If you weren’t alive in the ‘90s, there are plenty of things that just won’t make sense to you. It’s only been a few decades, but so much about the world has changed, particularly when it comes to technology. There’s a lot of good that comes from that, but there were also some benefits to growing up during the internet’s explosion. While video games undoubtedly look more life-like, that doesn’t necessarily mean everything is better, though I am glad a few of the things listed below are no longer around.
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Here are five things everyone from the ‘90s will remember, for good and bad.
5) Getting Kicked Off the Internet When Your Mom Needed the Phone
Imagine this: You just picked up EverQuest and want to hop online to play with your buddies. Unfortunately, this is Friday night in 1999, and your family is still on dial-up internet. After waiting through that excruciating deluge of sound that is AOL starting up, you log on for five minutes before your mom yells up that she needs the phone to call your grandma. Your gaming session is over before it started.
Nowadays, dial-up internet is a thing most kids have never heard of, but in the ’90s, it was one of the easiest ways for most families to get online. Essentially, the computer was “talking” to the internet through your phone, rendering the phone line unusable if someone was online.
If you were lucky, you had a “kids” line that served as a second home landline you could use for the internet. Otherwise, you were stuck sharing, making long sessions nearly impossible without getting grounded.
4) School Yard Rumors
To be clear, schoolyard rumors still exist. There are plenty of kids in 2025 still telling outrageous lies to their friends during recess. However, the ’90s were a bit different because you couldn’t go out and verify the wild video game theories your friends told you about with the internet in its infancy.
Could you actually unlock Blaze in Mortal Kombat 2? Was that Mew glitch in Pokémon Red and Blue real? Nowadays, you could easily look that info up and have dozens of answers. Back in the ’90s, many young players spent hours trying all kinds of different methods, only to ultimately discover it was pointless.
Of course, people still lie online in the modern day. That’s never going away, but it is a little easier to debunk Jeffrey in fourth grade telling you that all you had to do to play as Sheng Long in Street Fighter 2 was fight through the whole game without taking damage and then let the timer run out on the M. Bison fight without dealing or taking a hit.
3) LAN Parties
Don’t get me wrong, LAN parties still happen in the modern day, but they’re much less commonplace than they were back in the day. Nowadays, it’s more likely to be a spectacle like the one seen in the image below. In the past, it was just something you did with your friends every weekend to play Halo in the same room.
The reason LAN parties have died down is that everyone is already connected through the internet. Why lug your PlayStation 5 to your buddy’s house to play Battlefield 6 when you can just hop into Discord and talk to them online while you blast through an online lobby? Like dial-up, LAN parties don’t make as much sense now that everyone has wi-fi.
2) The GameShark
Of all the things on this list, this is the one I’d most like to see come back. Not so much the physical GameShark cartridge, but the idea of games having cheats that you don’t have to pay for. Remember when Assassin’s Creed introduced “time-saving” microtransactions? You could pay Ubisoft a fee and speed up XP accumulation, making it easier to level up.
In the ’90s, that was a code you could put in. Or, if you had a GameShark, it was an extra cart you plugged into your system. These devices were preloaded with thousands of codes for tons of games. You simply plugged your game on top of the GameShark and then selected which cheats you wanted.
Of course, you had to pay a small fee for the GameShark, but the amount you saved on printing out paper copies of every cheat was usually worth it. The GameShark had a few other functions, most notably, the Nintendo 64 version could bypass region locks, letting you play non-North American games on your NA console.
1) Video Game Rentals
Ah, Blockbuster (or whatever your local video rental chain was). We didn’t know how good we had it until it was gone. Look, when Netflix came around and ate video rental stores’ lunches with rentals that came directly to your home, it sounded awesome. And, to be fair, it really was at the time. For gamers, GameFly quickly emerged as the Netflix for games and was mostly solid.
The problem is that the lack of a physical store made both services hit-and-miss. You’d sign up for a selection of games and pray you’d be sent the one you wanted. With Blockbuster, you just walked in and browsed. If they didn’t have something you wanted, you might put in a hold with the desk, but you weren’t paying a monthly fee, so it wasn’t a big deal.
Yes, late fees were annoying, and if you were playing a game with internal storage, you risked losing your save, but there was something special about rental stores. It’s never been truly replicated in the modern world, and will likely remain a source of unrealised nostalgia.
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