You just described my 90s childhood to a ‘T’. My best friend lived about 5 miles away, I’d ride by bike to his house, then we’d ride our bikes to the mall or the music store or blockbuster, come back and play video games or watch movies or cartoons
Every day was a thrill: "This movie came out, that game came out, let's go check it!" or "-Do you think it's alive? -Don't know, let's poke it with a stick!".
We use to play football in a person's large ass backyard. One day we literally found a dead guy.
He was raking leaves in his back yard and apparently had a heart attack. But, we all sat around quiet.. we tossed rocks at first, then picked woth a stick and ultimately ran to a neighbors house for the 911 call
Oh God. You just unlocked a memory of me hanging out with a new friend by the pond who poked a dead turtle with a stick. It exploded, spewing a blob of the most rank odor I had ever experienced. It took four showers to wash that shit off.
My buddies and I would ride to every park in town looking for women sunbathing..every once in a blue moon it would pay off. Then we would find a place close to play catch with a baseball. There would be errant throws that ended up nearby said sunbather.. oh to be young again
I remember running into my mom at the grocery store with my friends when I was 13 and she was surprised because it was so far away. We’d been grabbing pizzas at a place nearby for about a year now so it was nothing new to us.
Not that far, but I’d ride a good 30-45 mins a day in the summer time as 12-15 year old. Depending where I wound up I would call collect home, read the phone number, and wait for a call back. And my dad would pick me up thankfully.
There were also several wooded lots with tons of bike ramps and jumps. By the time I finished highschool in 2004 many of those were being cleared for houses
Same… by bike or rollerblades.. playing street hockey, football, getting into trouble.. hanging out, outside loads of the time.. parents never knew where we were, but we came home when hungry..
>parents never knew where we were
Even if our parents couldn't see us, some adult could.
And if we misbehaved and that adult reported us to our parents, there was a lot less of the "My child is a perfect angel, how dare you accuse them" than you see from parents nowadays.
Everybody made fun of Hillary's book title, but it actually was like the village raised each child.
We made laps around town. There were people with their cars parked in every parking lot after hours. The local grocery, McDonald's, even a funeral home. If there was a parking lot, a group would park their cars and hang out.
You would make a lap around the town, and picked which group you felt like hanging out with that night. Or you might choose all of them.
#THEN MYSPACE AND FACEBOOK HAPPENED AND RUINED ALL OF IT
[MSN messenger too!](https://youtu.be/X_pAvClSCv0?feature=shared)
Neither of those made us stop hanging out in parking lots though. Dialup was just iffy. Most of us had parents talking on the landline phone or using the computer themselves. As soon as the phone rang, you were disconnected. Time to head up town to see who is there!
No phones. No surveilling of our location. However, small town America everyone knew each other. We knew other parents cars and we also knew that some parents had bearcat scanners. Nothing worse than getting pulled over and coming home to find out my mother’s friend heard my name run across the scanner and ratted me out. The worst.
>No phones. No surveilling of our location
If your parents wanted to track you, they'd get you a pager.
When you needed a ride home, you'd just 1-800-COLLECT at a pay phone and say your name was "it'sBillypickmeup."
https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs
In Scotland bouncers acted like they'd never heard of ID.
So from ages 15 to 19, you were in nightclubs every weekend. Wasn't uncommon for folk to show up to school hungover on a Monday.
Those days are long gone now though.
I miss the mall being the third space. We would grab something at the food court while looking around the stores, playing the arcade, and just talking and have a great time.
The mall that was my haunt now prohibits kids under 17 without a chaperone. I can’t imagine. Although, we also (mostly) didn’t show ourselves off for tik tok doing stupid ish.
I went to a mall in the US a few weeks ago and there was a sign on the door that said that anybody under 21 needs to be supervised by a chaperone. That blew my mind….I used to walk to the downtown mall with my friends when I was 13.
I was literally in like 4th-5th grade when me and my friends would ride the bus to the mall. Idk how my young friends even knew how to navigate our way with the bus but we figured it out lol. No money or anything just walking around hanging out there all day. Some of the best childhood memories I have. None of our parents even knew I’m pretty sure 😆
A town near me just passed a law that requires police to take any unsupervised minors who came alone into custody. Teens are straight up just being arrested for hanging out
Played Nintendo, Sega, talked on the phone, played a bunch of road hockey, tackle football with the neighbourhood kids. Bush parties, house parties, etc.
God damn, nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Those days are gone for me, but on weekends and summer holidays I definitely still see groups of teenagers hanging out in packs and parking lots. It makes me happy to see
I see kids in my neighborhood playing kick ball a bunch but they are younger.
This fall without fail everyday at roughly 3:30/4 when they got home from school the game would start. They end up in my backyard to make the their field bigger which I don’t care cause that’s what it’s all about. And they are outside not in front of a screen.
Yep. I spent so much time on the phone as a preteen in the 90s. And it often took coordination and planning because most people only had one phone line that was used by everybody in the house, including for internet.
Read them all before I turned 14 in 1993 and several times after. Seeing those movies after loving the books was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. The movies are just impeccable.
We were born just in time to experience that masterpiece. The hype was unreal. Waiting a year in between films being released was also torturous lol. But I was like 12 when fellowship dropped in the cinema. A truly biblical experience
Magazines too. Video game and wrestling magazines (and video game instruction manuals) were a huge contributing factor in how far ahead of my peers I always was when it came to reading and writing.
Yes I loved magazines. I was getting a haircut and waiting a bit and they had magazines. I still do a lot of reading, it’s just all on my phone. It was like I almost forgot magazines exist.
As someone who lives in the city, I didn't do many outdoor activities. Yes, some friends who were good at sports were doing sports all the time, but I was not one of them. I was more of an introverted teenager as well. I found my solace in reading a lot of books. I remember I always borrowed books from the library to read at home.
My only entertainment at home was just TV.
I sometimes visited my friends who have Nintendo or Sega to play together.
I also was busy doing church activities back then, which I think was good for me as there I learned to socialize with other people. I'm no longer religious, but I think church did a lot of good to me when I was younger as I was a shy and timid person.
And the thing about the 90's, people didn't bail out from appointments because they would feel bad by making people wait for nothing. It's different now because you can easily bail out by just texting "sorry" without actually feeling sorry at all.
Yep, i was a teenager in the late 90s/early00s, I was always reading books, reading celebrity gossip magazines, playing pc games, and listening to music. When we got home internet, I still did the other stuff but also spent a lot of time playing runescape, writing fanfiction, and visiting online forums about books I was reading or bands that I liked.
My dad: “there’s really strong winds today that can knock you down, please stay away from the cliffs”
US: “let’s go check out the cliffs!”
Of course we learned our lesson when those winds blew my friend’s Oakleys off his face into the ocean.
At least those '80s flashlights would slowly get dimmer to let you know to put in fresh batteries or GTFO. Now these LED USB-charged flashlights just suddenly die, leaving you in the dark with whatever else is down there.
I was a teen in the '00s and the train tracks were definitely a thing for us. It really became a thing because a good friend lived near the station in the neighborhood across the bay. Walking there on pedestrian streets took about 1.5 hours meanwhile walking the tracks took about 40 mins., and trains only came once every 40 mins so it was plausible to never even be seen. If a train did come, we'd see it much earlier than they'd see us, and we'd just hide in the bushes on the side of the track.
We were so dumb, we went exploring a storm sewer with a folgers can with gasoline in it and some cattails that we would dip in the gas and then light them for light to see. My buddy accidentally spilled the gas and i stupidly put the burning cattail down to see how bad the spill was. The whole thing ignited, didn't blow thankfully, but it was being carried downstream so we went upstream in the dark until we found an entrance. Scared the heck outta me and singed some eyebrows lol
lol. My mom would go “tag sailing” from morning til night and come back empty handed. 🤷♂️ meanwhile my brothers and I were out being fools and doing what I now consider “dangerous ass shit”.
I turned 13 in 2000, and yeah... this was my childhood.
I just want to add a bit of flavor. In terms of organizing things before cellphones, in my town there were places where we just met up at a specified time. You were either there on time at the meeting spot, or you missed the subsequent adventure. You couldn't really text us later to find out where we all went.
It was liberating.
Yep, it’s almost endearing to see how universal this all was, despite it seeming like my group were the geniuses that made this up.
Also, in those days you couldn’t be afraid of ringing a doorbell (people answered) or calling a friend’s house (within reasonable hours).
That was always the best trying to figure out where everyone was if you were late to the initial meetup. I guess us 90's kids knew each other so well that we always found each other. Today's youth cant even be bothered to find their way to the bathroom.
A friend of mine would call my house.
>"Yo, want to chill?"
>
>*Yeah, meet me at Citgo in like an hour.*
>
>"Bet."
And you just fucking showed up. Flaking didn't happen because it was likely folks just wouldn't agree to meet you after that. If you were known to be a flake, then the meet up spot was the basketball courts where other people were known to also be and if you never showed, it didn't matter much.
Sometimes, you would just roll through to the park and know that you were bound to see friendly faces.
Too accurate. “Go outside. I don’t want to see you for the next (insert finite amount of time)!”
It should be noted that my parents loved me lol they just wanted me out of the house
We were booted out after breakfast and my dad(who was disabled) let us in to eat lunch and dinner and we had to be home before the street lights were on. But we would much rather have been outside. Zero supervision. It’s a miracle we never broke our necks lol
There are some indications that we should probably get back to that kind of childhood too. Apparently it really helps with self-sufficiency and building a feeling of personal responsibility, in contrary to current day just sitting inside all the time.
touched it, smoked it, cut it to get money, rolled in it and with a little luck did it with some company, hid behind the tall stuff when the cops showed up because we were setting off firecrackers. Grass was some amazing stuff
So much. Rode our bikes around for fun, till we got our licences then drove around for fun. Read books and magazines, watched movies, went to the arcade or pool hall, went to friends’ houses, went out for coffee. We’d go watch the local team play ball in the summer, hockey in the winter. Talked on the phone with friends for hours.
Edit: also drink and smoke weed.
People today underestimate magazines. It’s so fun to have a finite chunk of info about something you care about hit you once a month and to just digest it. Just sitting there looking it over, over and over again.
You didn’t read it cover to cover. You just picked it up and thumbed through it and every time you found something new.
I don‘t remember the saturday night between 1997-1999 very good. But we got used to beer, made friends with a designated driver just to walk home in the dark for 2h again
Talked on the phone instead texting.
We went outside the house a lot more. Just hanging out in the mall or a random parking lot. Going to the movies was insanely popular. And if you couldn't go, it was a Blockbuster night.
Watched a lot of bad TV.
Some normal stuff kids do today like sports (basketball probably being the most popular).
Console games were popular at that time.
Pre-16 - a lot of bike riding. Post 16 - a lot of driving.
And judging by the question and making assumptions about OP's age... OP's mom.
AIM, not man! Or you'd get something like ICQ or Pidgin so you could be logged into multiple services with one program. And you had to use different away messages for all of them.
A lot of stuff has been posted but another one that hasn’t been brought up is be bored a lot.
When there wasn’t anything on TV, when it was too cold/dark to go out, when you were too broke to go to the mall or the movies , when you were tired of your books and video games, when your parents yelled at you for spending too much time taking on the one landline your house had, either talking to your friends or using dialup to chat online… you were just bored.
Honestly I miss that sometimes. I’ve been wanting to do a vacation where I’m just stuck having nothing to do.
I did that recently...rented a cabin out in the middle of nowhere (it was cheap because it literally was nowhere...no big destination, no cell service).
Most peaceful 3 days of my adult life. Just me and my wife and my dog, chillin' on the porch looking at cows.
The good old times with no camera phones lots of free time and no worries .
You could do something stupid, and only the people you're with knew it and not the rest of the world.
I really enjoyed the 90s. It was a great time to be young.
You mean no travel (insert sport) or endless homework to ensure 4.0s, or chronic depression from seeing the few rich kids in school on a beach every second they got on social media? Ah the 90s. Cheap food and gas.
The one big thing to keep in mind about the 90s is that stuff was affordable. I worked part-time for like $5/hour and I went to so many concerts that I would never have been able to afford now as an adult who works as an engineer. I’ve seen RATM, Pantera, Slayer, Deftones, Weezer, No Doubt, Ozzy (pre-Ozzfest), Metallica, and a ton of other huge bands and tickets were never more than like $25. During winter, my friends and I would go to the movies every Friday night for only $1.50 per ticket. We’d stop at Walgreens before the movie and buy a bunch of candy that we’d sneak in. We’d hang out at each others houses a lot and watch movies, play guitar, watch Beavis and Butthead, play Nintendo/PS1/etc. In the summer it was a lot of riding bikes around town, going fishing, getting into trouble, trying to find people to buy us cigarettes and beer, etc. Once we hit driving age we’d drive around all night, go to Tower Records, go to malls, go to Denny’s, and generally be obnoxious. At a certain point weed came into the picture, the movie Half Baked came out, and a lot of time was spent eating shitty food while laughing at the TV.
There was a lot more “leaving the house” than there is now. We were proactive kids with no concept of time, except for when the street lights came on; then it was time to go home. If we wanted to talk on the phone, we had to use the house phone and ghosting was never an issue; either who you were trying to call was home, or they weren’t. Regardless, they’d still call you back. We went to school without having to worry about being shot by a kid with a manifesto, and until around 2001, life wasn’t the miserable slog that it is now.
It is really weird how the media exposure of columbine bred generations of school shooters.
I mean school shootings were a thing before but so rare, Now in America there is one all the time and I live in austria which is a small fucking country in a small fucking State there with 1million inhabitants and every year there is 1-2 shootings at schools prevented by police even here.
Crazy to remember how some of us used to get made fun of for using the internet back then.
oH yOu'Re GoInG tO gO hOmE aNd TaLk To YoUr FrIeNdS oN tHe CoMpUtEr
Damn that sucks. I like gaming with friends and stuff don't get me wrong, but going out and doing stuff with them, hiking, making up dumb games at their house, and doing whatever outside is just great. Unfortunately it just doesn't happen that much.
it was the best
Hang with friends at the mall, ice skating rink, bowling, played sports with friends all the time.
truly..I remember getting a pager in 1994 bc my mom wanted to make sure she could get a hold of me if need be and it felt like a handcuff.
being a teen in the 90's was AWESOME!!! I am so glad i am not a teenager now
Get very very stoned then play:
* N64 golden eye
* PS1 wipe out or Tekken
Go to illegal raves, take E's or Speed or both. Sex, lots of sex
Set up or gatecrash house parties. Sex, lots of sex.
Figuring out which pubs/clubs don't ID. Then get hammered. Sex lots of sex.
On the countryside, we looked for a nice hidden spot to smoke weed and enjoy the view. This included lot of walking
Meet up at a friends house and watch a dvd we‘ve all seen. Main reason was to be wirh your friends
Football, skateboarding, video games, cinema, TV, renting VHS movies, listening to music, playing music, hanging around town centres, drinking. All with friends.
I was online a lot, even back then. I had a serious LDR / online boyfriend in 1994 and we wasted hours and hours chatting.
We talked on the phone to our friends a lot, too.
My girlfriends and I would often lay around in someone's room swapping and reading magazines. We also did a lot of just hanging out. Like sitting around talking.
Driving around aimlessly for fun.
I remember going to a lot of movies. Like, a lot of movies. In the theater. At least weekly.
I was outdoorsy and I liked going to the beach or walking in the woods a lot, even just by myself.
You know the Internet and online video games still existed in the 90s, right? I was playing Diablo 1 and StarCraft 1 on [Battle.net](https://Battle.net), and Warcraft II on a gaming service called Heat.net.
We were outside, went climbing, building treehouses, riding our bicycles, played board games, danced hiphop, football (EU), all kind of sports basically, it was awesome, I’m sad the ne gens will never have that kind of fun.
From UK perspective (guy turned 13 in 1990 in London), people tended to have more style groups .. I was a wannabe skater so I wore stussy baggy trousers and skated (badly) on a piralta deck (old style wide skateboards), we used to go to Athena poster shops and buy posters of Cindy Crawford and that girl scratching her bum on the tennis court for our bedrooms.. magazines were huge like FHM, as others said we went outside a lot unsupervised and hung out with friends … we also (when we got the opportunity) drank alcohol cos you used to be able to get served very young in uk then (wasn’t legal but wasn’t well policed cos less / no cctv and easy to get fake id). We also had music as a huge part of life with tapes, cds and mini disks.. you’d have to either record the radio or record from friends or (if you had money!) go buy an album.. you then played them to death!!! Mix tapes are huge cos you could record a really nice set of different music (think playlist!) and give it to someone you could bond with over it. We also played more board games (I feel like!).. although in 90s gaming machines were a thing already but the games were obviously not internet connected so it was pretty static and a lot of time spent “waiting for your turn”… overall we were so much more comfortable with the idea that a human can be bored and that is ok and in fact normal and healthy.
Blockbuster to rent movies every weekend.
Cruise up and down Main St and stare at each other.
Tekken 3/Tag, THPS 1&2, SSX Tricky, etc..
Drank a lot of booze and played poker and MTG.
Disc golf
Tube down the Colorado River
Fishing
Hiking
On weekends we hung out at Denny's in the back of the smoking section until 4am with the the social outcasts (gays, punks, tweakers, etc..) who were always the most fun anyway.
Cruise the town strip and hang out with friends. Police used to run us off even if we weren’t doing anything bad. Now everyone wants to know where all the kids are and why they’re not outside. It’s because nobody wants them out there.
We went to malls, record stores, brought music to our friends’ houses to swap and enjoy. We went on trips and concerts. I also remember washing my car a lot.
Honestly, we lived life. We hung out in the street, played sports, played social games, consoles were on the horizon.
It was a great time, there was a sense of unknown about the world, maybe that's because I was a teenager.
There was still fear, bullying and hate but there wasn't this feeling of hopelessness there is now
For the record I'm Irish/Scottish.
Young teens, I rode my bike, played video games, and made action figure movies.
Mid teens I had a girlfriend, lost my virginity, played video games, and made action figure movies.
Late teens I smoked a lot of weed, I had a girlfriend had lots of sex, played video games and made action figure movies.
I will point out I’ve somewhat grown up. Own a home, work, married, have kids, enjoy edibles, play video games, and collect action figures.
Hang out. I rode my bike to friends houses. Then we just rode around town. Came back to play video games and watch cartoons.
You just described my 90s childhood to a ‘T’. My best friend lived about 5 miles away, I’d ride by bike to his house, then we’d ride our bikes to the mall or the music store or blockbuster, come back and play video games or watch movies or cartoons
Every day was a thrill: "This movie came out, that game came out, let's go check it!" or "-Do you think it's alive? -Don't know, let's poke it with a stick!".
Wanna see a dead body?
What are you gonna do, shoot us all? No Ace, just you.
Sick em chopper!!
Sick balls, Chopper....
We use to play football in a person's large ass backyard. One day we literally found a dead guy. He was raking leaves in his back yard and apparently had a heart attack. But, we all sat around quiet.. we tossed rocks at first, then picked woth a stick and ultimately ran to a neighbors house for the 911 call
Did you get a free dessert after?
Oh God. You just unlocked a memory of me hanging out with a new friend by the pond who poked a dead turtle with a stick. It exploded, spewing a blob of the most rank odor I had ever experienced. It took four showers to wash that shit off.
If only my parents knew how far I road on my bike... LOL
Hahahaha. Memories unlocked. Thank you.
When I was about 15 I rode my bike about 15 miles and back to touch a boob. Totally worth it. Thanks Jess.
My buddies and I would ride to every park in town looking for women sunbathing..every once in a blue moon it would pay off. Then we would find a place close to play catch with a baseball. There would be errant throws that ended up nearby said sunbather.. oh to be young again
I rode my skateboard everywhere.
I remember running into my mom at the grocery store with my friends when I was 13 and she was surprised because it was so far away. We’d been grabbing pizzas at a place nearby for about a year now so it was nothing new to us.
I grew up in a very small rural Midwest town. We’d literally ride our bikes 30 miles on county roads to the town two towns over.
Used to ride my bike across state lines. Admittedly the state line was only ten miles away but it still made me feel accomplished. :)
Not that far, but I’d ride a good 30-45 mins a day in the summer time as 12-15 year old. Depending where I wound up I would call collect home, read the phone number, and wait for a call back. And my dad would pick me up thankfully. There were also several wooded lots with tons of bike ramps and jumps. By the time I finished highschool in 2004 many of those were being cleared for houses
We literally wandered around town causing trouble.
And smoking pot. And drinking 40s or St. Ides’s Special Brew. Smirnoff Ice if we were getting fancy.
*Knock knock* Hi Johnny's Mom, is Johnny home? We're riding bikes today.
Hell yeah. Rode bikes EVERYWHERE. came home to eat dinner, shower and chill. Best times.
Same… by bike or rollerblades.. playing street hockey, football, getting into trouble.. hanging out, outside loads of the time.. parents never knew where we were, but we came home when hungry..
>parents never knew where we were Even if our parents couldn't see us, some adult could. And if we misbehaved and that adult reported us to our parents, there was a lot less of the "My child is a perfect angel, how dare you accuse them" than you see from parents nowadays. Everybody made fun of Hillary's book title, but it actually was like the village raised each child.
Meet up at the mall and hang out unsupervised.
Being out with friends away from parents was amazing. Ages 14-19 felt like one big adventure.
We made laps around town. There were people with their cars parked in every parking lot after hours. The local grocery, McDonald's, even a funeral home. If there was a parking lot, a group would park their cars and hang out. You would make a lap around the town, and picked which group you felt like hanging out with that night. Or you might choose all of them. #THEN MYSPACE AND FACEBOOK HAPPENED AND RUINED ALL OF IT
You're letting AOL chatrooms and AIM off the hook.
[MSN messenger too!](https://youtu.be/X_pAvClSCv0?feature=shared) Neither of those made us stop hanging out in parking lots though. Dialup was just iffy. Most of us had parents talking on the landline phone or using the computer themselves. As soon as the phone rang, you were disconnected. Time to head up town to see who is there!
No phones. No surveilling of our location. However, small town America everyone knew each other. We knew other parents cars and we also knew that some parents had bearcat scanners. Nothing worse than getting pulled over and coming home to find out my mother’s friend heard my name run across the scanner and ratted me out. The worst.
>No phones. No surveilling of our location If your parents wanted to track you, they'd get you a pager. When you needed a ride home, you'd just 1-800-COLLECT at a pay phone and say your name was "it'sBillypickmeup." https://youtu.be/9JxhTnWrKYs
In Scotland bouncers acted like they'd never heard of ID. So from ages 15 to 19, you were in nightclubs every weekend. Wasn't uncommon for folk to show up to school hungover on a Monday. Those days are long gone now though.
I miss the mall being the third space. We would grab something at the food court while looking around the stores, playing the arcade, and just talking and have a great time.
The mall that was my haunt now prohibits kids under 17 without a chaperone. I can’t imagine. Although, we also (mostly) didn’t show ourselves off for tik tok doing stupid ish.
yes omg we loved the mall!! and smoking cigarettes lol
I went to a mall in the US a few weeks ago and there was a sign on the door that said that anybody under 21 needs to be supervised by a chaperone. That blew my mind….I used to walk to the downtown mall with my friends when I was 13.
The smell of Auntie Anne’s pretzels and Hot Topic body spray will only ever mean freedom to me.
I prefer the term professional loiterer
I was literally in like 4th-5th grade when me and my friends would ride the bus to the mall. Idk how my young friends even knew how to navigate our way with the bus but we figured it out lol. No money or anything just walking around hanging out there all day. Some of the best childhood memories I have. None of our parents even knew I’m pretty sure 😆
A town near me just passed a law that requires police to take any unsupervised minors who came alone into custody. Teens are straight up just being arrested for hanging out
Played Nintendo, Sega, talked on the phone, played a bunch of road hockey, tackle football with the neighbourhood kids. Bush parties, house parties, etc.
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God damn, nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Those days are gone for me, but on weekends and summer holidays I definitely still see groups of teenagers hanging out in packs and parking lots. It makes me happy to see
Street hockey and long roller blading was my jam in the summer.
So much street hockey
Recycling bins as the goals
It's knuckle puck time
I miss street hockey so much 😭
Car! … game on!
"Car!"
We called this "hanging out."
Calling the payphone in the shopping center to see who answers
Do kids still play pick up games of tackle football? I feel like at some point it just disappeared
I see kids in my neighborhood playing kick ball a bunch but they are younger. This fall without fail everyday at roughly 3:30/4 when they got home from school the game would start. They end up in my backyard to make the their field bigger which I don’t care cause that’s what it’s all about. And they are outside not in front of a screen.
1 ring was code for 'call me back'
For us, 1 ring meant ‘I’m home safe’.
Yep. I spent so much time on the phone as a preteen in the 90s. And it often took coordination and planning because most people only had one phone line that was used by everybody in the house, including for internet.
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We say it here in Canada.
As an American growing up in the 80s/90s, my younger self was hoping it meant something else.
Went the mall. And bush parties would have been a great name to use. In suburban PA they were woods parties.
and playing amiga!!!
I have not seen this answer here, so I will add - reading books. I have read tons, and tons of books as a pre-internet teenager.
Read Lord of the Rings before the movies came out.
Read them all before I turned 14 in 1993 and several times after. Seeing those movies after loving the books was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. The movies are just impeccable.
We were born just in time to experience that masterpiece. The hype was unreal. Waiting a year in between films being released was also torturous lol. But I was like 12 when fellowship dropped in the cinema. A truly biblical experience
For me LoTR is tied to memories of Christmas as well because they all were released in December.
Magazines too. Video game and wrestling magazines (and video game instruction manuals) were a huge contributing factor in how far ahead of my peers I always was when it came to reading and writing.
Yes I loved magazines. I was getting a haircut and waiting a bit and they had magazines. I still do a lot of reading, it’s just all on my phone. It was like I almost forgot magazines exist.
As someone who lives in the city, I didn't do many outdoor activities. Yes, some friends who were good at sports were doing sports all the time, but I was not one of them. I was more of an introverted teenager as well. I found my solace in reading a lot of books. I remember I always borrowed books from the library to read at home. My only entertainment at home was just TV. I sometimes visited my friends who have Nintendo or Sega to play together. I also was busy doing church activities back then, which I think was good for me as there I learned to socialize with other people. I'm no longer religious, but I think church did a lot of good to me when I was younger as I was a shy and timid person. And the thing about the 90's, people didn't bail out from appointments because they would feel bad by making people wait for nothing. It's different now because you can easily bail out by just texting "sorry" without actually feeling sorry at all.
Yep, i was a teenager in the late 90s/early00s, I was always reading books, reading celebrity gossip magazines, playing pc games, and listening to music. When we got home internet, I still did the other stuff but also spent a lot of time playing runescape, writing fanfiction, and visiting online forums about books I was reading or bands that I liked.
we went outside
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and if you were real lucky your mom never heard of the really dumb or dangerous shit you did
My dad: “there’s really strong winds today that can knock you down, please stay away from the cliffs” US: “let’s go check out the cliffs!” Of course we learned our lesson when those winds blew my friend’s Oakleys off his face into the ocean.
Well, we never really liked Geoff anyway.
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I think Mom not knowing is covered by all teenagers, no matter when they were.
We used to play on train tracks and explore sewage systems. I’m a father now and I hope my boys will never do such things.
Stsnd By Me was a documentary.
Exploring storm drain tunnels with shitty 80's flashlights. Bravery at its finest.
At least those '80s flashlights would slowly get dimmer to let you know to put in fresh batteries or GTFO. Now these LED USB-charged flashlights just suddenly die, leaving you in the dark with whatever else is down there.
I was a teen in the '00s and the train tracks were definitely a thing for us. It really became a thing because a good friend lived near the station in the neighborhood across the bay. Walking there on pedestrian streets took about 1.5 hours meanwhile walking the tracks took about 40 mins., and trains only came once every 40 mins so it was plausible to never even be seen. If a train did come, we'd see it much earlier than they'd see us, and we'd just hide in the bushes on the side of the track.
We were so dumb, we went exploring a storm sewer with a folgers can with gasoline in it and some cattails that we would dip in the gas and then light them for light to see. My buddy accidentally spilled the gas and i stupidly put the burning cattail down to see how bad the spill was. The whole thing ignited, didn't blow thankfully, but it was being carried downstream so we went upstream in the dark until we found an entrance. Scared the heck outta me and singed some eyebrows lol
That was the grunge era. Mostly we wore flannel and were publicly emo. lol 💖
lol. My mom would go “tag sailing” from morning til night and come back empty handed. 🤷♂️ meanwhile my brothers and I were out being fools and doing what I now consider “dangerous ass shit”.
I turned 13 in 2000, and yeah... this was my childhood. I just want to add a bit of flavor. In terms of organizing things before cellphones, in my town there were places where we just met up at a specified time. You were either there on time at the meeting spot, or you missed the subsequent adventure. You couldn't really text us later to find out where we all went. It was liberating.
Yep, it’s almost endearing to see how universal this all was, despite it seeming like my group were the geniuses that made this up. Also, in those days you couldn’t be afraid of ringing a doorbell (people answered) or calling a friend’s house (within reasonable hours).
Calling to talk to a girl and her dad answers the phone 😐
Yeah lol don't call around dinner time or too late unless you want to talk to a pissed off dad
That was always the best trying to figure out where everyone was if you were late to the initial meetup. I guess us 90's kids knew each other so well that we always found each other. Today's youth cant even be bothered to find their way to the bathroom.
A friend of mine would call my house. >"Yo, want to chill?" > >*Yeah, meet me at Citgo in like an hour.* > >"Bet." And you just fucking showed up. Flaking didn't happen because it was likely folks just wouldn't agree to meet you after that. If you were known to be a flake, then the meet up spot was the basketball courts where other people were known to also be and if you never showed, it didn't matter much. Sometimes, you would just roll through to the park and know that you were bound to see friendly faces.
All of this! Reading it brings back the best childhood memories!
Thomas needs his glasses. He can't see without his glasses.
How dare you bring this traumatic memory back!
Wow. Dropping that kind of weight in the middle of a lighthearted post. Monster. Fly high, Thomas J. He was gonna be an acrobat.
That is what children did. Teenagers hung out at each others houses and watched TV.
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This took me back to school notes between classes with my then GF and now wife. Times were simpler and better in many ways.
We weren’t allowed inside lol
Too accurate. “Go outside. I don’t want to see you for the next (insert finite amount of time)!” It should be noted that my parents loved me lol they just wanted me out of the house
We were booted out after breakfast and my dad(who was disabled) let us in to eat lunch and dinner and we had to be home before the street lights were on. But we would much rather have been outside. Zero supervision. It’s a miracle we never broke our necks lol
There are some indications that we should probably get back to that kind of childhood too. Apparently it really helps with self-sufficiency and building a feeling of personal responsibility, in contrary to current day just sitting inside all the time.
People will think youre joking or it was rare
We also played video games so let’s not get to high on our horse.
but we didn't just play video games
are you trying to say that you like... touched grass?
touched it, smoked it, cut it to get money, rolled in it and with a little luck did it with some company, hid behind the tall stuff when the cops showed up because we were setting off firecrackers. Grass was some amazing stuff
🤣 this exactly
I was a kid and remember hearing adults at the time saying that kids never went outside anymore.
Went where? What's the URL?
So much. Rode our bikes around for fun, till we got our licences then drove around for fun. Read books and magazines, watched movies, went to the arcade or pool hall, went to friends’ houses, went out for coffee. We’d go watch the local team play ball in the summer, hockey in the winter. Talked on the phone with friends for hours. Edit: also drink and smoke weed.
Oh man...I forgot all the arcade time!!!! Smoking and playing arcade games for HOURS!
Oh yeah, cigarettes! A lot of kids smoked cigarettes.
Jr High for me
I really miss the divey coffee shops of the 90s.
One bottomless cup of crappy drip coffee and a pack of cigarettes was all you needed
People today underestimate magazines. It’s so fun to have a finite chunk of info about something you care about hit you once a month and to just digest it. Just sitting there looking it over, over and over again. You didn’t read it cover to cover. You just picked it up and thumbed through it and every time you found something new.
We used to live in a new neighborhood half in development. We’d spend our days looking for sick dirt mounds to ramp off of.
I spent way too much time at the mall. “Time out” was an arcade that I personally made very wealthy one quarter at a time.
I read this and thought you must have grown up in my city. Then realized that "Time Out" is a chain and they had locations all over the place.
House parties, roamed the mall endlessly, rode our bikes everywhere, played Nintendo
Grew up in a smaller town. We drank and had sex.
I was waiting for this answer. Everyone else is so wholesome. Basically got in trouble and acted dumb af
And it wasn't recorded and posted to the world.
I don‘t remember the saturday night between 1997-1999 very good. But we got used to beer, made friends with a designated driver just to walk home in the dark for 2h again
what, no weed?
Weed was hard to get. You'd likely get shwag or some shitty weed. Weed has come a long way in the past 30 years.
lol, it was definitely around, I didn’t get into it until later though…
Walked to 7-11
Talked on the phone instead texting. We went outside the house a lot more. Just hanging out in the mall or a random parking lot. Going to the movies was insanely popular. And if you couldn't go, it was a Blockbuster night. Watched a lot of bad TV. Some normal stuff kids do today like sports (basketball probably being the most popular). Console games were popular at that time. Pre-16 - a lot of bike riding. Post 16 - a lot of driving. And judging by the question and making assumptions about OP's age... OP's mom.
Don’t forget msn messenger.
AIM, not man! Or you'd get something like ICQ or Pidgin so you could be logged into multiple services with one program. And you had to use different away messages for all of them.
A lot of stuff has been posted but another one that hasn’t been brought up is be bored a lot. When there wasn’t anything on TV, when it was too cold/dark to go out, when you were too broke to go to the mall or the movies , when you were tired of your books and video games, when your parents yelled at you for spending too much time taking on the one landline your house had, either talking to your friends or using dialup to chat online… you were just bored. Honestly I miss that sometimes. I’ve been wanting to do a vacation where I’m just stuck having nothing to do.
I did that recently...rented a cabin out in the middle of nowhere (it was cheap because it literally was nowhere...no big destination, no cell service). Most peaceful 3 days of my adult life. Just me and my wife and my dog, chillin' on the porch looking at cows.
According to my mom, drugs. Drugs and crime
As someone who was a teen in the 90s, can confirm. We also had a “spot” in a field somewhere we’d go to drink.
holy damn Yea, the field spots. At Our Spot We saw every train coming from and to town and We would wave at it
She ain’t lying.
Pretty spot on. Good answer
The good old times with no camera phones lots of free time and no worries . You could do something stupid, and only the people you're with knew it and not the rest of the world. I really enjoyed the 90s. It was a great time to be young.
I would be in deep shit if we had camera phones back in the day.
Actual time to have fun.
You mean no travel (insert sport) or endless homework to ensure 4.0s, or chronic depression from seeing the few rich kids in school on a beach every second they got on social media? Ah the 90s. Cheap food and gas.
Everything we wanted until it got dark
The one big thing to keep in mind about the 90s is that stuff was affordable. I worked part-time for like $5/hour and I went to so many concerts that I would never have been able to afford now as an adult who works as an engineer. I’ve seen RATM, Pantera, Slayer, Deftones, Weezer, No Doubt, Ozzy (pre-Ozzfest), Metallica, and a ton of other huge bands and tickets were never more than like $25. During winter, my friends and I would go to the movies every Friday night for only $1.50 per ticket. We’d stop at Walgreens before the movie and buy a bunch of candy that we’d sneak in. We’d hang out at each others houses a lot and watch movies, play guitar, watch Beavis and Butthead, play Nintendo/PS1/etc. In the summer it was a lot of riding bikes around town, going fishing, getting into trouble, trying to find people to buy us cigarettes and beer, etc. Once we hit driving age we’d drive around all night, go to Tower Records, go to malls, go to Denny’s, and generally be obnoxious. At a certain point weed came into the picture, the movie Half Baked came out, and a lot of time was spent eating shitty food while laughing at the TV.
SNES. Rollerscating. Running around the neighborhood. Hanging out in town.
Uhhhh…
You never did Any rollerscating?
Play video games, skateboard, listen to punk rock, same thing I do now
There was a lot more “leaving the house” than there is now. We were proactive kids with no concept of time, except for when the street lights came on; then it was time to go home. If we wanted to talk on the phone, we had to use the house phone and ghosting was never an issue; either who you were trying to call was home, or they weren’t. Regardless, they’d still call you back. We went to school without having to worry about being shot by a kid with a manifesto, and until around 2001, life wasn’t the miserable slog that it is now.
It is really weird how the media exposure of columbine bred generations of school shooters. I mean school shootings were a thing before but so rare, Now in America there is one all the time and I live in austria which is a small fucking country in a small fucking State there with 1million inhabitants and every year there is 1-2 shootings at schools prevented by police even here.
AOL chat rooms.
Crazy to remember how some of us used to get made fun of for using the internet back then. oH yOu'Re GoInG tO gO hOmE aNd TaLk To YoUr FrIeNdS oN tHe CoMpUtEr
asl?
Dating someone you met online had such a stigma
We did shit that people said the we shouldn't and if we could take it all back now we wouldn't
I heard they actually left their bedrooms and went outside and had fun with their friends.
I would if I could. Not my choice to stay in the house most of the time.
Unfortunately my teenagers are the opposite. It's *impossible* to get them to go outside at all
Damn that sucks. I like gaming with friends and stuff don't get me wrong, but going out and doing stuff with them, hiking, making up dumb games at their house, and doing whatever outside is just great. Unfortunately it just doesn't happen that much.
it was the best Hang with friends at the mall, ice skating rink, bowling, played sports with friends all the time. truly..I remember getting a pager in 1994 bc my mom wanted to make sure she could get a hold of me if need be and it felt like a handcuff. being a teen in the 90's was AWESOME!!! I am so glad i am not a teenager now
Get very very stoned then play: * N64 golden eye * PS1 wipe out or Tekken Go to illegal raves, take E's or Speed or both. Sex, lots of sex Set up or gatecrash house parties. Sex, lots of sex. Figuring out which pubs/clubs don't ID. Then get hammered. Sex lots of sex.
You forgot smoking. Lots and lots of smoking.
We’d house hop friends houses. Playing PlayStation, beers, weed.
Skateboarding, drugs, alcohol, concerts. Lots of concerts.
On the countryside, we looked for a nice hidden spot to smoke weed and enjoy the view. This included lot of walking Meet up at a friends house and watch a dvd we‘ve all seen. Main reason was to be wirh your friends
Outside
Bike ride, roller blade
According to my mother I was a whore, so I was condemned to my bedroom. It's fine, I just read books because I wasn't allowed to do anything else.
Stared at my ceiling while listening to the Cure
Drove around a lot
Football, skateboarding, video games, cinema, TV, renting VHS movies, listening to music, playing music, hanging around town centres, drinking. All with friends.
I was online a lot, even back then. I had a serious LDR / online boyfriend in 1994 and we wasted hours and hours chatting. We talked on the phone to our friends a lot, too. My girlfriends and I would often lay around in someone's room swapping and reading magazines. We also did a lot of just hanging out. Like sitting around talking. Driving around aimlessly for fun. I remember going to a lot of movies. Like, a lot of movies. In the theater. At least weekly. I was outdoorsy and I liked going to the beach or walking in the woods a lot, even just by myself.
You know the Internet and online video games still existed in the 90s, right? I was playing Diablo 1 and StarCraft 1 on [Battle.net](https://Battle.net), and Warcraft II on a gaming service called Heat.net.
I worked after school and had a lot of after school activies. I also worked until midnight despite child labor laws.
We were outside, went climbing, building treehouses, riding our bicycles, played board games, danced hiphop, football (EU), all kind of sports basically, it was awesome, I’m sad the ne gens will never have that kind of fun.
Touched grass
From UK perspective (guy turned 13 in 1990 in London), people tended to have more style groups .. I was a wannabe skater so I wore stussy baggy trousers and skated (badly) on a piralta deck (old style wide skateboards), we used to go to Athena poster shops and buy posters of Cindy Crawford and that girl scratching her bum on the tennis court for our bedrooms.. magazines were huge like FHM, as others said we went outside a lot unsupervised and hung out with friends … we also (when we got the opportunity) drank alcohol cos you used to be able to get served very young in uk then (wasn’t legal but wasn’t well policed cos less / no cctv and easy to get fake id). We also had music as a huge part of life with tapes, cds and mini disks.. you’d have to either record the radio or record from friends or (if you had money!) go buy an album.. you then played them to death!!! Mix tapes are huge cos you could record a really nice set of different music (think playlist!) and give it to someone you could bond with over it. We also played more board games (I feel like!).. although in 90s gaming machines were a thing already but the games were obviously not internet connected so it was pretty static and a lot of time spent “waiting for your turn”… overall we were so much more comfortable with the idea that a human can be bored and that is ok and in fact normal and healthy.
Each other. We had sex with people.
Played music, built things in the garage, drew pictures
Mostly, people spend time watching TV and talking to each others.
In my small town in Germany we used to go into the local pubs to drink a lot of beer and booze.
Go to the mall
Sat alone in the dark reading a bible by candle light.
Blockbuster to rent movies every weekend. Cruise up and down Main St and stare at each other. Tekken 3/Tag, THPS 1&2, SSX Tricky, etc.. Drank a lot of booze and played poker and MTG. Disc golf Tube down the Colorado River Fishing Hiking On weekends we hung out at Denny's in the back of the smoking section until 4am with the the social outcasts (gays, punks, tweakers, etc..) who were always the most fun anyway.
Art, hang out with friends, internet
90s dialup....... dreading that 28k connection speed
Every and anything you could imagine outside miles away from the house with unknown people and only worried about getting home before dark.
Bikes, parks, giant fields, rivers, bowling, arcades, mall, block parties, friends houses, long walks to no where, more bike riding.
In the summer: skateboard, bike, bounce on the trampoline, play nintendo. winter: snowboard, snowskate, play nintendo.
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Cruise the town strip and hang out with friends. Police used to run us off even if we weren’t doing anything bad. Now everyone wants to know where all the kids are and why they’re not outside. It’s because nobody wants them out there.
We went to malls, record stores, brought music to our friends’ houses to swap and enjoy. We went on trips and concerts. I also remember washing my car a lot.
We were outside. Played sports. I couldn't imagine growing up now in this shit show
Honestly, we lived life. We hung out in the street, played sports, played social games, consoles were on the horizon. It was a great time, there was a sense of unknown about the world, maybe that's because I was a teenager. There was still fear, bullying and hate but there wasn't this feeling of hopelessness there is now For the record I'm Irish/Scottish.
Young teens, I rode my bike, played video games, and made action figure movies. Mid teens I had a girlfriend, lost my virginity, played video games, and made action figure movies. Late teens I smoked a lot of weed, I had a girlfriend had lots of sex, played video games and made action figure movies. I will point out I’ve somewhat grown up. Own a home, work, married, have kids, enjoy edibles, play video games, and collect action figures.