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A hilariously broken line of video-game English that became one of the internet's first true memes. In February 2001, a techno remix and a Newgrounds video put 'All your base are belong to us' on forum signatures, Photoshopped billboards, and eventually YouTube's own maintenance page.
The VHS board game where the TV was the enemy. A ghoulish host called the Gatekeeper glared out of your screen, barking orders and taunts, while a 60-minute tape counted down and you scrambled to win before he did. You played in the dark, against your own television.
A vast library of fan-written, plain-text walkthroughs in monospaced ASCII — hand-drawn text maps, boss strategies, and the one password you needed. Players printed fifty-page guides on the family printer or scrolled giant text files over dial-up. GameFAQs was how you beat the unbeatable.
The line outside the strip mall at 11:45 PM, the pre-order receipt clutched like a ticket, the countdown, the cheer. Midnight launches at GameStop were gaming's midnight movie premiere — plus the counter where your old games became seven dollars.
A 36-year-old video-game tester gets evicted and moves in with his grandma and her roommates, where he's surrounded by pajama-wearing grandmothers, a dealer named Dante with a pet chimp, and the crushing weight of being a grown man living with his grandma. Critics absolutely eviscerated it. Then the DVD turned it into a canonical stoner comedy.
Get on the cover of Madden, get hurt. From Garrison Hearst's ankle to Michael Vick's leg to Shaun Alexander's foot, a decade of cover athletes made fans build a website begging EA to leave their guy alone.
You remember it running for years — it was actually two quick seasons, all in 1992, kept alive by reruns until 1997. Phil Moore sent kids "to the Video Zone!", the green-screen finale where you physically jumped around inside a video game and almost always lost. The dream of every kid with a Genesis and a dream.
Nintendo's official magazine and the pre-internet bible for stuck kids everywhere. Nintendo Power came packed with glossy fold-out maps, pull-out strategy guides, previews of games you couldn't afford yet, and the exact secret you needed to get past that one impossible level.
In the Toys "R" Us video-game aisle, you didn't grab the cartridge — you pulled a paper ticket from a plastic pouch under the box art, paid at the register, and traded the receipt at a counter window for the actual game. It was loss prevention that accidentally let you see exactly how many copies were left.