It really was a completely different time. Genesis and later SNES for Street Fighter II were the deal, and while I still have my NES, it is still most fondly remembered by me for sports games which is also why I needed Genesis at the time. My senior year in college was full on 16-bit, though. We were all competing in Tecmo Super Bowl, playing leagues and loving life. Celtics in late 1991 or early 1992, but it was all NES really until 1992 for me and really, for most people. I know I saw Tommy Lasorda Baseball at least a year or two before that, and Lakers vs. It took me until 1992 to get a Genesis with Bulls vs Lakers and the NBA Playoffs as well as Sonic the Hedgehog. I only bought an NES with a roommate in my 1990-1991 year and paid for his half of it in May of 1991. and watched another guy finish SMB 2 that first year. Baseball Stars was huge, having arrived that summer. We finished Ninja Gaiden after leaving the NES on for days. At college in the fall, I got to play NES for real for the first time (I had played it in 1985 at FAO Schwartz in NYC when it was soft launched on a Christmas trip) because a guy on my hall owned one. Genesis and Turbografx were just way off the reservation in 1989. The full launch of NES didn’t happen until 1986 so for many people that was still picking up steam in 1989. My gaming before I left for college was mostly on my Atari 800XL home computer. The original Tecmo Bowl shipped in early 1989 as a point of reference. In 1989 I was graduating high school and heading off to college. I was playing NES then and it took awhile for Sega Genesis to get on my radar. The interesting thing about the releases of both of those consoles is how low key they were unless you were truly deeply into gaming at the time. Your thoughts on the 16-bit consoles in that time period? Wikipedia says Golden Axe made it out in 1989 but in my experience, it arrived in Spring 1990, a bit outside of the launch window. The highlights for me of the first five or so months of North American 16-bit console releases were: I did later get a TG16 of my own after some price drops. Between borrowing and renting, we caught up with the launch era titles quite quickly. In early and mid 1990, a friend bought a TG16 and I bought a Genesis. I was impressed with their detail and atmosphere.īecause of the high expense of new consoles, I asked for 8-bit games for my 14th birthday and Christmas that year (Kenseiden, Ninja Gaiden, and Time Soldiers all kicked ass) but I began saving up for a 16-bit machine right after that and played as much Genesis and TG16 as I could in the mean time at malls. This is where I first saw the Genesis and TG16 in person with Space Harrier II and Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. Some Electronic Gaming Monthly articles and Video Games & Computer Entertainment covers:Ĭompucentre was neat because they always had several TVs and game systems hooked up, and you could ask to try any game they had (as long as you didn’t ask too much). New game systems just kind of arrived in stores. Official launch days weren’t really a thing back then. There was lots of magazine coverage that didn’t exist to that extent for the 8-bit Nintendo and Sega a few years earlier given the computer-dominated market at the time. I left out the SNES because it came out two years later where I live.įor me, 1989 was a really exciting launch era because it was the first one where I had a bunch of information and screenshots ahead of time, and the technology felt like such a big leap ahead. And even if you didn’t experience it first hand, please give your thoughts as well. What did you think about this time period, pre-launch and the early months of releases?įeel free to discuss the launch era of these systems for other regions, too. We’re less than a month away from the launch of (two of) the 16-bit consoles in North America.
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