Gaming

OK, so this one is really interesting and I think people maybe don't realize how that brief moment in time played out in some places.

So the Internet wasn't as widely available everywhere worldwide. It was expensive over here, and you paid by the minute. You could feel money bleeding out of your pocket if you were using it to play games, and horror stories of people who forgot to log off and got hit by huge phone bills were all over the news.

So while arcades were dying, LAN cafés exploded. All the way from Quake 1 to early CounterStrike days people would pay some cash to rent a semi-competent PC in a big room of LAN-connected computers and play each other in multiplayer games. Or, you know, if you needed to send an email or you didn´t have a computer at home and needed to write something. But mostly games. It was not that much more expensive than using the Internet at home and the experience was so much better.

I played some Doom and Command & Conquer with a couple of specific weirdo friends who had a modem, but LAN cafés were certainly the main venue for that kind of thing. There were like half a dozen in my town, and they each had communities focused on specific games. There was the Quake 3 place, which then got taken over by CS, to my disappointment. There was the weird tiny place where people did Baldur's Gate MP runs, a place that insisted on focusing on Unreal. There was a cheap one in a basement that never got over Quake 1 and people were doing railgun only 24/7. One place had people pay in advance to leave their Ultima Online characters mining while they went to class. It was groddy and magical and it'll never come back.

And I remember in the Quake 3 place they had the PC port of Turok up and running and I kept wondering who would want to play that instead, and especially who would want to play it on a console with a single stick. And then moving on with my day. I think that's a big part of why GoldenEye and the N64 didn't quite work as well in this market.