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TEN YEARS AGO

The year 2000 isn’t technically part of this decade but since most people started the Millennium a year early it hurts no one but pedants and calendar fetishists is we look back all the way to the year 2000.

Bill Clinton was President and Al Gore was a shoe-in the November elections. People were in love with The Sopranos and Sex and the City. Friends and ER were popular network TV shows. Britney was hot and Reality TV was in its infancy. Michael Jackson was reviled as a creepy pedo and the Matrix was considered a movie classic.

In video games the Sony PlayStation was the market leader and Nintendo’s 64 was all but dead. Sega has finally launched the Dreamcast into a market of wait-and-sees and made in impression on an entire generation of Sonic Fans to whom rape was something they never seriously considered happening to them. The PS2 was released in Japan and around  the world later in the year, legitimately selling out everywhere. The original PlayStation was slimmed down to the cute PSOne and PC was a thriving place to make profitable cutting edge games.

The biggest games of the year were (US numbers): Pokemon Stadium for the N64, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1 and 2 on the PlayStation, Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask and Gran Turismo 2 on PlayStation proving when you have staggered generations of hardware, install base wins over the new shiny. The biggest selling game released in 2000, Pokemon Stadium, sold nearly 4 million copies worldwide. Compare this to Modern Warfare 2 in 2009 selling six million units just in the US in its first three weeks. Tony Hawk Ride, the latest in the skateboarding series sold a fairly meager 144 000 copies in its first month. Pokemon still sells in huge numbers (though maybe not to the same extent), same with Zelda, and both of those seem to have found a comfortable home on the DS.

People started buying a PS2 since it was a relatively cheap DVD player and The Matrix DVD was the biggest PS2 title. Skip ahead 10 years and a lot of people are using PS3 to jump onto the Blu-Ray wagon. A GSM Cell Phone (ie 2G, Edge, the original iPhone) may have had a basic ringtone composer but was basically a phone, SMS device and may have played Snake or a Tetris variant if you had a high end machine. Now with smartphones we have music players with more storage than most PC’s had in 2000, 3D games, movie player, web browser, still and video camera AND phone and SMS capabilities. The Gameboy Color was Nintendo’s top of the line model without only minor competition from SNK. All it did was play games.

Consoles didn’t have HDD’s so you couldn’t patch games (like GT2′s 98% glitch). They also weren’t connected to the internet apart from Sega’s Dreamcast which offered a 56K modem in some markets. Broadband penetration was about as widespread as the travel diary of a skinny hermit who’s never left the room he was born in.

A Typical PC in the year 2000 was an Intel Pentium III of around 5-700 MHz with maybe 64 MB RAM and a 10 GB Hard drive. A PC gamer might have been raving about his GeForce 2 or the latest Radeon or even a Voodoo5. MS released Windows Me for home users (which many ignored) and Win 2000 for business users. Apple was basking in the enhanced street cred of the original CRT iMacs.

The Internet Bubble of the late 1990′s imploded with many promising companies disappearing faster than a serial killer’s neighbours. Today we still have Amazon.com but multimedia on the net was limited to that god awful Read Video or Real Audio formats. MP3 was taking off as a way to get those crunchy star trek soundbites out onto the web. People still used newsgroups and Netscape Navigator was the anti-MS web browser of choice. Google was in its infancy and people were just as likely to use Yahoo or Altavista for their search needs.

Some fun games were released in 2000. On PC there was No One Lives Forever channeled Austen Powers, Flint and 60′s James Bond; Deus Ex cyberpunked all those who could get into it; Return to Castle Wolfenstein returned to Castle Wolfenstin for real and of course, there was The Sims. Oh and there was the years big doomed-to-fail titles, John Romero’s Daikatana, with American McGee’s Alice close behind. MMO gaming meant Everquest. Warcraft was an RTS franchise but Blizzard’s title of the year was Diablo II, the click and click adventure that involved clicking a lot.

The Nintendo 64 started as a contender and was almost dead by the end of the year with Nintendo greatly winding down their release schedule in preparation for Game Cube. We still had Pokemon Stadium, Majora’s Mask, a port of Tony Hawk Pro Skater, Perfect Dark, Rayman 2, Banjo Tooie, etc but the writing was on the wall. PSOne continued to be the machine that everyone wanted to own, to play and to buy games for.

And they had Final Fantasy IX and Tony Hawk 2 on the PSone side. But we also had the PS2 with more Ridge Racer, Tekken Tag Tournament and, er Fantavision. The big breakout hit from the PS2 launch was EA’s SSX.

Poor Dreamcast, having no games from EA, made do with it’s own in-house sports games, still highly regarded by some. Someone other than EA made NFL games in the year 2000. They also released games like Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio. JET SET MOTHERFUCKING RADIO. Of course, all Sony had to do was announce the specs for the PS2 and large numbers of people decided to wait for that instead. There was a time where most people only had one console. Really. There was.

10 years ago, I started my current job, Cam was a Games journalist and Clint was a teenager. My PC at the time was bought in late 1999 and never seemed to work very well at games so I only managed Half Life and Unreal on it before giving up on PC gaming for a few years. I was mainly an N64 gamer at the time and in 2000 I was playing Banjo Kazooie, Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Rayman 2, Perfect Dark and Battle for Naboo (I loved Rogue Squadron).

I also picked up a DC even though the only games I had for it initially where Hidden and Dangerous (which was APPALLING) and Rainbow 6 and Rogue Spear (which were also appalling but strangely playable despite convoluted controls). It wasn’t until I found Crazy Taxi and Jet Set Radio that the DC made sense to me. I even got my first PSOne so that I could play all those PSOne games I had missed so 2000 saw me playing Crash Bandicoot 1-3, Metal Gear Solid, Spyro 1-3 and Medal of Honor.

For me it was a very good year. For most gamers, it was a very good year. For Sega, not so much.