Gaming's place in our lives

Gaming wasn't mainstream at the time. We of course had Nintendo and Sega fighting it out in the living room, but they knew their place in the market.Their market was different. It appealed to every gamer. The mum, the dad, the young boys and girls, the older boys and girls. It appealed to a huge audience, where PC seemed to deal with the "mature" audience.

In the 90's, arcade games were still a booming business with SEGA really dominating. Games like Daytona USA, Virtua Racing, Street Fighter, etc. all duking it out in the actual, physical arcade. Consoles were just not capable of running these high-end games. So the market was split in three.

Arcade gaming, home entertainment (Sega, Nintendo) and PC gaming.

Those who could afford to buy a $1000 - $3500 system while enjoying not just game use, but multimedia, office work, internet access, creativity work and high-end gaming.

PC games were being built by gamers and by passionate developers. The games had so much depth, character, difficulty, and expandability (through mods). Games back in the 90s now feel so nostalgic, just because of how much charm they seemed to exude.

Even games like Under a Killing Moon, Day of the Tentacle, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Commander Keen, Zork, Myst, Sim City. These games again, still live on. They're still remembered; this is the power of gaming on PC. Some of those games were almost unbeatable because of their difficulty. Gone are the days of requiring hints to finish a game or a walk-through - games now do this job FOR you.

What's the last absolutely mind-blowing game you remember on console? More specifically, FPS gaming or gaming that pushed boundaries and started a new trend in graphics, physics, gameplay, etc. - Goldeneye 007 on Nintendo 64. Remember being able to shoot a TV or computer monitor and it blow up? Or shooting a lock off a handle? Shooting a person in the knee and then reacting to being shot in the knee. Shooting them in the nuts and having them hold their nuts in pain? Remember boys and girls, this was done in the 90's on a relatively basic platform.

But it was the guys and girls at RARE who brought us an amazingly detailed world within Goldeneye 007 and shot them into a real of bringing FPS to consoles.