Bad Gaming: The Price of Cool

I stopped trying to be on the cutting edge of technology years ago. Every time I picked up a “new” gaming system, it turned out to be a big let down. Die-hard gamers think that if it’s new and expensive, it must be good. That’s what you think before you pay $180 for a Virtual Boy.

Now, I love 3D more than a normal person should. I would go see the worst movies just to get a glimpse of something cool flying at me. I was delighted when I walked into the brand new Toys ‘R’ Us store to take a look at it, first hand. This was 1995, when Virtual Reality was not only cool, it was the future. It had to be amazing, right? An immersive, 3D representation of the real world…in black and red. Then came the persistent reports of the system causing seizures and eye strain. The future was not looking so good. Luckily, the future only lasted about a year before being discontinued.

After my Nintendo was stolen and hawked by my sister for $35, I sort of became a Sega man. I loved my Genesis and did everything I could to lengthen its lifespan, and thankfully, so did the people from Sega. In 1992, they released the Sega CD for $299. With its live video and CD-quality audio, I had to have it. Just hearing a game talk was amazing. The system itself didn’t have a whole lot of good games, unless you include the wide array of “interactive movies” which, frankly, were the main reasons I wanted a Sega CD.

Now you didn’t have a poorly-rendered, bikini-clad babe as your incentive at the finish line, instead you got NightTrap, featuring a low-res Dana Plato in a denim bikini. When you are a teen with no friends, besides your Sega CD, that’s a big deal. The Sega CD also allowed me to become close friends with the likes of Marky Mark and C+C Music Factory through the Make My Video series. We cut a few music videos together. Those were the days. You have not lived until you’ve had a pixelated Mark Wahlberg tell you, “The video was phat!”

A few years later, Sega produced another way for me to squeeze more value out of the Genesis by pouring extra money into it. For just $159, you could extend your system’s lifespan into the 32-bit generation with the 32X add-on. If you’re keeping track, this puts the total cost of the system at about $707, including the $249 you spent on the Genesis in the first place. That means that your 32-bit gaming system, in 1994, would have cost more than your PS3 in 2008! But that low-res Dana Plato was now slightly less low-res. Yes, this add-on took mostly just old 16-bit games and added a few more bits so that you could buy them all over again. It’s the high price of being cool.