AA is for Quitters posted:

Discovery zone and it's kin. We had an awesome local one that was like 3000sq ft of tubes and slides and ball pits and foam poo poo to climb on....

Probably all closed due to lawsuit concerns, since there was no way in hell that poo poo could be sanitary, plus I know I wound up bruised and battered from jumping from great Heights into the ball pit

MisterGBH posted:

Wimpys.
It was a British alternative to McDonalds and the had English inspired burgers. I remember that they had a doughnut dessert called something like Brown Derby.

Frankston posted:

Wimpy's is still going, I ate at one just a month ago!

skander posted:

Do they give you until the following Tuesday to pay for it?

Thin Privilege posted:

Also lack of social media, especially Facebook.

Frankston posted:

It's weirdly expensive now, cost me £6 for a cheeseburger and fries.

Cleretic posted:

Games

joshtothemaxx posted:

I used to go to the public library to print out walkthroughs for games like Final Fantasy and Baldurs Gate from message boards, then later GameFAQs.

Cleretic posted:

That whole proto-internet, really. Before Wikipedia, Youtube, halfway-decent search engines. If you needed to find something out you had to loving look for it. And if you're like me and that thing was about a video game, you were about to learn some weird and interesting poo poo. Some of it was even true!

The way people learned about and shared info on video games in general was really neat, actually. These days people have really sophisticated tools to dissect and understand a game, and then you'll find out what they've found in a central location; people found out what changed in Undertale's latest patch in less than a day.

Back in the 90s? Good loving luck. You looked through the wilderness of message boards and fansites hoping to find some inkling of an answer to your question, and there's no guarantee that one actually existed. Sometimes that answer wasn't gonna become clear for years, sometimes there was never an answer, both times you'd get stuck sifting through a dozen people trying to bullshit each other with tales of their uncle who works at Nintendo. And then occasionally someone strikes gold and finds some actual, fantastic little morsel of information, either within the game's code or through some outlandish external source, but you'd need to strike gold just to find THEM striking gold.

Aesop Poprock posted:

Jesus those things were hundreds of pages. I'm sure the library loved you

Cleretic posted:

That whole proto-internet, really. Before Wikipedia, Youtube, halfway-decent search engines. If you needed to find something out you had to loving look for it. And if you're like me and that thing was about a video game, you were about to learn some weird and interesting poo poo. Some of it was even true!

The way people learned about and shared info on video games in general was really neat, actually. These days people have really sophisticated tools to dissect and understand a game, and then you'll find out what they've found in a central location; people found out what changed in Undertale's latest patch in less than a day.

Back in the 90s? Good loving luck. You looked through the wilderness of message boards and fansites hoping to find some inkling of an answer to your question, and there's no guarantee that one actually existed. Sometimes that answer wasn't gonna become clear for years, sometimes there was never an answer, both times you'd get stuck sifting through a dozen people trying to bullshit each other with tales of their uncle who works at Nintendo. And then occasionally someone strikes gold and finds some actual, fantastic little morsel of information, either within the game's code or through some outlandish external source, but you'd need to strike gold just to find THEM striking gold.

Tunicate posted:

Yeah, hard to maintain a sense of mystery.

It's why I appreciate people making elaborate hoaxes.

Previa_fun posted:

Antagonist Inc. message boards on AOL.

The N64 Rumor Mill was effectively my GBS before I knew what Something Awful was. Before SA existed, even.

There were a handful of really good (for the time) game-specific message boards with fairly tight communities, too.

Sir Nose posted:

Pendragon posted:

We had my almost 2-year-old kids watch one of his episodes on Netflix just for the heck of it.

They were hooked.

Watching Mr. Rogers is now the "just got home from daycare and mommy/daddy needs to cook dinner" time in our household, so he's definitely still around in some form.

Pendragon posted:

We had my almost 2-year-old kids watch one of his episodes on Netflix just for the heck of it.

They were hooked.

Watching Mr. Rogers is now the "just got home from daycare and mommy/daddy needs to cook dinner" time in our household, so he's definitely still around in some form.

Kaiser Mazoku posted:

Also, they got Mr. Rogers on Netflix?

Your Dunkle Sans posted:

This was the magic of discovery I had as a kid rummaging through info about Pokemon and Everquest (especially about Kerafyrm).

Woolie Wool posted:

I remember warpcore.org, an enormous Descent webring (remember those?) that had just about everything that was ever known about or made for Descent in the 1990s. I am sure nothing is left 20 years later.

queserasera posted:

Junk food nostalgia best nostalgia.

Sir Nose posted:

om nom nom posted:

While we're on cereal

owl_pellet posted:

I think video arcades qualify even if they're technically still around. There used to be one in every mall and even free-standing ones, and now they're so rare. Same goes for convenience stores, gas stations, movie theaters, and pizza parlors having a handful of arcade machines.

El Estrago Bonito posted:

Yeah arcades still exist but they really aren't the same. They're sort of on the way back now though since the hardware is cheap and plentiful and there's a whole generation of kids raised by YouTube gaming personalities that wants to play classic games but has no way to get them. The pricing setup is very different now and you can drink in most of them, but little by little I've started to see more Arcades pop up around me. I also think that right about now is when you could probably open a new Video Rental store in some major metro area. Enough people who grew up in the golden age of video stores now have kids that you could probably keep a mom and pop rental place rolling as long as it was authentic as gently caress. It would need to look and feel like walking back in time, and most importantly it would need to cater to the kind of films Redbox/Netflix never has, IE old classics, B movies, direct to video stuff, etc if you wanted to get really crazy you'd have a video game rental section filled with NES/SNES/Genesis/N64/Playstation games and a popcorn machine would obviously be required.