NOSTALGIA IS RUINING YOU
As acting President of the old nigga club I’m here to let you know that nostalgia is failing you.
Are there things I miss about the 90’s and 2000s? Fuck yes. Those decades were simpler times. I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t like to time travel back to when Halo & NBA Street came out.
I’d give up titties if I could go back and watch Saturday morning cartoons in nothing but my draws with cherry pop tart crumbs on my chest. I would love to relive those days watching Pokemon in the morning before heading to the bus stop for school. I remember those nights as a kid playing Tony Hawk Pro Skater while eating pizza hut.
FOR CHRIST SAKES I GREW UP WITH FRUITOPIA AND TOONAMI! THE MOST DELICIOUS NECTAR I’VE EVER TASTED IN LIFE AND THE GREATEST HUB FOR ANIME EVER! IT DOESN’T GET ANY MORE NOSTALGIC THAN THAT!
I believe I grew up in the greatest decades ever. It was a dream for kids. I have been on a campaign for a decade shitting on anything that was released the past 10-12 years and how it could never stand up to anything that was released during my childhood. Which is why I am the president of the old nigga club. It’s my duty to shit on everything I didn’t grow up with but I am here to say I was wrong about a lot of things and I was viewing things from a fucked up belief.
Nostalgia really fucks with your mind if you let it. It wasn’t that the things I grew up with were so much better than the things today. It was that my experience was better and more connected to those things.
There was a tik tok video I saw on youtube that inspired me to write this article. The title was something like “Modern Gaming Sucks” and of course I agreed with it before I even pressed play on the video.
When I watched the video I surprisingly disagreed with it. The reason being is that I recently purchased a PC to stream myself playing video games. Ever since I’ve purchased this PC I’ve realized how disconnected from gaming I’ve been. I’ve looked on the online stores for PS5 and Steam and there are so many amazing games I had no idea existed and it’s damn near an endless selection of games. I could make the argument that there are way more quality games today than I had growing up.
What I failed to realize is that there were trash ass games back in my childhood but there were only so many games made per year. Today in 2025 new games damn near release every fucking week and a lot of them are quality games. There’s so many games getting made it’s ridiculous cause there are more companies today than there were when I was a kid. It feels like there’s so many terrible games today because we are flooded with so many being made. It’s a numbers game. It’s like music streaming.
There’s so much music being uploaded everyday. There’s going to be bad music but if I say music sucks that means I’m only listening to mainstream industry music. If I truly researched I would find nothing but heat. There’s billions of people on this planet, there is an abundance of amazing music artists that don’t have the same marketing and branding opportunities that would put more eyes on them.
I’ve definitely said music sucks in the past but I was really talking about mainstream music.
I could also say the same thing about film. There’s a reason why certain movies get made and certain movies do not. Growing up as fans and consumers we had no streaming to watch movies on so we had no choice but to wait for a movie to hit cable television, DVD/Blu-ray, or actually go to the theaters and watch the movies. If a movie flopped in the box office the studio had another chance to recoup the money through physical media sales. Some people would see the movie on cable television and like it and go out and purchase a physical copy of the movie. Mallrats by Kevin Smith is a good example. A complete box office failure but Mallrats became a cult classic through DVD sales.
Now there is no avenue to recoup money from movies with huge budgets. Studios are looking at everything that is not a remake as a risk because it is not a sure fire home run. Even if a reboot fails they have the merchandise to fall back on and they feel they can capture the youth and the adults that grew up on it. Lilo & Stitch reboot is a prime example of that. It’s almost grossed a billion worldwide in under a month.
Everything was easy to market to us in the era I grew up in because we were easy to find. We were watching TV so commercials were key and previews in movie theaters and even billboards and street team posters because everyone was outside more back then.
It’s the experience that we miss. The experience is making us believe that everything was flawless when we grew up. We miss those midnight release lines. We miss playing those lan parties. We miss hooking up 4 controllers and talking shit to each other face to face on Mario Kart. We miss spending the night at friends houses and playing tekken until the sun came up. All of this has to do with the climate of where we were as a society more than it has to do with quality because it’s like I said before there was a lot of bullshit growing up and we act like it didn’t exist.
Nintendo 64 is a god awful system. A fucking abomination. Mario Kart 64 overrated. Goldeneye is fucking awful. The controller is pathetic. That system has a library of games that is a pile of elephant shit but as a kid I thought it was the coolest thing in the world because I was fixated on the games I had. Dreamcast is my all time favorite console and I can truly say as an adult it’s overrated. I was attached to the feelings and experiences those consoles gave me.
Another thing that gets left out of the equation is finances.
My parents weren't buying me every video game. So what we had was what we had. So if those games were amazing then I assumed that the entire library for that console was amazing. As an adult that pays bills I can afford to buy games every week if I wanted to so I’m going to come across terrible games more than I did as a kid.
Trash video games. Trash money grab movies. Trash television. The lack of creativity and care has plagued every era of entertainment, even our parents. It's just now everything is more accessible and can be seen or heard at the press of a button. There’s more of it today so it's harder to avoid.
What really is the problem across the board is capitalism. It’s always been the issue even in the 90’s and 2000’s. It’s just worse because budgets are bigger and there’s more money at stake. The more money at stake the greedier these companies will become.
There is so much cool shit out here today and we overlook it or don’t even bother to look for it because we are stuck in our past. I’m not saying nostalgia is an overall bad thing. I have a retro corner in my home with a crt tv and hundreds of old physical media to watch on it. Old consoles hooked up to it. I love the era I grew up in but I’m no longer blinded by it. Are there things I grew up with way better than things today? Yes. Are there things today better than the things I grew up with in the past? Yes.
It’s okay to admit that. It doesn’t erase your past. It allows you to become an old person that doesn’t shake their closed fist at everything but instead gives you a mind to open for new possibilities. Use your closed fist for good things instead like punching racists.
Love, Benny
