Christmas one year. We lost our minds.

My brother bought the very first Nintendo NES and hid it from me because he didn't want to have to share it with me, which I thought was hilarious. But it was really in the 90s when I really started to get into the multiplayer gaming aspect of it. Before then, it was just single-player games, the old Sierra games, gaming with my brother, taking turns with the controller, that kind of thing. But that is to me, like my most like memorable memories of gaming was just going over to my buddy's house, Mario cart, golden eye tech in, uh, I mean, you know, we'll get into a lot of these and I don't want to spoil them all, but like just for

hours and hours on end. So that is like my, my main memory of that was just having fun with your buddies, playing games till late, you know, the wee hours of the morning, of that was just having fun with your buddies, playing games till late, you know, the wee hours of the morning and just having an absolute blast. That was always the best too. You know, the, when you switch off to hand off the controller, the debate between,

do you go by death or do you go by time? Cause you're good, man. You're like, oh yeah, I know I'm good at this game. Let's just go by who dies, you know? And then you switch and then the other guy goes and he dies in three minutes you're like oh yeah hand it back over yeah that was that was always the the big debate um yeah i i grew up uh actually a same thing like as long as i can remember i remember playing playing video games um i remember we had for some reason an atari the 2600 i remember playing pong and other simple games i don't remember much of it because i was pretty young but uh sega playstation

and 64 all those through the 90s were like my young childhood and then kind of progressing into my later years you know in the late 90s and in a little more mature games and stuff so yeah 90s were definitely a big big influence on setting up my just absolute love for gaming yeah and you have an older brother ryan did did you guys do a lot of gaming together or was marcus not much of a gamer no he wasn't he wasn't much of a big gamer um he you know spent time at the other house and would come over and stuff believe it or not i actually remembered playing a lot of games uh with my dad um who is not a gamer at all but the one game he would play on sega was and this is the reason we got it for christmas one year was so that he could play madden he's a big football fan and we would play madden you know with i think it

was like 94 with the little characters running around. And I remember playing a lot of that as a kid. And then just as it progressed, just a lot of solo gaming and then multiplayer later on. Oh, nice. Did your dad always pick the Steelers? Of course. Yeah, I know your whole family are a bunch of Steelers fans. Yeah, his whole side of the family is from Pittsburgh. So don't come at me, everybody.

Yeah, for me, it was a little bit different because I was not allowed to own any consoles growing up. I've mentioned that on the show before. Yeah, pretty much everyone I knew owned an NES. So most of my gaming came either by going to my friends houses or playing at arcades. So like here in the Phoenix area, you know, growing up we had pistol pete's pizza which had an arcade and we've got peter piper pizza that's still around local favorite so that's mostly how my gaming came about i remember trying to work on my parents because they just thought i'd be addicted

and it was really bad for my brain and i remember when uh track and field came out for nes where you could lay down the big controller on the floor and you could run and do hurdles and stuff. And I would try to tell my mom, like, oh, this is going to be so good. I'm going to get exercise. Can't we just buy this? And the answer was always, no. No dice.

You're not buying a Nintendo. Yeah, yeah. Never was able to wear my parents down. We did get our first PC in 93, but gaming on PCs didn't really take off until later because computers back then did not have GPUs. It really wasn't until after Windows 95 and DirectX came out. But a lot of my early gaming memories were definitely PC gaming in the late 90s. The first console I ever owned was a Nintendo 64 that I bought with my own money. I think it was in 98 or 99. So I almost went through the whole 90s with no console whatsoever.

All right. Well, before we move on to starting to share some of our specific memories here, Josh, can you tell the people a little bit about Patreon support options? Well, if you want to be a hero to the world, if you've been listening to this podcast for a while and we're bringing you some enjoyment or just some brightness to your day, think about supporting the show. This show, this show exists because we are passionate about gaming, but there, there are some expenses to it, but also we love to just pour our hearts and souls into this. And if you find that you're getting a lot of entertainment out of it, think

about going to Patreon. You can do that at multiplayer squad.com. You can sign up for as little as five bucks a month. I mean, it's really not like a huge detriment to your wallet there, but it's an awesome way to just say, hey, thanks for the content guys, but it also allows us to keep the show going. Don't worry. We don't believe in free gifts. We are going to give you a lot back. We give you two bonus episodes every single month that we call the squad cast. It's much more laid back. We, we get pretty silly with it. We get to know us a little bit better. We try to mix up the content there as well.

You also get early access to the episodes. So you get them a day before they actually released to the world and you get them ad free as well. Plus you get some sweet discord perks as you know, for being get them ad free as well. Plus you get some sweet discord perks for being part of that community as well. So we really do try to say, Hey, thank you for the support. But again, if you are so inclined, you can head over to multiplayer squad.com and sign up. All right. So guys, let's just take turns. Whatever you guys want to bring up. We can talk about a particular game. We can talk about a piece of hardware, maybe a gaming memory you have,

and then we'll just spend a couple minutes talking about each one and we'll just go in a circle until we run out of time. Ryan, how about we let you go first as the youngin of the pod? What do you want to talk about here oh man um where to begin i guess i i guess i want to continue on with just uh kind of gaming where it started for me is uh just back in the early 90s like i was i was born in 88 so kind of you know like i said um with mad in 94 that was one of the first memories i remember kind of like playing video games with my dad, which was just so much fun for me. I didn't really know what I was doing.

I was like five years old, four years old, or whatever when I was playing. And it was just something so cool about these systems that you put this little cartridge in and all these colors pop up on the screen and you can interact with it. And to me

as a little kid that just blew my mind and i had so much fun just diving into those worlds and you can kind of check out of out of everything else in life and just go into that and so that just kind of really hit a spark for me as a young kid with like like i said for the sega was kind of the really first system that i remember that was a big one that we had. And it just, you know, progressed from there. So I never had any Segas and I know Josh had the Sega master system. Oh, you also have a Genesis Josh or no? No, that's when my brother got the NES.

And so we, we kind of switched over to Nintendo at that point. It's funny. Even then there's the console switching back and forth or wait no i'm thinking that the genis i'm sorry yeah yeah uh i think i did have a gen no no i only had the sega master system i didn't get the genesis ah gotcha yeah it's funny when you first discover games it like seems like magic. I had this here on my list, and I'll just go ahead and kind of jump in and share my story here. I was going to talk about the first time I ever remember seeing video games, because I actually remember this. Fair disclosure, I did share this story once on the pod, but I think it was like four years ago, so some long-term listeners might remember. But there's a game called Blaster Master. And this game released in the very late

80s. And I was, I believe, five at the time of this story. And my family's social life was almost entirely through our family's church. And I remember that there was a family called the Fogelsons. They had a couple of boys that were just a little bit older than me. And I remember that there was a family called the Fogelsons. They had a couple of boys that were just a little bit older than me. And we got a lot of clothes, like hand-me-downs from their boys, stuff like that. And I remember when I was about five, we went over to their house to eat dinner. And I remember around the TV, there were a whole bunch of kids because there were, I don't know, like four or five families that were all there gathering. And there were a whole bunch of boys and girls looking at the TV.

And I ran over and I saw that they were all playing this game called Blaster Master. And for those who aren't aware of this game, I think cocaine was still influencing a lot of games at the time. Because let me just read this description from wikipedia the game features a character named jason who follows his pet frog fred down a hole in the earth there he finds a tank and uses it to battle radioactive mutants the player controls jason and the tank sofia the third through eight levels of gameplay to find the whereabouts of Fred and to defeat the mutants and their leader, the plutonium boss. All right. So this is the first game I ever saw. And so I walked up to all the kids and I said, oh, can I play? Now they were all older than me. And so they told me they weren't trying to be mean or anything, but they said, oh, you're too young. This game is too hard for you.

And so I was like, oh, okay. All right. And so I wasn't terribly sad, but I did walk away. And so I started roaming their house off playing by myself. And I went into one of the boys' rooms and he had a little handsaw that was just sitting out on his desk and so i just picked it up i took off the little safety sheath and he had a wooden desk what else are you supposed to do with a wooden saw and i started his wooden desk in half um so that's my first video game memory ever was seeing the games not being allowed to play. Stupid five-year-old Paul in his brain thought this wouldn't be a problem to start sawing this kid's desk. I got in huge trouble about it, by the way, obviously. But I remember that just

seeming so cool. I just wanted to be one of the kids playing video games. And that to me was like, that planted the seed of what made me want to play games later in life. And that to me was like, that planted the seed of what made me want to play games later in life. And that just like always really stuck with me. Dang, dude, you let me off easy for eating your wheat thins. I was going to say, to this day, we do not tell Paul no, by the way. Whatever you want, Paul. You will pay for it. Yeah, Josh, you grew up, even though you're a lot older than us, your dad gamed. So you pretty much had games like your entire life. Do you even remember

the first time? Yeah, dude, I remember playing Pong. I mean, I remember the computer was down in our scary basement. I was like four years old. I was terrified to go down there. But I remember my dad going down there and showing me pong and how we could hit the little ball back and forth. And I was like, well, this is great. And then I remember my brother and I were outside playing one day, because this is what kids did back in my day. And I remember we were walking past the back sliding door to our house. And inside, we saw my parents sitting at a table looking our house. And inside we saw my parents sitting at a table, like looking at something. And so we kind of looked in through the glass and apparently

they had bought an Atari and hidden it from us. And we're playing games on the Atari while we were outside playing because they wanted to play it. And so then we like busted and we were like, what is that? And know? And they, I remember they were playing like centipede defender pitfall. I mean, all these old Atari games that people have heard of and we lost our minds. And then, you know, the glorious thing was my dad's job. He, I guess one of his coworkers had the ability to basically rip off video game cartridges. So we had these little things called proms where almost every single day, my dad would come home with like 10 proms of video games. So imagine being a kid with access to the entire Atari

library. I mean, that was my reality, believe it or not. And so, I mean, now you guys know why I'm going to love video games, man. Because that's what I grew up with. And then jumping ahead to the 90s, the really cool thing for me there was this is when I started to get into PC gaming. Because again, my dad was kind of a nerd. He always liked having a computer around. And I mentioned the Sierra games that came out. These were your old school point and click adventures. But there was, I mean, a period of time where Sierra was the king of the world when it came to video games, man.

I mean, you had the King's Quest series, the Police Quest, the Space Quest. Yeah, SWAT. Oh, yeah. Heroes Quest. Leisure Suit Larry. I mean, all these games that were, you know, super high tech. They had music and sounds and adventure and characters and story and all this stuff. To me, that's when gaming took a huge leap forward over these very basic, simple Atari games, which were very fun at the time, but also insanely repetitive, you know? And so now all of a sudden gaming like makes this leap into having incredible stories and memorable characters and different

types of gameplay, like combat and problem solving and quests and all these things that started to come together. It was magical, man. I mean, it's hard to describe that advancement that like games took at the start of the nineties. I mean, you mentioned it at the top of the show, Paul, we'd started 3d and I don't mean VR 3d. I'm talking like things stopped being two dimensional on the screen side scrollers and actually started looking like they were 3d and i mean it was mind-blowing at the time oh yeah it was it was such a great decade for gaming every few months there was like some major advancement whether it was on console or on pc there were just i, there were even tons of consoles that didn't necessarily catch on,

but they had like great tech. I remember like the Neo Geo. They looked so cool and they had like the extra buttons, but like I never played it. I always felt a little intimidated by it, but yeah, I mean, you had all kinds of stuff like that. All right, well, let's go ahead and take our first break and then we'll be right back. All right, Josh, what did you want to bring up next? I do have to just one little tidbit since you just mentioned the Neo Geo, but that is the most expensive home video game console ever made. It was $650 to purchase it back in 1990,

which as of today would be about $1,600. And every cartridge for the Neo Geo was $200 a piece. Yikes. That's wild. It's insane. I mean, it did look really cool. It did have some advanced tech with the graphics and everything. But anyway, okay.

It was just crazy. I remember seeing that in the stores and being like, what the heck, man? That's wild. I had no clue it was that expensive. Yeah. For me, let's start early in the 90s. And here's one of the things that I want to try not to do, especially for our long-term listeners.

Everybody that's listened to this show for any length of time has heard me gush about EverQuest and Street Fighter 2 and those sorts of things. I'm going to try to vary it up a little bit and talk about some other games that I remember from the 90s. I got to start with Doom, guys. Now, I played Wolfenfenstein which came out before doom did and wolfenstein was pretty awesome at the time i mean you know you're kicking in doors and you're you're gunning down nazis and i remember like this was the first shooter game that i had ever played in my life and i remember thinking like well this is really neat but then doom comes along and doom upped the ante on every aspect of like a first person shooter to be honest and while wolfenstein came out first doom is what actually launched first person shooters

into like mainstream gaming at that point spread like wildfire it was bananas and i know people see stuff like doom being played on you know any things. I think the latest was like a pregnancy test that somebody was playing Doom on and stuff like that. But, dude, back in the day, color graphics, smooth. We say smooth animation because at the time it was incredible. But it was funny because nowadays shooting the shotgun and then pumping it was like three frames you know but back then it was amazing because you're like dude he's pumping the shotgun man you could see the little fire shoot out of the barrel and stuff but all the different variety of monsters the pace of the gameplay the music in that game i mean i remember having my mind blown and on top of that doom was hard like i think like

honestly i credit a little bit of my love of difficult games to playing doom because when you got the the mancubus the dudes with the the cannons and all that stuff and the the cacodemons which were the flying beholder looking guys you would die a thousand times in one of those rooms. But then when you beat that room, it was the most legendary feeling possible. Doom was just absolutely incredible. And then unlike today where game development takes like six years, Doom 2 comes out the very next year. Yeah. No waiting. And you know what Doom 2 had? Multiplayer, guys. Doom 2 had multiplayer combat.

They were the first, literally the first game to have deathmatch. Doom is what coined the term deathmatch. It did not exist before then. They coined it. They perfected it. I remember playing multiplayer with some of my buddies at the time and man what an awesome time that was ryan did you play doom back in the day or were you a little too young for that i played it uh when i was a teeny bit older but um yeah i definitely definitely got some doom in it always

like scared me when i was a kid it scared me too that's what i was gonna say especially when you'd get busted up and you know the little avatar on the bottom his face is all like bloody bloody yeah messed up and i'd be like this bloody lip this game's wild i'm gonna go back to play crash bandicoot i remember it being the first game i ever learned codes for and i still remember them because it was you know made by id software so it was like iddqd id clip let you run through walls idkfa and uh i always thought that was really cool like learning those kinds of codes and being able to put them in games i might be wrong but i think doom also gave people the map editor so people were also able to like build their own levels which seems really early on for people to be able to do stuff like that.

But I'm pretty sure that was included in Doom also. But yeah, what a cool game. It's crazy to think about playing those first person shooters where you can't even like pan up or down. You're just looking left or right and walking forward and pressing shoot. But we didn't know any better.

That's as good as it got back then. I mean, the other thing too is like, I'm watching gameplay here. Cause it's just like, oh man, I've got like mass nostalgia coming back. But the other thing too was like, this was 3d.

You were in these maze, like dungeons and areas and stuff. And you were walking forward, which was weird. You know what I mean? To, to do that in a shooter, because like,

I mean, let's be honest, like Contra, one of the other really, really well-known shooters back in the day was just a 2D side-scrolling shooter. So Doom to come out like Wolfenstein and make it a 3D game where you're actually moving forward and turning, you know, and going down these hallways and these dungeons and stuff, that was not stuff that people were used to seeing back then. Oh yeah, absolutely. That's kind of a cool game

to bring up because that actually kind of ties into what I was going to talk about next. I wanted to talk a little bit about what it was like trying to find good games in the 90s, because this was a little different. I mean, we're talking pre-internet, pre-AOL days, pre-Metacritic, obviously Steam is nowhere on the horizon yet, there were really only a couple of ways that you could find games. It was like, word of mouth, maybe you played a demo at a store, and maybe you would pick up a gaming magazine, and you would read about a game or a preview or something like that. But more often than not, I don't know about you guys, but for me, most of the time when I picked out a game, whether it was to buy or something to rent at Blockbuster,

it was almost always the game cover. Like, am I alone in that? Or did you guys also like put a lot of stock into what the cover of the game looked like oh for sure no you look and you see something that is either like dark and gritty with some cool looking action characters or something bright colors that just draws you in those definitely you know as you're skimming across the shelf like you said there's no internet so you didn't know anything about these you're just like oh that looks cool i guess mom can i get this one you know or can i get that one so it's definitely yeah that that for sure sold me the box art back in the day was literally how you picked games yeah i mean it was the the box art on the front and then you turn the box over and they'd have three or four screenshots of what gameplay looked like in the game and i

know this is blowing some people's minds especially especially some of our younger listeners out there. But what Ryan said is 100% true. There was no internet. You couldn't... Oh, Ryan's showing off his Metal Gear CD. This is my original Metal Gear. I mean, I had like nine screenshots on the back of it to show you what the game looked like. But this was the thing. There was no internet. You couldn't just go and Google search a game and then look up what gameplay looked like. So the only way you knew what game you wanted to pick was either because of the art on it or because you had a friend that picked up the game and said, yo, this game's awesome, man. You need to get it. And that was it. There was no other way. Yeah. And Doom has one of the best all-time covers.

You've got Doom guy in hell on a little rock ledge, and he's just surrounded by dozens of like scary looking demons all trying to like climb up and get to him. And I have that mental image ingrained from all the times I went to Best Buy or Comp USA or, you know or whatever it was, maybe even Circuit City back in the day, and seeing that cover and thinking it looked so cool. I mean, publishers knew this too. They looked to find creative ways to stand out with their boxes and cover art. Do you guys remember the Tomb Raider box? It was a trapezoid. Do you remember that?

The box was? Oh oh i don't remember the box of tomb raider had a really thin top a really wide bottom and then the angled sides and it just had the words tomb raider with lara croft's body there but it's like when every other box is just a plain rectangle and here's this like crazy looking trapezoid. That was like a way that you sold games was just like being clever in the, in the boxes. I mean, I, I remember, I remember finding a game called full throttle because I remember at the time loving LucasArts games, like pretty much anything LucasArts made. I liked, and I just remember seeing a cover of a guy. He was just a biker, and behind him was this giant fire explosion, and I was like, all right, I'll buy it. I'll give it a shot, and it ended up being

one of my favorite point-and-click adventure games, but yeah, that was just such a staple in the 90s was just walking down the aisles of the store or Blockbuster and just trying to whittle things down. Maybe you'd carry a couple boxes with you and you'd be like looking at them and comparing them oh this one looks way cooler i'm gonna go with this one you know i remember warcraft i bought the first warcraft solely because of the the orc on the front green orc yeah i was gonna say yeah i remember that one yeah but that was like i i kind of missed that that that was kind of fun back in the day nowadays i almost feel like we know too much about games ahead of time there was something to be said for like a little bit of discovery and you gave more games a chance because you just

didn't know and if it looked cool you'd give it a shot this was also the heart of the uh video game rentals oh yeah various stores like you know. Like, you know, I think this was actually before blockbuster came around or at least where I lived, we had like red coast video, get a couple of mom. Yeah. You had a couple of mom and pop stores, but that was, that was the other thing is you'd ride your bike to the video game store slash movie store. Um, and you'd go and you'd look at the shelf where the games were. And you would hope that if you found a cool game, that the box was your, the cartridge was back behind there or the empty box, I guess, that you'd then take up to the counter and they'd find the cartridge and put it in there for you.

But I mean, this was the way that we got to try games. I mean, as a kid, you didn't have very much money to buy a game. So nine out of 10 times you were going to the you know your local rental place and you were browsing through again you know the cover art is what would sell you on something but a lot of times it was dictated by what was actually available oh yeah i mean i remember my brother and i many times like riding our bikes to the to the store and looking around and it's like well we have two games on the shelf you know Which one of these looks like it sucks the least? And kind of going, well, let's try this one. And then we'd rent it for a couple of days and then you had to take it back. And if you forgot, you had to pay the late fee, which was expensive as a kid. But that was how we tried out lots of different games.

Oh, yeah. And you go there. I mean, when you're a kid, you got nothing on the weekends and you're just ready to game all weekend. So you just got all that anticipation when you go, but wasn't that just the best thing when you, when you get there and you're just in awe of how many games are on those shelves back behind the counter, when you get, you hand them the empty box and you see, and they skim through them all and you look in and you just think that is so many video games. And you want every single one of them. I always remember just looking up and my jaw was just dropped to the floor with how many games were there. But yeah, aside from cover art and graphics and stuff like that, those sample discs were huge for me. Because also, gaming was kind of fairly new.

And also, most of our parents thought it was going to rot our brains out except for josh so you could get a sample but you couldn't just keep buying games so i remember just constantly playing samples and i would play the different games on there over and over and over just to get game time in when i got bored of the other games i have so those were huge that's actually how i found you know one of my favorite games ever metal gear solid um from a sample disc and i was they let you play that first uh the first base level and i was just like i have to have this game but um yeah that that just all this even creating this list and looking up all this stuff it just it's wild how many games i totally forgot about and and i played so many more games back then and And like you said, Paul,

you just give a lot more chance than I do now or over the last few years. It's wild. Yeah. Yeah. I really miss being able to rent games more. I remember always making plans with my friends. Let's spend the night at your house. And then they'd be like, all right, I'm going to ask my mom if we can rent a game and I'll do extra chores. And you would try to like strategize ways to try to get to Blockbuster and get that rental. But there was nothing more fun than trying out that new game. And that was the thing between everybody. Everyone always had at least one of the systems. So like your one buddy had an N64.

You had the PlayStation. The other one had this. So there was always something with whatever game was out between all the friends you could get to that person's house and play it yeah the the cool thing was too is like in that like that discovery of just grabbing a game taking it home having zero clue what to expect like this is how like megaman i remember playing megaman and it was like dude this game's fantastic like where did this come from but then i remember playing Mega Man. And it was like, dude, this game's fantastic. Like, where did this come from? But then I remember playing these like terrible games. Oh, yeah. So many bad ones. Man, like we totally just wasted our money on this.

So we don't have that anymore. You know, for the most part, what you're getting. There's all the previews and the reviews on the internet and stuff like that. And, you know, sometimes we're still pleasantly surprised or we're disappointed in some games, but there was nothing like just diving into the complete unknown and then being like, okay, this game is awesome. Like, where has this game been? Or having that disappointment of like, do you think if we took it back, like right now they'd swap it out for a different game oh that was the worst all right ryan coming back to you what do you want to talk about next oh um i think i'm going along along those lines of where um like josh said we all know like the top bangers in the 90s you know you got a symphony of the Night and Starcraft, Half-Life, Metal Gear. By the way, 1998 was insane for video games. Like, the list is just off the charts of all these crazy bangers.

But we know those are all great. I wanted to mention one along with, like, just kind of a parental influence that I had on a game. My good friend Daniel as a kid, we were really close as children and he had the N64 I had you know PlayStation and so we would I would go over there and his dad he's passed away from cancer so Wayne love you you made a big

influence on me but he was absolutely great and he would sit and I remember he would sit and play with us on the weekends and he would play all these different games but one that we played a lot of was Star Wars. And it was just an awesome game. It was Shadows of the Empire. And I remember it was one of those cool 3D looking games on N64 that you would just get lost in.

And he would sit and he'd play with us and we'd just play for hours. And I remember that was like one of those that really kind of set in stone just a love for gaming where you could just unwind and escape from the world and just dive into this new world and just play, just game for as long as you could for you to go play outside even in the summer in good old Arizona. But that's one that definitely stuck with me um not not i don't i don't think huge well known i don't really remember anyone much talking about it but it was definitely a really cool game and i remember this one part where one of those big yetis would just swing his arms almost like a kind of cartoonish looking just swing whirlwind his arms and he would just wreck me every time and it took me i hated that stupid yeti would you uh slice its like arm off like from uh uh episode five no i don't i don't think you got um like the lightsaber in that if i can remember

right i think you just had like a blaster and stuff but i just remember being out there and that that stinking yeti um would just always kick my butt every time there were a lot of good star wars games in the 90s oh 2000s also i feel like they've kind of become a little more hit and miss lately but there were a lot of good ones back in the day for sure what's weird is i played all the space ones like the tie fighter and x-wing and those but i did not play like many of the like the on foot ones so like dark forces i mean i played i did play dark forces but i think i missed a lot of the like the other ones because there was like what jedi knight and some of those that might have come later but

yeah i was all about the space combat ones but i i didn't really play a lot of the the you know the person what's the opposite of space like planet land ones yeah josh like to do barrel roll oh yeah good old star fox but i know but it's in space yeah well is it i mean i guess partly because star fox is like on the planets and stuff too. Yeah. Whatever. Yeah. You're like flying in the sky of those planets. Yeah. All right. Let's go ahead and take our last break and then we'll be right back. All right, Josh, swinging back around to you. All right. I, you know, recently we had a conversation on our Discord server about this

game. I recommended it to somebody. But I want to ask you guys a few questions, right? You guys like games with good story? Sure. Yeah. Who doesn't? You guys like games where you might have a plethora of options as far as either characters or ships or just having a huge variety of gameplay elements? Sure.

Love it. Do you guys like space? Space is fun, right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, questing, real-time combat. Is this Josh's hype thing that he does? How about really, really good, funny humor to a game? Okay.

Okay. There's a game that checks all of these boxes, guys, legitimately. And I remember playing this game, and this is one of those ones that left that impression on me where i went to gaming is at its peak right now and that's a game called star control 2 okay now you've heard me mention this but i've never really broken this game down very much before but in star control 2 you're trying to find these precursors there's these you know giant alien or just these alien races that are evil and you're trying to find these precursors. There's these giant alien or just

these alien races that are evil and they're coming to attack the galaxy. And you have to try to form an alliance and go out into the galaxy and hopefully meet alien races and say, hey, do you want to ally with us? Because we're going to stand up against the big bad guys. And sometimes when you're out in the galaxy and you're meeting aliens, they're not all nice. So you might meet a mean alien race that now wants to wipe you out. The beauty of this game was there's like 30 different alien races out there and you had dialogue options. So when you met one of these, it would put like their bridge up on the screen with like the captain talking to you. And they were the most fantastical aliens you could imagine, which was really cool at the time. And then you had dialogue options and how you wanted to deal with them. And then when things broke down and they're like,

you know, prepare to be destroyed, it would go into a 2D space combat, real time, almost like arcade like type game. And you could swap between the ships of the aliens that had allied with you so this was very much like a rock paper scissors type combat where you know you would have some ships that you were great with other ones that you were terrible with every single alien race had its own ship which had like two or three different abilities it was like the precursor to like hero shooters in a way, it was like the precursor to like hero shooters in a way, because it was just like, look, here's a ton of options. You know, everybody has a couple of different abilities go wild, you know, and then there was that arcade

shooter part of it. Uh, you know, and then, like I said, you had quests, you had a star map that you were exploring. You had planets that you'd go scan and you detect alien life and you'd land on them. And then you'd meet some marooned alien species that was really funny. You know, and that this game was complete. It literally had everything you could want in a game. I genuinely think that mass effect borrowed a lot of the ideas from this game, like as a precursor, but it was one of my favorite games I ever played. Still to this day, they released a more recent remake version of it called Star Control Origins that I think would still hold up to this day. The graphics are decent and it's the exact same type of gameplay. So I cannot recommend this enough. At least Google it or go to Steam and search for it. Star Control Origins. It was such an incredible game, man. Absolutely mind-blowing

for a younger Josh. Well, in being early 90s, I'm watching some footage, especially for PC gaming. This is pretty advanced for the time, for sure. And that was in DOS. Yeah. I mean, that was the thing dude is like between the questing the star system all the different aliens and they all would talk and have different sound effects and stuff um they were needy like if you met people that would join you sometimes they'd come back and they'd be like hey you know we're doing all this and you're not doing anything for us so then you'd have to like try to appease them to keep them in the alliance and stuff and it had this great humor aspect to it at the same time absolutely just

i loved that game so much man if they told me they're coming out with star control 3 i'd lose my mind yeah i never played any of the star controls so that's just totally outside my experience yeah i'm guessing same for you ryan yeah no i haven't either but yeah i'm looking at footage and and stuff of this too this is cool especially like you said for the early 90s like that that's wild yeah uh fun fact they literally just released a kickstarter for something called free stars the irkwan masters uh because they're trying to make like a an updated sequel to it with like still maintaining that feel of the original games. And that literally just released, I think, the day before this recording.

Oh, wow. Nice. All right. Moving on to the next thing here. I wanted to talk a little bit about multiplayer gaming on pc in the 90s all right now did all of us engage in dial up like direct 1v1 certain games with your buddies but you couldn't do more than 1v1 because that's all you could call is one other person yep i remember playing so much Command and Conquer and Descent. It was me and my buddy Kyle. And you would type in your buddy's phone number. There was no way to connect to a server with multiple people. You would just dial them directly. And you could just play that game.

And of course, inevitably, a family member would pick up the phone. Your game would start to stutter and hiccup, and you'd start yelling, hang up the phone, I'm playing online. And that was so cool to be able to have the ability. And it's so weird to think how quick we went from, okay, now we all have these dial-up modems that run incredibly slow, to then just a few years later, all of a sudden now you have like massive online multiplayer with Battlefield and stuff, really not that much longer later. But I always thought that that was really fun, being able to do the direct dial-up with your friends. I remember always picking GDI in Command & Conquer. I'd get my stealth tanks, hide them behind my buddy's base,

pop them out of stealth, start shooting his buildings. And then as soon as he'd realize, I'd call them back and put them in stealth and just do it over and over. Descent was another great one. Josh, I know you and I have talked about it in the past. Having like a full 360 degree space dogfighter at the time was really novel. And I remember a few years later, someone did open up a server

where you could connect to that online. And that might have been like 99, like right at the end of the decade. But it was not terribly easy to do multiplayer back then. And this is obviously, you know, on console, it was even different. You had to have like Xbox Live and stuff like that. And that wasn't even until the 2000s. But just having the option on PC was very cool in the moment. All right, Ryan, coming back to you. What do you want to talk about next? Oh, man. I'm going to go to one that is not on a big main console, but something that took over a lot of hours of my life as a child. I'm going back to the OG Game Boy and Pokemon. Okay. All right. i want to be the very best like no one ever was okay all right all right i would uh a big big pokemon kid um i was kind of right at that time

fifth sixth grade um mid 90s that was uh that was or kind of later 90s that was my pokemon era but that was just handheld gaming like that you know know, on the original Game Boy and then Game Boy Advanced and Game Boy Color. When, you know, you got actual color on this little teeny device. It just, you know, again, I know we keep saying this, but there was so much advancement in the 90s. Every year, it seemed like there was just crazy, crazy technological kind of progression. And playing that handheld game, and it wasn't just Tetris or Pong or something like that, where it's saving my Pokemon's levels, and I'm traveling through this world. And it was just something that I remember my parents would go to some church activity on weeknights, and they'd let me bring the Game Boy.

And I'm naturally pretty much an extrovert. I like to be around people and talk and hang out. But when I would go to this, I would sit in a corner, not talk to anyone, and I would play Game Boy for that. 45 minutes or an hour that they were at their thing, and then they'd pick me up and take me home. Because we had limits on how long we could play, but I was uninterrupted and could just sit and play for all that time so

that was that was a big one for me that just kept kept me going i loved just to sit and be able to have that device that you could just take anywhere road trips um you know these little things where i just have to be stuck there for an hour might as well play a game you know there there wasn't a portable like console or handheld before the game boy was there i can't remember one no i don't think so the game boy came out in 1990 so that was first i mean think about how truly like life-changing that is right i mean you know it used to be that you had nintendo and you had to plug it into your TV and all that stuff. You had to have power, plug it in. And then all of a sudden, you're telling me that I can play these games anywhere I want on a road trip at church?

At the doctor's office? Yeah, you're bringing it over to your buddy's house for a sleepover and stuff like that. I mean, I remember my friend and I remember thinking like they were rich at the time, you know, and like they had a Game Boy and I just remember thinking like, oh my goodness. And it was so funny because his mom always had the Game Boy and playing Tetris. So it was like nobody else actually ever got to play, you know, but it was just like, this was insane to have games like Pokemon that you could just play anywhere. I remember being so jealous of my friends that had a Game Boy because they could play

video games basically whenever they wanted. And then you'd have the Game Boy, but then there's always that one dude who just had it totally tricked out. He had the magnifying glass, the light, the different case, the extra, like whatever, you know, the cooling fan on there was all kinds of mods that they would put and you just oh man you like that guy but whatever i still have a game boy so yeah it was it was just something yeah it just was wild who was your uh starting pokemon ryan um i think i went charmander yeah i feel like and then almost everyone did

yeah oh for sure gotta go with the fire but um i definitely like uh i played a lot of that but i I think I went Charmander. Yeah. I feel like almost everyone did. Yeah. Oh, for sure. Got to go with the fire. But I definitely like I played a lot of that. But the most I played was yellow, I think, or gold or whatever. We start with Pikachu. But yeah, definitely. I'm pretty sure I went with Charmander.

Then, of course, a few years later, they came out with the Sega Game Gear. And I remember one of my friends had that. And we would take turns playing Mortal Combat and so like when we got sent to bed when I would spend the night he would just like play one round and then he would hand it to me on the bunk bed and then I'd play around and hand it back to him

and the Game Gear was pretty legit because that was color right off the bat. Yeah, it was pretty wild. Yeah. All right Josh coming back around to you tony hawks pro skater boys all right yeah maybe maybe the best game of the 90s honestly it's in contention i can't tell you how many dozens and dozens and dozens of hours i spent at my buddy's house with us just trading off there was some nights we'd have six dudes hanging out over there

and just literally passing the controller down the entire line. And I remember watching my buddy just go on this absolutely insane run in the mall where he was like grinding from one thing to another, doing all these tricks. And I mean, racking up this like million point score and the other five of us just absolutely losing our minds,

cheering this dude on. I mean, like just screaming as loud as we could, like just go, go. Yeah. You're almost there, man.

Like keep going. And just like pumping each other up, man. The music in that game was some of the best soundtrack you'd heard in a video game up to that point, because it was using all like at the time modern and, you know, and top songs. So that was really cool because it really just amped keep going for that slightly higher score or trying to find the secret parts of the level to get the letters. Remember you'd have to get skate. Oh yeah. Yeah. That was in the levels. You had the different skaters that you'd unlock. Like if I remember, it was like Bob Burnquist was one of my favorites. Rodney Mullen, baby. Yeah. Yeah. So you had all

these different skaters that people liked, you know, at the time. And when turn people were wondering like oh who's he gonna pick man who's he gonna you know and then you'd go through and you'd uh you'd pick the different levels at the same time it's like is it gonna be mall is it gonna be the the school is it gonna be the warehouse the warehouse is where it was at yeah the skate park one what was that uh burn signed i think was the name of it if i if i remember right but yeah and then it was just, dude, that game was so incredible. It was weird because it was competitive. But at the same time, you were always cheering your buddy on to have this epic run at the same time, man. And it had that really cool signature blue cartridge on Nintendo 64.

Yeah. I forgot about that. No, it's definitely this one um i'm glad you brought that one up because that hits really hard for me i was i was a skate or die bro as a kid i probably started skating as like fifth grade or fourth or fifth grade and that was my life through you know i started playing hockey a little later and got into other sports but um in high school and stuff but i i skated for years and years i still skateboard and i mean i broke my wrist two years ago skateboarding because i'm a silly old man but that one just i i already i knew all the skaters i knew all the

tricks i knew it was just a game that was made perfectly for me at the perfect time. And so I just fell in love with that game so much to where this is a somewhat of an embarrassing story, but I was in junior high seventh or eighth grade English. And, um, I I've always been a decent writer. I like to write and I hate math, but I enjoyed writing. And, but I was so into skateboarding and Tony Hawk that in some essay I was writing, I wrote like a trick sequence. And I was thinking how cool it was. And I was like, man, these are such cool tricks. And I was thinking about the sequence of how I carried over this jump and this grind and everything. And then I got my paperback and it just says run on sentence minus 10 points or something. And I was like, oh, yeah, that was kind of dumb oh man oh that's so

funny uh yeah i think maybe the last thing that that i was gonna bring up here is just that our relationship with developers was just much more secure back in the 90s than it is now you know there were some real heavy hitters for sure i mean like i mentioned before everything lucas arts put out i was a huge fan of whether it was monkey island or the star wars games or the indiana jones games those were always fantastic blizzard obviously came out with diablo warcraft and starcraft capcom i mean they were crushing it in the 90s street fighter resident evil megaman which you mentioned earlier josh konami metal gear solid silent nami back in the day yes yeah i mean and and square soft with all the final fantasies like the the the developers i feel like they had much

higher hit rates back then and obviously game development was much simpler. You cranked out games a lot quicker. There were fewer options. The tech was only so good, so it was always a little bit limited. I feel like game development now is so much harder because the sky is the limit for anything that comes out now. Back then you were working with like a couple megabytes of RAM, so everyone was automatically confined in making these games. But you really could trust everything that certain developers put out. And maybe that's why still to this day, we'll say things like, man, CD Projekt Red, do we still trust them after the Cyberpunk release? Well, now that they got the game back to where it should have been, yeah, I think we

trust them. Or maybe it's from software. Or like talking about Baldur's Gate, Larian, Larian Studios. There's still a few out there, but I feel like that's more like a relic from the 90s and the 2000s where we trusted developers back then. Nowadays, it seems a little bit more of a grab bag of what's going to be good or what's going to be bad like just because like konami comes out with something that doesn't mean anything to me anymore but it did mean something back in the 90s yeah i think it does mean stuff today i mean you know if rockstar says hey we're going to release a game people pay attention you have to see if cd project red says hey we're releasing

a game like people pay attention larian studios is another one but if ubisoft says hey we're releasing this game people kind of go like right and blizzard says hey we're releasing a new game people really perk up but then it's kind of like yo but you're just trying to rob me at this point, you know? And so I'm with you, Paul. I mean, I think, I think what we see is we see much more, I'm going to call it predatory to just simplify it. You know, I get that these, you know, the gamers make the decisions in this case, so it's not necessarily predatory, but I think we are seeing these developers that are completely money focused and they are a business just trying to, you know, make money and nothing else. They don't care about the gamers.

They don't care about anything. They have these PR departments that will cover up any big mess up, which we've seen a lot of lately. You know, I mean, think about it. The backlash lately is unheard of. I mean, we talk about games back then that really flopped. I mean, there's like two, E.T. and Superman. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I can't think of any other games for that whole period where it was just outrage. And now it seems like we're getting outraged like six times a year almost. And so I think that that's part of it honestly is back then number one games had to be complete because they were on a cartridge if you bought it and it didn't work that was real bad you know now you buy a game and it doesn't work they go oh uh yeah we're

working we'll patch it don't worry we got a patch coming guys you know and that kind of stuff so well not only that just like you mentioned before how Doom 2 came out one year after Doom, like think about the fact that GTA 5 is over 10 years old. We are talking a full decade with no new GTA. And yet look at the 90s. Beginning of the 90s, you had Mario 3 as the newest Mario. You get Super Mario World, Super Mario Land on Game Boy, you get Super Mario 64 and Mario Sunshine. Those are all absolutely fantastic games because you got those new games every two years. The advancement of those games is also incredible. Look at the difference going from Mario 3 all the way up to Mario

Sunshine. So, the fact that the studios were pumping out more games and they were all high quality, nowadays, I think it's like, well, we have 10 years of development in this game. We have to monetize the heck out of it. And especially in the case of Rockstar, they're going to spend $300 million on promoting GTA 6 because they have to make $10 billion off it. So I don't know. It's just a totally different business model these days. Back then, I think it was a little bit more loosey-goosey because if this game fails, there'll be a new one next year. And now the studios don't have that luxury. They have to have a hit. They have to squeeze as much money as they can out of it.

And in some ways, I definitely prefer the old method for sure. Yeah, because they were making games to be fun. Yeah. That's what got you rich back in the 90s. That's what I'm saying. Back in the 90s, if you made a game that was fun, people would tell their friends because, again, before the internet. So if you make something that I'm loving, I'm going to school and I'm telling all my buddies that I found

this game and then I'm playing this game and it's the greatest game I've ever heard of, you know, and then they go and beg their parents for that game and then, you know, so on and so forth. But back then, that was the key to success was make a game fun and people are going to want to play our game. You know, nowadays it's, Oh, well let's make it look really fancy or,

you know, let's use all these psychological aspects, you know, to try to keep people playing. It's just reading these articles on like battle or battlegrounds, right? A hearthstone and how, you know,

it's all about gaming the player retention and the player counts in these games, which is why you're seeing these really mundane type free battle pass systems and stuff like that. And if you come back and play for a little while, maybe they give you a free card pack as a welcome back gift because it's not about people having fun.

It's about being able to report to your shareholders. Hey, guess what? We still have this many million people playing our game. And then they go, oh, okay, well, that's good. That's success then. It's a candy crush model. Right. Even though the game's not fun, people don't want to do the quests or any of that stuff, but that's how they see it nowadays. And that's the difference. They have the financial fiduciary responsibility or whatever yeah but that's the thing too is i mean i mean correct me if i'm wrong but like back in the 90s and stuff you didn't become a game developer or that to be a millionaire and you

didn't care about games you you loved games and you wanted to make games you wanted to tell a story you wanted to create something that you yourself would want to play and i i just don't feel in a lot of the games now they have that there's not a big soul to these games to where you can tell that they just poured their heart into it and and they truly cared you know uh win or lose like you know that they tried their hardest and it wasn't about the money. It was about creating something with their passion and with their love of gaming. This is, I mean, for AAA titles, I think you're right. I think this is why, you know, we have been touting and saying the rise of the indie devs because the passion and the creativity that they have does come through, you know? And I think that part of it, and I'm

guilty of this because I love a really good AAA game. I like being wowed by something. So I admit I'm part of that problem, but it's like the AAA games get me really excited and it's crazy to see what we can do with gaming. But more often than not, I find I'm actually having more fun with an indie game than I am with a AAA title. Yeah, absolutely. I think you're definitely right, Ryan. It was more passion-driven because there was also less money in it. The whole idea of the gaming industry being bigger than the movie industry and music industry combined, that was unheard of back in the 90s. It was kind of like, oh, you're a game developer, like you can make money doing that. That was more like the mentality.

So it's definitely driven, I think, a lot more of wanting to provide a fun experience. And if this can be a living, great. Whereas now it's, you know, it's just a little bit too focused on the numbers these days. All right. Well, I think that brings us to an end of this trip down memory lane. We would like to remind all of our listeners to please go sign up on Patreon to get those bonus episodes. You can also help what we support. You can also help support what we do here.

You can sign up over at MultiplayerSquad.com. You can also hit us up on socials at Video GamamersPod and make sure to click on that five-star rating. Thank you for listening to all of us old farts talk about games from 30 years ago. Hopefully, it was at least somewhat enjoyable to all of you. Until next time, happy gaming. See ya. All right. See everybody.