Regarding https://felipepepe.medium.com/the-gentrification-of-video-game-history-dfe11f1e08ae
I haven't seen a GameBoy IRL until 2018. NES was a very viable gaming platform in my locality well into 00s, though a few lucky kids had a SEGA Genesis or (gasp) a PS1. Most kids indeed went to a "computer club"; having a local club and knowing its admin meant your game saves won't be erased between the times you visit the place - using floppies for backups wasn't always allowed due to endless viruses. Fun times. Strange times
@nina_kali_nina really good article. I thought a lot about this lens of history, when I was looking into 8-bit videogame music; I became convinced that there must be loads of brasilian 8-bit tunes (they had an Sega Master System clone I think), but they were essentially unobtainable. I don't know if that's actually true tho.
@drj I suspect local console games weren't a thing due to licensing costs of devtools back then. But I know there were many local games for home computers, with music and everything
@lunarloony@dosgame.club@nina_kali_nina I resonate with the part about the Video Game Crash. It's often talked about like this huge, global event that Nintendo rescued us all from... but when I read about it, it seems so benign, especially from a UK perspective.
@nina_kali_nina this was a great article, thanks for sharing! It was similar in the periphery of Spain where I grew up: almost nobody had a console, the friend who had a NES got it in the 90s and lived 6km away. I was extremely lucky that my dad was into computers so there was a MSX at home in the late 80s, then a clone PC. He also worked at the local school and organised for it to get into the first government programme to promote having computers at schools, so that's where I saw an Apple II at first (only one, which I never touched, it was used by the school staff) and later the next round of the deal got them a few XTs, one 286, and two 386s (all nondescript clones).
One of the teachers made us learn some Logo, and there were some locally produced “homebrew” edutainment titles that probably nobody will ever remember nor be able to preserve. My dad would go sometimes after work back to the school to use the beefier computers to arrange the teacher's timetables, do some work with dBase on the students database, or some other thing our poor XT wouldn't handle. Some days he would take me with him and I could play Alley Cat, Test Drive, crash planes with Flight Simulator, or even take CorelDRAW! for a spin. It was mesmerizing to see the example steam locomotive drawing being rendered a few curves at a time! My love for vector graphics persists to this day.
We moved and I didn't see another NES for a couple of years... I wouldn't have my first console until 1997 after slowly saving money by myself by asking for it instead of gifts e.g. from grandparents or in my birthday, and finally managing to put together enough cash for a PlayStation. I only played the games from the included demo disk for the first months 
. I only knew two other people in town I could swap games with.
Many people in Spain also skipped the 16-bit era, going straight from 8-bit to 32, or starting there already. The 8-bit era was quite big for game developers in Spain, and it's reasonably well
documented; but mostly ignored outside Europe. Also the industry infamously failed to make the jump to the next generations of computers and consoles.
In the 90s most people played in “cybercafes” and I did myself, even when we had a Pentium at home by then. We had at some point dial up internet at home but of course it cost money so most of my early internet shenanigans (including IRC, forums, and so) was at the cybercafe, in between games.
@aperezdc thanks for the memories!