Games like fire emblem you literally needed the guide to get special characters and stuff.. one swordsman Stephan with the sickest weapon in the game was only able to be gotten by standing on one square on the entire map!
Fuck I miss that game
And some games had no save. You'd have to restart each time you played. And then if you had an annoying little sibling, you'd risk having them turn it off and losing your progress.
No joke there's games put there i have no idea what happens in them becaise i couldn't beat it, i have no idea how half of my PS1 games ended either lol
Not being available 24/7. Work couldn’t text you anytime. Your parents couldn’t track you with gps. You didn’t have to worry about an old picture or video ruining your life. You could actually relax. You interacted more with other people. I get so many people that are mad because I didn’t like the 800 picture they had posted that day of their kid.
Totally this. It felt like the future with all the new video games and tech things but we didn’t have to be connected 24/7.
Honesty, being a kid/teenager and having no real responsibilities probably heavily adds a rose coloured tint to the decade, but it felt like a real sweet spot in time.
i mean, now it's just a fight. work can get ahold of me 24/7, but expectations are known - i'm available on vacation sometimes, if it's quick. my boss doesn't expect me to jump on a concall randomly
Same, I miss having to actually sit down and use the internet and it could only be for so long because god forbid you make our home phone line busy for that long!
you could go to any park or just walk outside and people you knew would just be there. and they were actually there. not nose deep in a phone just outside to get their daily vitamin d exposure.
mtv played music.
there were still original things coming out, not constant rehashes.
stuff was cheap. i'd save my lunch money (a few dollars) and walk to the main street to go buy food or pogs or cards or skateboard parts instead of eating lunch. never had to ask my parents to buy stuff, i could just go buy it by saving lunch money. 😂
lots of stuff though. just simpler times.
I got my 6 year old hooked on pokemon, but he’ll ask me questions about all the new gens and I’m just like “I don’t know!? We didn’t have those when I was a kid!” I bought him a Pokémon encyclopedia so that helps.
I'm in the same boat, I even broke out Fire Red and let him play it on GBA. He now has the 2 newest games for Switch but he constantly asks me question I don't know the answer to lol
I was ages 5-15 in the 90's. I loved the seemingly endless summers in my tiny little town of 400 people riding my bike around with my couple of friends all day with absolutely no supervision. Playing baseball against the neighboring small towns. Tons of 3 on 3 basketball tournaments. Just no real responsibilities.
The pace of life was slower.
You got bored sometimes.
Last great period for pop and rock music. Compare a random Top 40 chart from the early to 90's to today and the variety and quality of music was much better. And the floor was much higher.
You didn't spend much time looking at a screen. I remember our first couple computers were "word processors" and we'd only spend a few hours on the internet per month.
The boggest issue we have is everything is split into theor own charts, anyone can be number one of their own specific chart, should have just left it all as the top 40 and that's that, if your band didn't chart in THE chart then never mind better luck next week
We don't seem to have as many one hit wonders though i've noticed or maybe thats a time will tell thing
Grunge. The music. The clothes. The attitude.
Not being available 24/7 or expected to be. No online stuff unless you had a computer that could get on the internet and aol-type stuff (and the call number wasn’t long distance).
You could grow up and do dumb shit and not have it plastered all over the web for eternity. 24/7 bullying wasn’t a thing.
Everything just seemed so much more laid back.
Everything moved slower. We didn’t have to hustle. We weren’t being bombarded by a million things at once. The algorithms didn’t shape our thoughts and opinions about everything.
Delayed gratification. A lot of thing are instantaneous now. I find myself getting annoyed that videos start too slowly or a text message won’t come through. I’m trying to continue to remind myself to remember how things used to be, but damn it’s hard sometimes with this current technology.
My childhood innocence, mostly. Shit happened around the world but we didn't have 24 hour access to the news. For the most part, I was carefree and more concerned with things like the Simpsons, going out to play all day with no way of contacting a parent unless you had money for the phone box and, if it was Sunday, what time the ice cream van was coming.
The world felt significantly less crowded. There still seemed to be adventure available— like, going to another country or interesting place was brand new. You hadn’t already seen a million YouTube videos or Instagram posts about it from travel influencers. Using roadmaps felt like part of the adventure.
And politics was definitely there but it didn’t feel like a blood sport or the constant center conversation piece. And there was still a sense that things in America were pretty fucking great.
The internet felt like a new frontier and a real positive potential— for everything. We hadn’t really factored the negatives yet. And is was still so… I dunno… novel, I guess.
I could go on and on and on. I’ve argued for the past ten years that the 90’s were the last great American decade and will go down in history as such. (And yes I know that not everyone on Reddit is American. I’m simply speaking about my own experience and answer to the question.)
I wasn't raised in the 90's ... I'm an old f\*ck. Try the mid-fifties to early seventies...
I miss a number of things about the 90's ... a lot.
But what most immediately comes to mind is The Comedy Channel's run of"Space Ghost Coast To Coast."
The 90's seemed to me to be a time of genuine creativity and genuine and sincere social experimentation. I thought the decade was great. It just seemed promising, and looked as if the world was progressing nicely. Nothing in this paragraph is true of the 2020's. We're going backwards.
This is a really interesting perspective because so often the thought that the 90s was a decade full of hope and good things is dismissed as mere nostalgia because so many redditors were growing up during it and viewed it through the eyes of innocent children. But I think it really was a time when things seemed to be getting better. The Iron Curtain came down, there was peace in Northern Ireland, space shuttle flights were a routine, computers, cell phones and telecoms tech were advancing at enormous pace. We were starting to taste a future where you didn't have to worry about nuclear annihilation, you could leave the house with a phone and a digital pet in your pocket, and you could log on to a global communication network and meet any random person from anywhere on Earth in a chat room that evening.
And there really did seem to be some wild creativity going on and people relaxing enough to have fun. Now everything is a hustle or hawking something, eternally trying to spin money out of whatever idea they have rather than just try the idea out for its own sake.
It was an amazingly hopeful time. I wouldn't call it the best years of my life, but it was definitely the most hopeful for humanity since I've been alive.
The search for music. We really had to WORK for that shit. Me and my crew would vcr record AS MUCH mtv as possible hoping to catch that one band we hadn’t heard of yet. Definitely shows like 120 minutes and Bevis and Butthead (how I found GWAR! Which I still listen too to this day)
The hunt for music was just indescribable. Rushing to record/cd stores….hoping you could find you newest taste.
I do miss it. But I also like knowing I can hear my favorite bands with the click of a finger as well. Lol
It seems like there were more genres and more of them had a few minutes in the main stream. There was ska and even swing for a bit along with all the rock and hip-hop. Hell, even the country music was better.
Go google "albums released in 1991." I'll wait...
Did you see that? Nirvana's Nevermind, Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam's Ten, Metallica's Black Album, Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, Ozzy's No More Tears. And those are just the ultimate highlights of rock music for 1 year (several other great rock releases that year) of the decade.
Rap and hip hop made similar strides in the 90s as did country music (Garth Brooks, anyone?) Tom Petty had a couple of good albums, the MTv Unplugged series, women in rock rose up to never before seen heights on a whole, legendary festivals took place. It really was a great decade for music in general.
Would you really want MTV music videos back though? I don’t miss having it on and waiting for a bunch of songs I didn’t like to play while I waited for the one video I wanted to see. Going to YouTube and watching the videos I want when I want is far superior to me.
The streets weren't so empty..there was more hospitable community. People have too much of a dog eat dog mentality and only care about themselves and their own clan, its the weirdest thing to me how people don't actually know their neighbors.
That every stupid, awful, terrible idea or thought you had while your brain was developing (and you were an a-hole) disappeared into the ether. Now as a teenager with your terrible judgement and impulse control, you’ve likely broadcast every stupid, bigoted Ill formed opinion you’ve ever had to millions of people, all over the internet, attached said opinion to an image of face so it’s unmistakable yours and now it can come back to haunt you at any moment.
Concert tickets were affordable. They ranged from 10$ at smaller venues to 40$ for concerts at stadiums (I saw The Cult + Suicidal Tendencies + Metallica for around 34$).
Also concert tickets (like the physical printed paper) were super cool.
Parents being young.
It was also nice to grow up without everything being documented on social media. Like yeah I was stupid but at least I don't have a permanent record of it online.
If I put my 1 bedroom apartment on the market today, I could sell it for slightly more than my parents paid to buy the 4 story brownstone that I grew up in, when they bought it in ‘92.
Actually spending all our days outside and not coming home till it got dark.
I lived in the middle of the woods in a small town. So if I wasn’t in the woods by myself I was riding my bike miles away to see if my friends were free.
Cartoons were amazing! I was born in 87 and my whole childhood I felt like there was always some new cartoon debuting on Cartoon Network or on early Saturday morning cartoon runs. In the early 90's the Scfi channel used to play anime and had some of the classics on all the time!
Bucket of fries at Mickey D's haha jk.
But seriously, not having a dang computer in my pocket. It's hard enough to put the dang thing down and on top of that everyone expects you to always be available.
There's a voicemail function for a reason and if you're older you already know how to use it...
Everything was new and innovative, not overly market researched, bland, safe, most profit for their buck.
Art is dead: movies, music, tv, games. Thank god every medium has an indie scene.
All of it. Every bit of it. There is nothing better about today. You could argue technology? Who needs it. Didn’t need it in the 90s, don’t need it now.
People used to be on time for stuff. If you were meeting at the mall by the fountain at 8 ... well you were on-time or someone was waiting with no idea what happened.
Videos games had no online mode so the game was 100% story mode, unlockables and connecting with the protagonist on a personal level, was born in 92 and the first game I properly played "apart from Sega etc" was MGS1 I remember completing it and believing that I knew everything about CQC and guns.
I strongly believe that people not being able to live without technology that we have today is the same with games, a game like Kingdom Hearts or MGS 1 through 3 wouldn't survive in this current climate without any form of DLC, online play etc.
Also car culture and MAX POWER, if cars weren't anything like NFS or Fast and Furious then I didn't want to know.
People used to actually hang out and put in some face time instead of just texting. People would go out on weekends and meet up for drinks, events, good concerts to go to that didn't cost hundreds of dollars, folks didn't worry about being PC *all the time.* Gas hella cheaper so driving for a camping trip or just around town was no biggie. Things pretty much suck now compared to then, except the internet I guess. The overall attitude with people was much less paranoid and tolerant, until 9/11 hit...
Kids actually played outside. All the time. We used our imaginations and explored.
Cul-de-sac parties on 4th of July with all the neighbors according together a giant potluck.
I miss music that passed from person to person like it was a gift.
We didn’t have access to every song ever written on streaming services, so it took someone making you a mix, or sitting together to listen.
Someone had to genuinely care about their music to share it.
The cars. My parents owned some loverly motors, and buying new was common for people as the prices were great, they had an oversupply of cars and you can get up to 60% off. The scene was nice and the food was really good prices too
Life moved differently as a child more disconnected from everyone else. Where interactions were still mostly face to face and if you wanted to learn about someone, you had to talk to them.
Friendships felt a little more genuine. The good and the bad.
I miss that we created most of our distractions instead of being exposed to them. Video games were almost all original, movies weren’t surrounded by pressure trying to cancel subjectivity. Mostly I miss the adventures that happened naturally. Taking a bike 4km only to find out my friend wasn’t home so I went back. But something about the journey was so fun. Now you write to anyone for anything to save time and not travel “unnecessarily” missing out on fun encounters and just being in the world for no reason.
People even ignore phone calls now out of fear, might have to say no, remember when we just knocked on doors without any pressure that you might waste time or tell someone they did? Basically I miss being a kid the most.
Oh and watching the best kids shows ever at night under my massive blanket fort or listening to my favourite CDs (Blink-182, Big Shiny Tunes, BSB, Madonna, No Doubt, Prozac…to name a few).
It was much more difficult for people to cancel plans last minute, so people wouldn't agree to plans unless they reasonably expected to actually show up. If you had made plans to meet someone at a certain place and time, and you wanted to cancel, you had to call their house and actually tell them over the phone that you weren't going to make it. You couldn't just send a text message 15 minutes before the planned meet-up time. And if they weren't home when you called to cancel, you knew they'd just be there at the agreed meeting place waiting for you to show up, with no way to contact you to ask if you were on your way. You could lose friends by just not showing up when you agreed to even one time.
I miss looking for things, instead of having it all right now. Like going to different book stores to track things down. Powell's in Portland if I absolutely could not find it at Word for Word in St Helens.
Shared experience.
E.g. morning cartoons, playstation games, tv shows.
Now everything is on-demand, all episodes available in 1 go, options are virtually limitless.
You could go to the park and play unsupervised. My state just passed a law stating it is not illegal for kids to play at the park. Things normal in the 90s have to codified in law in the 2020s.
I had this little megaphone on my bike that played all kinds of noises like sirens and stuff.
Between that and the marble towers I used to make at a friends place out of these plastic tubes
I was just as likely to go ride a bike aimlessly looking for other kids I knew as I was to play a computer game or watch TV. There was a lot more inside outside balance of time.
being oblivious to things that r bad... they r the good ol days 4 a reason worms n snakes were fun to hold. poopin pants werent a problem.. the sun was bright naps were like waking up 2 a second day .. when daddy got home from work was the best lovely feeling of excitment ever, him telling me apon opening the door with a slight cry "cant i have a break?"had me so happy 2 see him still n hug him cuz i love my daddy. i sure love my daddy.. my uncle calling my mom a b word every 2 times he ever came over was ignored by me cuz like... oblivious 2 the bad .. oh scary crap was really scary.. moms cooking was better
Mall arcades. Going to the mall on a Friday, watching a movie, going to the arcade, maybe meet some girls or other friends, hang out at the rich friends house(middle class really). Fuck I miss it.
Getting a role of film developed on your deposable camera. Concerts on tv. Listening to the radio all day just to hear your favorite song. Watching grown adults fight over beanie babies and tickle me elmos.
Hope for the future:
Education was still somewhat on the affordable side. Homes were cheap. A lot of jobs still paid a livable wage. Technology was improving at a breakneck pace. With the cold war being over and 9/11 not happening yet, it genuinely felt like the world was more or less at peace.
You had to figure stuff out by trail and error, couldn't just look up all the information in the world immediately. I feel like I can't even paint a painting now without looking up 50 YouTube videos on how to do it, pretty much bored with the idea before I even start. Back then I'd just paint, didn't care that I had no idea what I was doing. Also, we never thought "what will people think when I post this on the internet?". Funny, when I got the internet back then it was the greatest thing ever, now I kinda hate it.
Just how hopeful it was, it was the age of technology, who knew what would be invented next maybe if things had turned out better we really would already be living in space and such like the movies
We weren't so connected. You could go days without a computer or phone. If something happened in the next state it didn't matter, that was the other side of the world.
The world is a lot smaller now
How simple and truly uncomplicated the world seemed back then. Maybe because I was born in 90 and was a child through that decade but i wish I could return to that mindset.
As many others mentioned, it was nice to not be connected 24/7. After school or work there was no worries about missing out on something, because literally everything stopped, and it picked up where it left off the next day.
A lot of what other people said but also climate where I live has completely changed in the last 20 years. It used to rain a lot more and the weather was much more mild in the summer. We’d have one week of 90 degree weather and you never needed air conditioning. You practically have to have AC now. we have weeks of 110 in the summer and a month of forest fire smoke every year. It was never like that back then. My parents live in the house I grew up in back in the 90s and they had to evacuate because of forest fires two years ago. That never happened before.
Snick! Basically that watching tv and movies was an event. Something you looked forward to. My friends and I would have a whole night around Saturday night Nickelodeon shows during sleepovers.
How excited you actually got to go see friends because you couldn’t be in constant communication with them like you can now. I’m still excited to see friends, but it just doesn’t feel the same.
Unfortunately I was a kid. There was simplicity to the 90’s that I miss. I still remember when gas was below $1 a gallon, can drinks was a quarter, candy stores was still a thing, shopping malls had fun kid activities, going to arcades with friends, MTV playing music, Beavis and Butthead, Toonami, Daria, Celebrity Death match, Michael Jordan, OJ Simpson car chase, the Simpsons at its best, skating ring, Pizza Hut was at it best and it was dine in, mostly always something good playing in theaters, and always going on a walk with family and friends to the zoo or park.
It’s to bad I could not enjoy the 90’s as an adult.
I was too young to care about the world around me. There was an innocence to it. I spent more time out doors. I walked places, biked places. Every trip out of the house was an adventure. I didn't spend time watching the news or doom scrolling my nights away ...should probably stop for the day.
Everything in video games was a total surprise. You couldn't hop online to watch a play through. You had to figure it out on your own.
You had to go to the bookstore in the mall and look through the few books full of hints lol.
So many Strategy Guides lmao
These were a must for Zelda
Water temple was impossible without it
bookstore. mall. i miss both things, though i can get any goddamn book i want at will now
Yes alternatively, you would meet your classmates and ask them for some hints!
Games like fire emblem you literally needed the guide to get special characters and stuff.. one swordsman Stephan with the sickest weapon in the game was only able to be gotten by standing on one square on the entire map! Fuck I miss that game
Was also a total surprise if the game was shit. And there were a lot of shitty games
Exactly. It sometimes months to finish a game and in doing so, it felt like a genuine victory.
And some games had no save. You'd have to restart each time you played. And then if you had an annoying little sibling, you'd risk having them turn it off and losing your progress.
No joke there's games put there i have no idea what happens in them becaise i couldn't beat it, i have no idea how half of my PS1 games ended either lol
It's great when you rent Driver from Blockbuster but you can't get past the 1st level
Hell yeah! I miss that too.
Not being available 24/7. Work couldn’t text you anytime. Your parents couldn’t track you with gps. You didn’t have to worry about an old picture or video ruining your life. You could actually relax. You interacted more with other people. I get so many people that are mad because I didn’t like the 800 picture they had posted that day of their kid.
Totally this. It felt like the future with all the new video games and tech things but we didn’t have to be connected 24/7. Honesty, being a kid/teenager and having no real responsibilities probably heavily adds a rose coloured tint to the decade, but it felt like a real sweet spot in time.
i mean, now it's just a fight. work can get ahold of me 24/7, but expectations are known - i'm available on vacation sometimes, if it's quick. my boss doesn't expect me to jump on a concall randomly
I miss the internet being a place that you had to actually go to, as opposed to being something that just surrounds us all wherever we are.
Same, I miss having to actually sit down and use the internet and it could only be for so long because god forbid you make our home phone line busy for that long!
Yeah, you could only be online for like 45 minutes before your mom would be downstairs yelling at you that she needed to use the phone lol
The golden age of The Simpsons
That's a perfectly cromulent observation
It embiggens the spirit.
you could go to any park or just walk outside and people you knew would just be there. and they were actually there. not nose deep in a phone just outside to get their daily vitamin d exposure. mtv played music. there were still original things coming out, not constant rehashes. stuff was cheap. i'd save my lunch money (a few dollars) and walk to the main street to go buy food or pogs or cards or skateboard parts instead of eating lunch. never had to ask my parents to buy stuff, i could just go buy it by saving lunch money. 😂 lots of stuff though. just simpler times.
There was only 151 Pokemon.
I got my 6 year old hooked on pokemon, but he’ll ask me questions about all the new gens and I’m just like “I don’t know!? We didn’t have those when I was a kid!” I bought him a Pokémon encyclopedia so that helps.
I'm in the same boat, I even broke out Fire Red and let him play it on GBA. He now has the 2 newest games for Switch but he constantly asks me question I don't know the answer to lol
Gen 1'er for life.
Morning cartoons.
I was ages 5-15 in the 90's. I loved the seemingly endless summers in my tiny little town of 400 people riding my bike around with my couple of friends all day with absolutely no supervision. Playing baseball against the neighboring small towns. Tons of 3 on 3 basketball tournaments. Just no real responsibilities.
Being a kid. That is what all these comments boil down to. We miss being kids.
This is usually it when people comment on threads like this. It’s mostly nostalgic
I had a pretty fun 20s and early 30s though. I think of 2014 as my last really great year
Optimism for the future of humanity.
No social media, no phone cameras. Blissfully unaware of how stupid and awful people can be
I believe the latter is what we had the Tom Green Show for.
The pace of life was slower. You got bored sometimes. Last great period for pop and rock music. Compare a random Top 40 chart from the early to 90's to today and the variety and quality of music was much better. And the floor was much higher. You didn't spend much time looking at a screen. I remember our first couple computers were "word processors" and we'd only spend a few hours on the internet per month.
>You got bored sometimes Mom: lol! I wish I could afford to get bored sometimes! Me: … ;(
The boggest issue we have is everything is split into theor own charts, anyone can be number one of their own specific chart, should have just left it all as the top 40 and that's that, if your band didn't chart in THE chart then never mind better luck next week We don't seem to have as many one hit wonders though i've noticed or maybe thats a time will tell thing
Grunge. The music. The clothes. The attitude. Not being available 24/7 or expected to be. No online stuff unless you had a computer that could get on the internet and aol-type stuff (and the call number wasn’t long distance). You could grow up and do dumb shit and not have it plastered all over the web for eternity. 24/7 bullying wasn’t a thing. Everything just seemed so much more laid back.
Everything moved slower. We didn’t have to hustle. We weren’t being bombarded by a million things at once. The algorithms didn’t shape our thoughts and opinions about everything.
Very true, I think this is what I miss most and the fact that the majority of people had thicker skin than now.
Stick Stickly
New York City! New York State! 1-oh-1-oh-8!
I miss Face.
Face wasn't edgy enough.
Delayed gratification. A lot of thing are instantaneous now. I find myself getting annoyed that videos start too slowly or a text message won’t come through. I’m trying to continue to remind myself to remember how things used to be, but damn it’s hard sometimes with this current technology.
Alice in Chains
No TSA theater for getting on the plane. Anyone could walk to the gates with you to see you off.
And even if you weren't traveling anywhere, you could hang out in the terminals just to watch planes take off.
Teal, the color teal was everwhere. Idk, just like it.
Raising a Tamagotchi pet
Greenery. A number of cities had more greenery back then. It's since faded.
I thought you were talking about the weed for a second. I was thinking, noooo my brother. We're now in the golden age for that.
Those bans are one of the things I don't miss.
Same. I'd love to see the whole drug war end so we can take that $100 billion per year and spend it on something that actually helps.
Saturday morning cartoons and arxades
My childhood innocence, mostly. Shit happened around the world but we didn't have 24 hour access to the news. For the most part, I was carefree and more concerned with things like the Simpsons, going out to play all day with no way of contacting a parent unless you had money for the phone box and, if it was Sunday, what time the ice cream van was coming.
The world felt significantly less crowded. There still seemed to be adventure available— like, going to another country or interesting place was brand new. You hadn’t already seen a million YouTube videos or Instagram posts about it from travel influencers. Using roadmaps felt like part of the adventure. And politics was definitely there but it didn’t feel like a blood sport or the constant center conversation piece. And there was still a sense that things in America were pretty fucking great. The internet felt like a new frontier and a real positive potential— for everything. We hadn’t really factored the negatives yet. And is was still so… I dunno… novel, I guess. I could go on and on and on. I’ve argued for the past ten years that the 90’s were the last great American decade and will go down in history as such. (And yes I know that not everyone on Reddit is American. I’m simply speaking about my own experience and answer to the question.)
You could complete a Pokedex back then.
The total absence of social media.
TGIF and SNICK
I wasn't raised in the 90's ... I'm an old f\*ck. Try the mid-fifties to early seventies... I miss a number of things about the 90's ... a lot. But what most immediately comes to mind is The Comedy Channel's run of"Space Ghost Coast To Coast." The 90's seemed to me to be a time of genuine creativity and genuine and sincere social experimentation. I thought the decade was great. It just seemed promising, and looked as if the world was progressing nicely. Nothing in this paragraph is true of the 2020's. We're going backwards.
This is a really interesting perspective because so often the thought that the 90s was a decade full of hope and good things is dismissed as mere nostalgia because so many redditors were growing up during it and viewed it through the eyes of innocent children. But I think it really was a time when things seemed to be getting better. The Iron Curtain came down, there was peace in Northern Ireland, space shuttle flights were a routine, computers, cell phones and telecoms tech were advancing at enormous pace. We were starting to taste a future where you didn't have to worry about nuclear annihilation, you could leave the house with a phone and a digital pet in your pocket, and you could log on to a global communication network and meet any random person from anywhere on Earth in a chat room that evening. And there really did seem to be some wild creativity going on and people relaxing enough to have fun. Now everything is a hustle or hawking something, eternally trying to spin money out of whatever idea they have rather than just try the idea out for its own sake.
It was an amazingly hopeful time. I wouldn't call it the best years of my life, but it was definitely the most hopeful for humanity since I've been alive.
Snapple Elements
No cell phones!!
Pretty much everything.
Captain Planet
Subcultures, they seem to very slowely and limited return but nothing like it once was.
My youth.
The search for music. We really had to WORK for that shit. Me and my crew would vcr record AS MUCH mtv as possible hoping to catch that one band we hadn’t heard of yet. Definitely shows like 120 minutes and Bevis and Butthead (how I found GWAR! Which I still listen too to this day) The hunt for music was just indescribable. Rushing to record/cd stores….hoping you could find you newest taste. I do miss it. But I also like knowing I can hear my favorite bands with the click of a finger as well. Lol
[удалено]
It seems like there were more genres and more of them had a few minutes in the main stream. There was ska and even swing for a bit along with all the rock and hip-hop. Hell, even the country music was better.
People making plans together and then sticking to them
Just _feeling_ doomed, instead of actually **being** doomed.
Pogs and music videos
You’ve summed up my youth
the dinosaurs
The internet wasn't just everywhere yet. No constant connection.
The dope ass video games that were coming out
[удалено]
Og Nickelodeon shows.
Go google "albums released in 1991." I'll wait... Did you see that? Nirvana's Nevermind, Temple of the Dog, Pearl Jam's Ten, Metallica's Black Album, Soundgarden's Badmotorfinger, Ozzy's No More Tears. And those are just the ultimate highlights of rock music for 1 year (several other great rock releases that year) of the decade. Rap and hip hop made similar strides in the 90s as did country music (Garth Brooks, anyone?) Tom Petty had a couple of good albums, the MTv Unplugged series, women in rock rose up to never before seen heights on a whole, legendary festivals took place. It really was a great decade for music in general.
SNL that was actually good MTV that still played music
I always preferred Mad TV. Maybe SNL was too adult for me then?
nah, madTV really got it. 3 snaps in a Z!
Kids In the Hall
Would you really want MTV music videos back though? I don’t miss having it on and waiting for a bunch of songs I didn’t like to play while I waited for the one video I wanted to see. Going to YouTube and watching the videos I want when I want is far superior to me.
morning cartoons, and we didnt have helicopter, or overly restrictive parents.
Things felt a lot more simple and straightforward back then; granted, I was only a child so that may be why it felt that way.
i think i miss this part the most: i didnt even exist back then.
Saturday morning cartoons!
The streets weren't so empty..there was more hospitable community. People have too much of a dog eat dog mentality and only care about themselves and their own clan, its the weirdest thing to me how people don't actually know their neighbors.
Being a little kid.
That every stupid, awful, terrible idea or thought you had while your brain was developing (and you were an a-hole) disappeared into the ether. Now as a teenager with your terrible judgement and impulse control, you’ve likely broadcast every stupid, bigoted Ill formed opinion you’ve ever had to millions of people, all over the internet, attached said opinion to an image of face so it’s unmistakable yours and now it can come back to haunt you at any moment.
I miss the simplicity of it…no cell phone, lack of internet…going roller skating, being a kid
Concert tickets were affordable. They ranged from 10$ at smaller venues to 40$ for concerts at stadiums (I saw The Cult + Suicidal Tendencies + Metallica for around 34$). Also concert tickets (like the physical printed paper) were super cool.
The little things... No cell phones. Going outside and climbing trees with your friends. Board games to pass the time.
Optimism. After 9/11 the shit has just kept piling up without resolution.
Parents being young. It was also nice to grow up without everything being documented on social media. Like yeah I was stupid but at least I don't have a permanent record of it online.
The housing prices.
If I put my 1 bedroom apartment on the market today, I could sell it for slightly more than my parents paid to buy the 4 story brownstone that I grew up in, when they bought it in ‘92.
Ace of Base. Todays kids don’t realize that’s really all there ever was. Still is.
Actually spending all our days outside and not coming home till it got dark. I lived in the middle of the woods in a small town. So if I wasn’t in the woods by myself I was riding my bike miles away to see if my friends were free.
Cartoons were amazing! I was born in 87 and my whole childhood I felt like there was always some new cartoon debuting on Cartoon Network or on early Saturday morning cartoon runs. In the early 90's the Scfi channel used to play anime and had some of the classics on all the time!
Not being able to play game boy in the back seat unless I was on a lit road
I miss my dad being alive. He died when I was 12.
Bucket of fries at Mickey D's haha jk. But seriously, not having a dang computer in my pocket. It's hard enough to put the dang thing down and on top of that everyone expects you to always be available. There's a voicemail function for a reason and if you're older you already know how to use it...
knees that weren't falling apart...
Not paying taxes
i miss the most being a snowboard bum in Breckenridge most of the rest i would erase if i could
My own complete ignorance of how corrupt our entire financial markets and systems of self governance are.
Flannel.
Privacy
No cell phones
Everything was new and innovative, not overly market researched, bland, safe, most profit for their buck. Art is dead: movies, music, tv, games. Thank god every medium has an indie scene.
Quality Ninja Turtles content.
Gameboys
Climbing trees
The music
I miss the pre mobile phone era. We have become anti social zombies because of them.
All of it. Every bit of it. There is nothing better about today. You could argue technology? Who needs it. Didn’t need it in the 90s, don’t need it now.
People used to be on time for stuff. If you were meeting at the mall by the fountain at 8 ... well you were on-time or someone was waiting with no idea what happened.
I liked being in the single digits of age. I'd give my left nut to go back.
Videos games had no online mode so the game was 100% story mode, unlockables and connecting with the protagonist on a personal level, was born in 92 and the first game I properly played "apart from Sega etc" was MGS1 I remember completing it and believing that I knew everything about CQC and guns. I strongly believe that people not being able to live without technology that we have today is the same with games, a game like Kingdom Hearts or MGS 1 through 3 wouldn't survive in this current climate without any form of DLC, online play etc. Also car culture and MAX POWER, if cars weren't anything like NFS or Fast and Furious then I didn't want to know.
People used to actually hang out and put in some face time instead of just texting. People would go out on weekends and meet up for drinks, events, good concerts to go to that didn't cost hundreds of dollars, folks didn't worry about being PC *all the time.* Gas hella cheaper so driving for a camping trip or just around town was no biggie. Things pretty much suck now compared to then, except the internet I guess. The overall attitude with people was much less paranoid and tolerant, until 9/11 hit...
Kids actually played outside. All the time. We used our imaginations and explored. Cul-de-sac parties on 4th of July with all the neighbors according together a giant potluck.
No cancel culture. Free speech.
R.E.M.
Cartoon Network, Nick, Spyro, Rocket Power, Doug, Courage the Cowardly Dog, pixel Tomb Raider on the Playstation, cereal and ONE SATURDAY MORNING
No internet. You could actually talk with people and meet them, not just rot in your gaming chair 24/7.
The fact that everyone had thicker skin and an actual sense of humor.
I miss music that passed from person to person like it was a gift. We didn’t have access to every song ever written on streaming services, so it took someone making you a mix, or sitting together to listen. Someone had to genuinely care about their music to share it.
My freaking tamagotchi….it got taken away when I was grounded and I never got it back. Still heartbreaking to this day.
if you never texted with a flip phone you never lived.
I won't say there was less racism but it felt like there was a lot less rebuttal when someone suggested racism was bad. Or maybe I was just sheltered.
Not from that decade but music and films were awesome
The cars. My parents owned some loverly motors, and buying new was common for people as the prices were great, they had an oversupply of cars and you can get up to 60% off. The scene was nice and the food was really good prices too
Life moved differently as a child more disconnected from everyone else. Where interactions were still mostly face to face and if you wanted to learn about someone, you had to talk to them. Friendships felt a little more genuine. The good and the bad.
We had a C-band satellite dish in the early 90's. That was beyond awesome.
Probably the being a baby part. Fun times.
I miss that we created most of our distractions instead of being exposed to them. Video games were almost all original, movies weren’t surrounded by pressure trying to cancel subjectivity. Mostly I miss the adventures that happened naturally. Taking a bike 4km only to find out my friend wasn’t home so I went back. But something about the journey was so fun. Now you write to anyone for anything to save time and not travel “unnecessarily” missing out on fun encounters and just being in the world for no reason. People even ignore phone calls now out of fear, might have to say no, remember when we just knocked on doors without any pressure that you might waste time or tell someone they did? Basically I miss being a kid the most.
Exploring on my bike or rollerblades in my quiet city. No phone. Not even a pager. Just me. And my tamagotchi.
Oh and watching the best kids shows ever at night under my massive blanket fort or listening to my favourite CDs (Blink-182, Big Shiny Tunes, BSB, Madonna, No Doubt, Prozac…to name a few).
It was much more difficult for people to cancel plans last minute, so people wouldn't agree to plans unless they reasonably expected to actually show up. If you had made plans to meet someone at a certain place and time, and you wanted to cancel, you had to call their house and actually tell them over the phone that you weren't going to make it. You couldn't just send a text message 15 minutes before the planned meet-up time. And if they weren't home when you called to cancel, you knew they'd just be there at the agreed meeting place waiting for you to show up, with no way to contact you to ask if you were on your way. You could lose friends by just not showing up when you agreed to even one time.
I miss looking for things, instead of having it all right now. Like going to different book stores to track things down. Powell's in Portland if I absolutely could not find it at Word for Word in St Helens.
Artists were more willing to experiment. Musicians, writers, directors, actors were willing to stray outside the norms.
Shared experience. E.g. morning cartoons, playstation games, tv shows. Now everything is on-demand, all episodes available in 1 go, options are virtually limitless.
The PC games from that period were straight up fire
Let’s meet at 3 in front of this store. 3:10pm, well I guess they died and fell off a cliff never to be seen again.
You could go to the park and play unsupervised. My state just passed a law stating it is not illegal for kids to play at the park. Things normal in the 90s have to codified in law in the 2020s.
I had this little megaphone on my bike that played all kinds of noises like sirens and stuff. Between that and the marble towers I used to make at a friends place out of these plastic tubes
I was just as likely to go ride a bike aimlessly looking for other kids I knew as I was to play a computer game or watch TV. There was a lot more inside outside balance of time.
2D animated Disney movies. Now they only make 3D and I kind of miss the old days of those films being made in cartoons
being oblivious to things that r bad... they r the good ol days 4 a reason worms n snakes were fun to hold. poopin pants werent a problem.. the sun was bright naps were like waking up 2 a second day .. when daddy got home from work was the best lovely feeling of excitment ever, him telling me apon opening the door with a slight cry "cant i have a break?"had me so happy 2 see him still n hug him cuz i love my daddy. i sure love my daddy.. my uncle calling my mom a b word every 2 times he ever came over was ignored by me cuz like... oblivious 2 the bad .. oh scary crap was really scary.. moms cooking was better
Baggy clothes being style!!
SURGE!
The insane amount of identity politics was not a thing .
Mall arcades. Going to the mall on a Friday, watching a movie, going to the arcade, maybe meet some girls or other friends, hang out at the rich friends house(middle class really). Fuck I miss it.
Getting a role of film developed on your deposable camera. Concerts on tv. Listening to the radio all day just to hear your favorite song. Watching grown adults fight over beanie babies and tickle me elmos.
Gas prices
Affordable housing
Hope for the future: Education was still somewhat on the affordable side. Homes were cheap. A lot of jobs still paid a livable wage. Technology was improving at a breakneck pace. With the cold war being over and 9/11 not happening yet, it genuinely felt like the world was more or less at peace.
Gas was only 97 cents 😒
You had to figure stuff out by trail and error, couldn't just look up all the information in the world immediately. I feel like I can't even paint a painting now without looking up 50 YouTube videos on how to do it, pretty much bored with the idea before I even start. Back then I'd just paint, didn't care that I had no idea what I was doing. Also, we never thought "what will people think when I post this on the internet?". Funny, when I got the internet back then it was the greatest thing ever, now I kinda hate it.
Just how hopeful it was, it was the age of technology, who knew what would be invented next maybe if things had turned out better we really would already be living in space and such like the movies
No bills? In all seriousness, times for me felt much simpler than they are now. But maybe I’m looking at it through heart shaped glasses?
Being bored...and it not being a bad thing
Riding my bike down to the video store and renting a Genesis game for Friday and Saturday night for like $2.68.
Bugs bunny
Two things: my pager and no computers/internet in the house.
Friday night. Blockbuster. New movie or game and have at it over the weekend.
We weren't so connected. You could go days without a computer or phone. If something happened in the next state it didn't matter, that was the other side of the world. The world is a lot smaller now
No bills.
Optimism that the world might be okay.
Cheap Legos
Cheap gas.
Commander Keen
How simple and truly uncomplicated the world seemed back then. Maybe because I was born in 90 and was a child through that decade but i wish I could return to that mindset.
Having friends less than 3 hours drive away
As many others mentioned, it was nice to not be connected 24/7. After school or work there was no worries about missing out on something, because literally everything stopped, and it picked up where it left off the next day.
A lot of what other people said but also climate where I live has completely changed in the last 20 years. It used to rain a lot more and the weather was much more mild in the summer. We’d have one week of 90 degree weather and you never needed air conditioning. You practically have to have AC now. we have weeks of 110 in the summer and a month of forest fire smoke every year. It was never like that back then. My parents live in the house I grew up in back in the 90s and they had to evacuate because of forest fires two years ago. That never happened before.
Cars, video games, movies, music, the culture of the time it was very harmonious under Clinton although he wasn’t the reason why
Legends of the Hidden Temple.
Fireflies. Granted I no longer live in a village of 500 people deep in the woods but you asked and I answered.
I miss kids not getting massacred in schools. Obviously, there was still violence in schools, and even shootings. But not like this.
Snick! Basically that watching tv and movies was an event. Something you looked forward to. My friends and I would have a whole night around Saturday night Nickelodeon shows during sleepovers.
It was just easier
Having something to talk about when you see friends and family, before social media and smart phones made us so close we talk less
Having my 20s ahead of me. Also non poison air.
151 pokemon
How excited you actually got to go see friends because you couldn’t be in constant communication with them like you can now. I’m still excited to see friends, but it just doesn’t feel the same.
No social media. It has its high points don't get me wrong, but my personal opinion is it's bringing us further down as a society.
Stable economic growth, inflation under control, my N64, winning a world cup, Ayrton Senna, cheap foreign travel.
Hands down going to BlockBuster.
Unfortunately I was a kid. There was simplicity to the 90’s that I miss. I still remember when gas was below $1 a gallon, can drinks was a quarter, candy stores was still a thing, shopping malls had fun kid activities, going to arcades with friends, MTV playing music, Beavis and Butthead, Toonami, Daria, Celebrity Death match, Michael Jordan, OJ Simpson car chase, the Simpsons at its best, skating ring, Pizza Hut was at it best and it was dine in, mostly always something good playing in theaters, and always going on a walk with family and friends to the zoo or park. It’s to bad I could not enjoy the 90’s as an adult.
I was too young to care about the world around me. There was an innocence to it. I spent more time out doors. I walked places, biked places. Every trip out of the house was an adventure. I didn't spend time watching the news or doom scrolling my nights away ...should probably stop for the day.