I specifically mean games or series that featured some kind of niche subculture/activity/lifestyle that appealed to teens and young adults as opposed to ones that were just fads among kids like Pokemon in the 90s or toys-to-life games in the 2010s or just generally popular games
DDR (no, not that one) probably counts as one, though that might’ve been mostly confined to Japanese arcades
Does this sort of thing even happen anymore? I assume these days youngins just play Fortnite, Call of Duty Warzone or whatever else instead of extreme sports or rhythm games
You already nixed Pokemon, but it seems like Pokemon Go
could be considered enough of its own thing to be includedPokemon Go fucking changed the world for like 3 months. I dont think there has been anything like that in my life that just put the world on its head and then put it right back
It was so barebones at the time too. It’s actually bloated at this point and guilty of every mobile game sin, but it’s wild to see so many people still playing it. I still boot it up every now and then but haven’t gotten nearly as into it as some people have.
Though with that recent sale, it’s definitely time to abandon it for good.
PoGo had crazy broad appeal, ranging from kids to the elderly
I remember seeing grandmas doing raids downtown
I played it a bit when it started, and then got back into it a couple of years later because a friend of mine was into it. I gotta say, seeing crowds of people at local parks during community events was quite heartwarming.
The grey brown modern military shooter slop published during like the early 2010s. God that was some fascistic garbage.
classic spunkgargleweewee shooters, priming the next generation for mindless imperial slaughter on the television
Around 2016 it felt like the industry was pivoting to vr and now 9 years later does anyone even care about vr anymore?
In my experience, no matter how cheap it gets, VR still requires a lot of space. Most people under 40 live in shoeboxes.
cockpit games work but they don’t make enough of those that are enough better than a flat screen to justify the extra effort at home
I care, because it is still neat tech, but yeah it feels like it’s kinda dead for a while. Apple’s thing made a bit of a splash, but didn’t linger.
vr needs something more transformative than 200 shooting galleries and to be able to replace my desktop monitor.
it also needs to not weigh a ton, not have cables, and somehow also last all day on battery.
I had a lot of fun with VR from like 2019-2021. But it really does still feel like a gimmick. I loved whipping it out at a party or kickback, and people were always eager to play some games on it, but it really was the novelty that made it fun. It offers unreal immersion but the space requirements, up front costs, and isolating feel are big turn offs. And using it longer than 2 hours or so is near impossible. That said, my friends all got quests and quest 2s during quarantine and it gave us a lot of new and more immersive ways to play pc games and socialize that I valued during that time.
There was a good fifteen-ish years staring in the mid 90s where game advertising had to be very confrontational or gross for some reason. That feels like a very era defining thing. Like I remember the Hitman ad showing a dead woman in a bathtub, or the Gamecube Wavebird controller that had a guy playing on the toilet. And of course everyone remembers being made John Romero’s bitch.
Acclaim was notorious for this kinda thing, like they had a campaign for Shadowman 2 where they offered to pay the funeral costs of anyone who put an ad on their tombstone.
Or just anything involved with the campaign for the Dante’s Inferno game. Part of it involved hiring actors to portray Christian protestors to call the game sacrilegious. Then EA sent boxes to game critics like Yahtzee. When opened the boxes would play that Rick Astley song and wouldn’t stop until destroyed with a hammer. Like who tf was hired to think of all of this stuff and why did game companies pay marketers to do this
Part of it involved hiring actors to portray Christian protestors to call the game sacrilegious.
Ok, this is actually really funny. They should do this again but for “woke”, they can invent an outrage cycle and see how much the chuds fall for it
Earthbound: This Game Stinks
The roguelite genre will probably be seen as a hallmark of the last decade-ish of gaming.
DS brain and focus boosting or learning “games”
Maybe not a fad so much as the natural change in the industry towards digital distribution, but I miss the days of “feelies” - physical promotions like cloth maps included with games.
Then again, I had to call Nintendo because I lost the letter that provided the clue you needed to complete Startropics.
1776! This thing is chock full of america tropes
Those little shits:
Wii sports
Yeah, motion control/waggle in general.
The call of duty modern warfare and black ops games during the early 2010s and very late 2000s. It seemed like every second game, no matter the genre, tried to copy call of duty. The subculture around these games on early internet/YouTube was a thing.
The enormous amount of World War II games after Saving Private Ryan came out, as part of an even bigger wave of WWII media in general.
*slaps roof* You can fit so many media properties in this war!
EDIT: There was a big flowering of Half-Life mods for a time, and it is the reason we have Subnautica
Mascot Platformers in the 90s
The height of RTS 90s early 2000s… I played more or less every RTS game made because it was my favourite genre. May it rest in peace. Thanks blizzard for killing it permanently
how do you reckon that blizzard killed RTSes?
It’s a bit of a trick question, Blizzard didn’t really do anything to kill RTS persay, it was more that after SC2 released every publisher was trying to get a piece of the starcraft esports pie. You can see elements of SC2isms starting around with RA3 when that released, and most other RTS games were trying to go hard on streamlining near everything like how SC2 did eventually culminating to being like C&C4’s gameplay and design, and some RTS games got forced to hard pivot to being a MOBA (remember End of Nations?)
Quick time events and good riddance
Quick time events are still alive and well. I played Star Wars Outlaws recently and they had quick time events for eating food
Unless you’re playing a yakuza game LOL
Though their worst offenders are definitely the mid-2010’s tbf, except for Lost Judgment’s weird multi-input QTEs. Dead Souls in particular speeds them up so fast on higher difficulties that it’s basically impossible to hit them consistently unless you use the PS3 menu to buffer them
I dont think anyone is still really trying the Kinect thing anymore. nobody wants to do motion controlling anymore.
Some VR headsets detect hand movement through the headset cameras, eliminating the need for controllers. Probably the closest thing to a successor the kinect has.
