Posted: 4/9/2010 1:41 AM
Post subject: Old School Gaming in Europe
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Limne
Any
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 153
So, I've noticed that this board has a fairly international user base. I've been wondering something for a while, and as both Wikipedia and Google have both been surprisingly unrevealing I thought I'd pose this question to you folks; how was Old School Gaming in Europe? On the NES and SNES say? I know that games over there have to run on the 50hz Pal format and I've heard that NoE had even stronger censorship policies even than NoA, but what exactly did they do with regards to language? Here in Canada we tended to get English-French bilingual manuals, but it occurs to me how much trouble a French speaking kid in Quebec would have had trying to get through an RPG... And then, Europe has more than 20 languages. So what did they do? I remember hearing that not nearly as many games made if over to Europe, but on the other hand I know you got titles like Terranigma where we didn't. How's that work? Can you elaborate on any other peculiarities of the market in Europe?
Posted: 4/9/2010 1:47 AM
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Flygon
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
While I can't speak for Europe directly, I can confirm that far less RPGs came out there. It helps that Australia and Europe kept getting factored in under the same market.
Posted: 4/9/2010 1:54 AM
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HHS
Active player (282)
Joined: 10/8/2006
Posts: 356
Most games were in English only. Some games were in English, French and German, and some had different English, French and German version. Secret of Evermore and Illusion of Time were in Spanish. Then there was Shadowgate, which was in Swedish.
Posted: 4/9/2010 7:15 AM
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Warp
Banned User, Former player
Joined: 3/10/2004
Posts: 7698
Location: Finland
I'm not completely certain of this (because I have little knowledge of the gaming culture of the 80's in the US), but I think that in Europe the "home computers" (such as the C64, Amstrad and ZX Spectrum) were much more popular as gaming platforms than they were in the US, in relation to actual game consoles (such as the Atari 2600, NES, SNES and Mega Drive). Hence there was a rather rich proliferation of game companies and freelance programmers making games for those "home computers". Back then it was quite common in some countries, such as Spain, to have companies and freelancers making games principally for their own country (iow. in their own language). I have personal experience from Spain about this: Many, many Spanish gaming companies and programmers were writing games in Spanish only, for the Spanish markets, and almost exclusively for the "home computers" (because they did not have any limitations and it was easy to develop and distribute games for them). Nowadays it's almost unthinkable to write big games for one's own country only (although there are exceptions to this, of course, but they are rare). Great Britain was a big producer of home computer games back then, and they were much more popular internationally. One company name which I remember clearly is Ocean Software (with its distinctive logo). As said, I don't really know how popular these home computer games were in the US in the 80's, or if the US was more a NES/Genesis country.
Posted: 4/9/2010 12:00 PM
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arflech
He/Him
Joined: 5/3/2008
Posts: 1120
I remember hearing that the Master System was much more popular in Europe (and even moreso in Brazil) than in the US (I've lived in the US for my whole life, and I entered kindergarten in 1990, so I was around for the 8-bit era, and I didn't even know that Sega had made a console before the Genesis until 2000) and I was appalled when I learned that Super Mario RPG was never released outside of the US and Japan (until 1 1/2 years ago with the advent of the Virtual Console).
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Posted: 4/9/2010 1:44 PM
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Limne
Any
Joined: 2/24/2010
Posts: 153
As said, I don't really know how popular these home computer games were in the US in the 80's, or if the US was more a NES/Genesis country.
Not so sure about the 80's, but when I was growing up in the 90's I'd never even heard of the home computers, or really, even the old Atari systems. For me, that period was defined by the Console War between the Genesis and SNES. Plenty of households still had an NES lying around though because they didn't want to have to upgrade it. I know that most households had at least one of those systems... I always understood PC games to be for a different audience, namely people who understood computers and were using them anyway: most kids my age preferred the simplicity of game pads, and cartridges, and not having to load anything in DOS.
Posted: 4/9/2010 3:31 PM
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arflech
He/Him
Joined: 5/3/2008
Posts: 1120
I enjoyed some of the old DOS games...but I believe by "home computer" was meant a console that was not meant to be a general-purpose PC while still allowing people to create programs on it rather than relying on pre-manufactured games for all entertainment. The Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, and Sega SC-3000/SF-7000 (the branch-off from the SG-1000 that did not become the Master System) were home computers; they were primarily intended for gaming but it was possible to program also, commonly in a dialect of BASIC. This article summarizes them well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_computer BTW my household was primarily a "Nintendo household" (as opposed to "Sega" and later "Sony") although we did end up getting a Genesis, Sega CD, 32X, and GameGear in 1994 shortly before the Saturn came out (and never got a Saturn).
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