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doublepepperoni [none/use name] @hexbear.net

Aside from Tony Hawk and Guitar Hero, what other era-specific gaming fads can you think of

I specifically mean games or series that featured some kind of niche subculture/activity/lifestyle that appealed to teens and young adults as opposed to ones that were just fads among kids like Pokemon in the 90s or toys-to-life games in the 2010s or just generally popular games

DDR (no, not that one) probably counts as one, though that might've been mostly confined to Japanese arcades

Does this sort of thing even happen anymore? I assume these days youngins just play Fortnite, Call of Duty Warzone or whatever else instead of extreme sports or rhythm games

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  • There was a good fifteen-ish years staring in the mid 90s where game advertising had to be very confrontational or gross for some reason. That feels like a very era defining thing. Like I remember the Hitman ad showing a dead woman in a bathtub, or the Gamecube Wavebird controller that had a guy playing on the toilet. And of course everyone remembers being made John Romero's bitch.

    Acclaim was notorious for this kinda thing, like they had a campaign for Shadowman 2 where they offered to pay the funeral costs of anyone who put an ad on their tombstone.

    Or just anything involved with the campaign for the Dante's Inferno game. Part of it involved hiring actors to portray Christian protestors to call the game sacrilegious. Then EA sent boxes to game critics like Yahtzee. When opened the boxes would play that Rick Astley song and wouldn't stop until destroyed with a hammer. Like who tf was hired to think of all of this stuff and why did game companies pay marketers to do this

  • The enormous amount of World War II games after Saving Private Ryan came out, as part of an even bigger wave of WWII media in general.

    slaps roof You can fit so many media properties in this war!

    EDIT: There was a big flowering of Half-Life mods for a time, and it is the reason we have Subnautica

  • Maybe not a fad so much as the natural change in the industry towards digital distribution, but I miss the days of "feelies" - physical promotions like cloth maps included with games.

    Then again, I had to call Nintendo because I lost the letter that provided the clue you needed to complete Startropics.

  • Quick time events and good riddance

    • Quick time events are still alive and well. I played Star Wars Outlaws recently and they had quick time events for eating food

    • Unless you're playing a yakuza game LOL

      Though their worst offenders are definitely the mid-2010's tbf, except for Lost Judgment's weird multi-input QTEs. Dead Souls in particular speeds them up so fast on higher difficulties that it's basically impossible to hit them consistently unless you use the PS3 menu to buffer them

  • The call of duty modern warfare and black ops games during the early 2010s and very late 2000s. It seemed like every second game, no matter the genre, tried to copy call of duty. The subculture around these games on early internet/YouTube was a thing.

  • This is a weird fad of the 90’s, but classic 90’s ‘tude: it was everywhere and carried on even in the 2000s.

    I’d say the quintessential 90’s ‘tude character was Bart Simpson: the rebellious kid who wasn’t afraid to put teachers in their place. More relevant to the conversation, Simpsons video games were crawling with ‘tude. Almost immediately after sonic came out and was a more benign version of this. Unlike Mario, he was cool and edgy.

    We got a little bit of this still in the 2000s and Sly Cooper’s a good example. Sly Cooper was arguably 90’s ‘tudes mature, suave older brother in college. Sly himself was always confident and quick with the joke, and regularly flirted with Carmelita. Even when he got angry in the first game, he spoke in a somewhat calm manner as if he knew what he was doing. Look at boss banter with the fiendish five vs his banter with Bentley.

    In some ways, I liked it because American media was flirting with more moral ambiguity, even if it meant having objectively good but “chaotic” characters like Sly Cooper.

47 comments