Anyone else have the "where were you 20 years ago" problem with media?

[skykiii]

It's a constant recurring disappointment I have: Something I would've been all over had I been able to experience it 20 years ago (or earlier) but it wasn't available until I was too old for it.

Personal examples: There was a period where I was really interested in 70s-80s anime, so companies like Discotek putting out waves of it would've been awesome... if it had happened decades ago.

Or RPGs that didn't get translated (officially or otherwise) until I was bored of the genre.... relatedly, this is also one thing that sucks about retro-style games on modern systems. I constantly find myself thinking "if this had actually been for [insert console here] this would have been great."

Does anyone else experience this?

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

I think that's a universal human experience, not just with media. Experiencing something new for the first time as it happens is unique, if you go back to it later or do it again after the fact it's just not the same.

The more biting form is when you were in fact around to experience it at the time but chose not to.

 

[BikeLock]

I think that's a universal human experience, not just with media. Experiencing something new for the first time as it happens is unique, if you go back to it later or do it again after the fact it's just not the same.

The more biting form is when you were in fact around to experience it at the time but chose not to.

I only narrowly dodged the Pokemon bullet because my mom wouldn't buy me a Gameboy at the time.

I'm also really fucking sad that I spent all my petty cash on '90s baseball and football cards instead of Magic cards.

 

[We Are The Witches]

It's not a perfect world, far from it, so things like these are how you'd expect.

Where was ChatGPT when I was attempting to have fun & test Cleverbot? Conversations were so braindead, would have been great to have it at that time. But I guess the path was not set for it to exist back then.

 

[Daddy's Angry Juice]

Yeah, growing up has its negatives and positives. You start to lose interest in a lot of things that were cool growing up, but on the brightside you gain new interests or find a passion for something you never would be interested in as a kid.

I'm not as into anime as I was when I was growing up, but Ive gained a new passion for cooking. Sure I can't relate to the Borutos and My Hero Academias, but I can make crabcakes at 4 in the morning and no one can stop me. I'm a big boy now, and big boys don't have bed times.

 

[Mister Baranavichy]

I wish I had started doing art way way earlier, but such is life, something else is that I've always hated team sports and games, yet for some reason, I never knew of 1 on 1 fighters like street fighter, I would've been all over them had I known.

 

[Heem 'em all.]

Cars. The best days are long gone.

 

[PovertySprocket]

Bumfight, Whiskey, LSD Riders, Landspeed: CKY, Big Brother Video...

 

[Metamorpho]

Discotek is a faggot ass company.

 

[cybertoaster]

Nah if anything the media today is utter shit, tho I wish jellywish and cheap storage had been a thing 20 years ago so I didn't have to download 240p videos and burn them on DVD-Rs.

 

[Grift Garrison]

The problem is there is too much shit now I end up with option paralysis. Plus 25-30 years ago we had the golden age of the internet, and I'd trade that for any of today's media options.

 

[Atatata]

Bit offtopic but I feel like there are series that are considered to be fairly shit and go unnoticed today that, if tweaked a little and done in a retro style 30-60 years earlier, would have been considered absolute classics and would have had great discussions. Now it's just disgusting twitter mutant art, tranny shit, gen z slang, and big tittied AI spam.

 

[Grub]

I wish I had started doing art way way earlier, but such is life,

This is something I regret. I always thought I hated art and drawing because I'd never been good at it so I never took any kind of art classes or anything like that in High School and I kind of wish I had. It was actually after I played Hollow Knight long after high school and for some reason I was looking at the characters and thought they'd be easy to draw. At the time I worked a job that had a lot of downtime just watching a machine, so I started trying to teach my self to draw by drawing all the little characters from that game while I was working and I actually started getting better, but not just that, I started trying to learn more about art in general and I figured out I actually find it fun. I'm still not that great at it but I'm slowly learning. I wish now though that I'd had some kind of formal lessons when I was 20 years younger.

As for the general op, I feel that way about arcades. We never had an arcade in the town I grew up in and my parents weren't really all that thrilled with the idea of wasting money in arcade machines so I only ever got to play on real arcade cabinets a few times. I've tried playing them on mame since then but it honestly feels kind of pointless just sitting in front of a computer free playing arcade games. It also kind of made me understand why my parents were not stoked on us playing arcade games. I can't remember what game it was, some fighting game, but I remember sitting there trying to count up how much money I would have spent if I was playing it in a real arcade and it worked out to be something like $15 in ten minutes trying to beat a boss.

 

[Baked Al-Aqsa]

Sometimes, things just aren't meant to be popular at the time no matter how much they tried.

Take Earthbound for instance, Nintendo spent god knows how much time and effort localizing it to make it palatable for American kids and even threw in a freaking strategy guide and scratch and sniff stickers (remember those???), and even with all that, nobody gave a shit and they mostly sat on shelves for years until being liquidated in clearance or otherwise. It took mid 00s forums, youtube reviews, and image boards to make people notice the gem it was and start to talk about it in earnest. Fast forward to current year, any and all discourse/mods/etc. of the series are saturated with trannies and/or soycucks with Peter Pan syndrome. Go figure.

Case in point:

 

[Dysnomia]

The problem is there is too much shit now I end up with option paralysis. Plus 25-30 years ago we had the golden age of the internet, and I'd trade that for any of today's media options.

I remember in the 80s I just had regular TV and the choices were limited. So when you finally found something that was watchable after turning the dial twenty times it felt magical. With cable you learned that having 200 channels didn't mean anything good was going to be on. I usually just kept MTV on. Even if you didn't like the song the videos themselves could be entertaining. You could find a diamond in the rough.

Now we have the whole internet. It's just too much. You can watch practically anything you want instantly. There's no having to watch The Frugal Gourmet on PBS because the only other things on Sunday afternoon were golf, tennis or politics. You learned to appreciate PBS on a rainy day because it had the only palatable stuff on most of the time.

I think if I grew up on the internet I would appreciate media less. Because I can binge a whole series without even thinking just because I'm bored. It takes away something from the experience. A marathon used to be a special weekend or holiday thing that the networks would put on as a treat. I still like the Twilight Zone marathon. But I can watch it any time I want now and I can't help but think of that when it's on.

 

[I_Lurk_Here]

If I had money when I was younger, I would've bought more toys. Lego, figures, plushies, Pokémon cards, all things like Star Wars, Mario and maybe even some Valve merch too. I bought 3 small Lego sets a few years ago and last year I just dumped them all in a black bag because they collected dust and I wanted space for books.

 

[Quarterback Rex Grossman]

Nope. Movies and video games peaked around 1999, and pogs were the last great human invention.

 

[skykiii]

Nope. Movies and video games peaked around 1999, and pogs were the last great human invention.

I mean, I agree. What this topic is getting at though is how personal aging figures into it.

Like just for example imagine if you somehow never saw Batman the Animated Series until you were forty. You might still be able to appreciate it on some level but it won't hit the same because inherently a forty-year-old is more picky and might even have reached a point where superhero media doesn't do much for them anymore.

Or to recycle the OP, I often have this issue with SNES RPGs, particularly fan-translated ones. In the 1990s I would have been all over this shit because I was a huge RPG nut. But now I practically hate the RPG genre and find every time I play one they just kinda get on my nerves, so even games that might actually be the classic literature of the genre are stuff I probably can't tolerate for more than an hour. I find myself wishing I could go back in time and give these games to my younger self.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

It's usually either:
1. Getting too hyped and then coming with too high expectations. This happened to me with Cowboy Bebop that was great but not as memorable god tier the western anime community describes it.
2. The media being revolutionary for its day but either overused today or missing too many QoL to be fun. Like Breath of Fire 3 which was slow as fuck. Or any game with the twist that the player is an actual character.

Being too old is almost never a factor besides cases where the media takes too much time investment to enjoy, like mmo or series with 1000+ episodes.

 

[Yukako]

There are some series that I regret not getting into sooner, but at the same time I feel like I wouldn't be able to fully comprehend them if I were younger. Though I have noticed that it's more difficult for me to get invested into media lately. Either because it's too time consuming, I outgrew the genre, or it suffers from millennial writing.