Our Nintendo equivalent were old DOS games, like Prehistoric, GP, Doom, MK1-2 and many more. There was even a PC version of Mario, where you could not go through level 4 (or we were just dumb). Later we got emulators for SNES and SEGA and we played a lot of those games with one keyboard. The problem was, these old keyboards does not like when you press like 6 buttons at the same time :D
My dad used to do this back in the late 90's to and early 2000's, during the PS1 and PS2 eras. He'd smuggle shit tons of CDs and DVDs and Playstations across the Italy-Yugoslavia border. He'd program and solder custom chips on the consoles himself and had a dozen or so dvd burners working constantly. Everyone in town knew him and people to this day recognize him as "The video games guy" lol.
Praise these people who brought us bootleg games. They were the REAL HEROES of kids that were hooked on dat pixel crack, but were broke as heck. I wish them health and long life! XD
I once transported the game, from a friend's computer to mine, using nothing else than a bunch of defective floppy discs. I'd chop up the game using Winrar into 8kb chunks, and copied the chunks into the floppy. If any of the chunks were copied into a bad sector, I would not be able to copy them back into my PC. So I put the defective chunks into a separate folder on the floppy itself, and just left them there. This allowed me to only use the good part of the floppy. Still, I started the process with ~10 diskettes, and by the time I was finished I only had maybe six still working.
Things you forgot: Java phone games. The crappy bootleg handheld consoles you'd buy at Chinese stores. Tekken and Mortal Kombat. FIFA and PES. Those Yu-Gi-Oh games on PC (Joey, Kaiba and Yugi). TV game shows: Hugo, Secret Agent Izzy, etc. Damn, being a kid was fun.
It's still around actually. You may want to check out Chicken Invaders Universe, which is basically a galaxy-exploring game with RPG elements like enhancing your spacecraft and accomplishing various tasks.
Growing up in Romania, it was completely normal to me that videogames were played on a PC (in my case, my mom's work PC). When I started following gaming news online, it was so weird to me to find out that, at the time, Americans would primarily play on consoles. I never even heard of anything like the Playstation or Xbox until the late 2000's and I was born in '95. Nobody I knew had a console, we all just shared a bunch of floppy disks and later on CD's with cracked games on them. Good Times :)
I remember back in 2011 my parents managed to buy me a ps2 SH with a bunch of CD disks ( amongst which was a NFS MW Black Edition disk ). I had a PC with a cracked version of NFS MW on it too before the PS2. I've played some of the disk games on the ps2 but then I've noticed I had to put up my savefiles on some external SD cards I had to slot in the ps2? That just made me go back to the pc. I've only kept the ps2 in case my dad wanted to play C&C generals when I wanted to get on.
The internet cafe phenomenon in the early 2000's was such that even people who had a PC at home often didn't have an internet subscription, as it was SO affordable to just sit at the net cafe for hours. People would often spend their whole Saturday night playing CounterStrike at the cafe. As far as games that are local favorites, the German games Gothic and Gothic 2 became literal national treasures in Poland, while a free South Korean MMO named Metin 2 became the most popular game in Romania.
Hey, Polish here. About Metin, you can basically say the same like Romanians. Poles we're I believe the third biggest Playerbase at some point, right behind Russians and Brazilians. ... To this day I hate Brazilian playerbases.
I didn't have an internet subscription for years back then, I only used the school's internet sometimes and when I went to the internet cafe. We had two we went the most to: one of them was inside a mall so we just ate icecream and played CS 1.6 all day every day after school. 1€/hour. The other one was a small PC store that on Saturday mornings charged 1 cent per hour, so we took what essentially amounted to a single piece of bubblegum's worth of money and spent the entire morning playing Tibia there. Man I'm overdosing on nostalgia right now.
So much nostalgia! From maybe a more girly perspective - Farm Frenzy, Dinner Dash, Sims, and Superstar Chefs were some of my faves. Madagascar video game was a joy as well
My first encounter with CS was either in 99 or 2000 in a webcafe on my street. It was a pre 1.5 beta that only had the "deathmatch" level. For those of us who had played quake and halflife before - we all switched instantly even before the game was finished.
First time I played 1.6 locally I got dunked on, so my kid brain got so stubborn I spent the next 8 or so years playing so I'd be the one to do the dunking
I remember once as a kid i played CS1.6 in some internet cafe, with other kids( there was like 5-6 of us) and some doomer came like 25+ years old to kill all of us with a white sniper we called "Ptičarka" I mean dude find something to do in your life
or hell ... if you are a bit older... you started out with 1.3 then went on 1.5 and finaly the perfect 1.6 xD... there was also all the custom maps of WC3 ...
Re-Volt the RC racing game was the GOAT! You could have raced through houses, a shopping center, history and science museum and the best one was a Toy Factory!
I work in a retro video game shop. Sometime last year, in 2023, we had a man come in mesmerized by everything we had. He was from Serbia, and wanted to know if the *Dendy* he still had could play our NES games. Amazing to see it in real life.
@@lindemann316 Same thing happened to my cousins In Hungary 30 years. They went to the chinese market and saw someone selling Dendy cassettes. One of the cassettes wrote "99 in 1". My small cousins asked the man: "Does this have lots of games on it?". And the man said "yes, yes, suuure, lots of games". When they got home and put the cassette in it only had 1 game on it xD
I've seen Dendis sold by junk dealers next to the green markets like 10-15 years ago. I guess nowadays they would be bought out with the retro-gaming resurgence :)
I'm Polish, and I can completely relate. Heroes of Might and Magic III is the absolute GOAT. I also have fond memories of playing Carmageddon 2, CS 1.6, Quake III Arena, and Diablo over LAN at cybercafes with friends. Those were precious times that, sadly, will never return.
Tell me about it. Internet cafes before PC's with internet became widely available playing CS 1.6 and Quake III with your childhood friends is perhaps one of the sweetest memeories from my childhood. The rush you would get from playing with friends like that is something I doubt many of us can relive again.
@@Vlad_-_-_ Our teacher would let us play Unreal Tournament LAN after class. Also there was this Mario clone that for the most part looked like the original, but that you could not finish, because the last level ended in an endless corridor, but somehow it had a bonus level hidden at the "choose your save" "level", and on this bonus level all the goombas were replaced with little babies that you had to jump on, the turtle is replaced with the programmer holding his keyboard, and if you jumped on him, the guy lost his keyboard, and started running around, yelling "Where's my keyboard !", and the hammer-throwing turtle was replaced with a polish olympic hammer-thrower, yelling "HOPPA", among other things. I've downloaded it from the internet archive recently.
38 years old Romanian here. I was a lucky kid. My dad was a sales representative for steel factory so he traveled around Europe on delegation trips. In 1995 he bought me a SNES from Germany. I had super mario world, donkey kong country, mk1 and mk2. In 1998 he bought me a ps1 also from germany. My house was the most popular house in town, we were like 10-15 kids in the living room playing Twisted metal 2 and tekken 3 taking turns, the loser wold have to give up he`s place...such fun times.
26 here, had a Playstation in the early 2000's (modded to play pirated discs, of course). My father knew this guy who would burn discs for him. Playing Crash Team Racing with my cousins has to be the most fun I've ever had with a video game.
Same age. Didn t have a SNES. But, we had a neighbor that owned a console with Mario and Duck Hunt. In 98 or 99 my parents bought me a PC. You are right, fun times.
@@Romulu5 I had my first pc in 2000, that was the year i stopped playing on consoles, have not owned a console since then. The only "console" that i own is a batocera emulation station with ps2(pcsx2) and gamecube(dolphin) games on it that i built for my son. Far better than buying modern consoles in my opinion.
-50 aura points for not mentioning Serious Sam which was a childhood game for kids growing up in the Balkans, but also one of the few games that were actually made in a Balkan country
For some reason this video brought up a different memory.... How I would go to the Library (because only that had internet) watch porn and play the game "don't jerk it if the Librarian is watching" XD
The more i watch your videos, the more i realize south america and the balkans are literally two parallel universes. As a 23 yrs old peruvian i can tell you: there is not a single peruvian who hasn't played gta sa, vice city and cs 1.6. i remember playing vice city in the exact same way you described. I even had a friend in class who would pass everyone the cheat codes list handwritten on a ripped off page of his notebook. There was also the fact that some cracked games that you could buy from the dude who sold games, movies, anime, music all on dvd and some even had an internet cafe, could be set on english or even japanese by default. Luckily we had english as an assignment on school so pretty much everyone had a dictionary that we could use and try to decipher what the hell was saying on the screen.i remember trying almost all the games on the video on the internet cafe near my house. The only clear diference i found was that here the popular moba was dota.Ah the memories.
Man I was just waiting for the South American comment, I met a Brazilian guy on SAMP who actually introduced me, a Serb, to the remove kebab meme as a kid. So I know about the similarities in our cultures and I love it honestly is essentially what I'm trying to say.
This timeline is 4-5 years off... in bulgaria computer clubs where very common even before 2000s(warcaft 2, halflife, deltafoce, cs 1.4 1.5, C&C, doom, blood, starcraft, diablo 1, ultima online... where the main games played in the clubs) and by 2010 they died off, cause everyone got a pc and internet
I remember a friend of mine playing the Pilsner game in IT-class. Our 60 yo IT teacher passed by and told him turn it off. The friend, not taking his eyes off the screen, said something like " I just need to finish taking off her cloths" . The IT teacher then spent the following 2-3 minutes patiently watching and adding comments like " that game is fixed" , "watch out, don't miss that bottle" and was sadly disappointed when the student failed to complete the task at hand....
I'm from Croatia and I remember the dudes that sold burnt games, pržene as we called it. Those guys were competing who would pull a better Neo from Matrix. Black trenchcoats, sunglasses and all. There was a huge police crackdown on those guys somewhere in 2000s so my friend decided to buy a pack of blank cds, write GTA San Andreas on them and sold them for 50 kuna. Half of the neighbourhood was afer him. Ah man, such great times.
Više od pol teritorija Hrvatske spada pod Balkanski poluotok. Od cijele Hrvatske jedino se Panonija ne nalazi na Balkanskom poluotoku. Zemljopisno gledano. Od kud tebi informacija da se ne nalazimo na Balkanu?
I am born in 1986 in Bulgaria and lived through that period as child and teenager. The lack of PCs in peoples homes was addressed by Computer Cafes where you had usually 8-20 PCs and we used to play connected by LAN. You would pay per hour. I still remember playing 4 v 4 on Starcraft!
We even had Warcraft 3, StarCraft 2, CS:GO, H3, AoE1&2, AoM, MoH:AA tournaments at multiple net cafe's in my city. Our 50k town had 5 net cafe's that I was aware of and probably a few others that I didn't know. I used to spend my weekends there during high school, mostly grinding away at Adventure Quest and Dark Throne. Good times.
Im tunisian and holy shit u just described exactly what a kid from tunisia’s childhood looks like. Like to a freaky degree. I didn’t know we are balkans
GTA was so popular here in Romania that around mid-2000 people made modded versions of the game and distribute them like GTA Bucuresti or GTA Romania and even to this day I know people who prefer to play a modded version of San Andreas which added multiplayer SAMP on short over the official GTA 5 multiplayer
Same in Brazil, there was GTA Rio de Janeiro, GTA São Paulo and even GTA Tropa de Elite, which just had a ton of random mods and some music from the movie. This was all on PS2 though.
3:40 not a flash drive, but my mother (who's a teacher) had a friend at school whose husband engaged in the habit and would occasionally gift us cd's with games (mostly demos) and animated movies. You haven't lived until you watched the first Shrek movie in two parts because the cd can only fill up that much space
You haven't lived until you watch the first Matrix movie in 2 parts, BUT one week apart, because the second cd was scrached and no longer working, so you need to find a replacement.
4:40 I remember young naive me playing san andreas, and having no clue what the N word actually meant. So for a while after noticing how the word was used in game, i thought it meant something like friend or bro. So me and my friends always used to greet each other like this.
We're from the Balkans, we all have the N word approval. That was my logic (and still is 😅) because we suffered as much as our afro brothers and sisters.
I am 35y old from Serbia, and I have never, ever, talked with a person from Balkans who played Halo. But Counter Strike 1.6 was played by millions and it is still played by thousands of people. I co-owned one of the best ranked CS 1.6 servers in the world, and I had to "retire" from CS because people were so into it that they would fight, live and breathe CS 1.6. it was so stressful, like it was World Cup, but it was just amateur people who liked that game.
I was in the same boat, I fking loved Halo and it was so hard to come across a normal CD with Halo on it, they were all either defected or a bad pirated game with half the files corrupted. As soon as I got internet I pirated Halo myself and loved every second of it. CS 1.6 was only good on LAN with a few friends, when everyone got the internet it started to become hell. League of legends was my jam for a long time in gaming cafes and still is actually, been playing since season 2
@@STR-sd4rt Da ne prdim na Englskom više pošto vidim da smo naši :D Ja sam Halo tek skoro igrao prvi put, 20 godina nakon izlaska, a LOL nisam nikad probao, tako da meni jedino CS 1.6 ostaje kao neka nostalgična multiplayer igra
@@cefa1337 Fatality Family je bio u pitanju. Ako se ne varam, ja kada sam otišao bili smo u top10 na svetu, a valjda su posle dogurali do top3. Nisam bio "pravi" vlasnik nego sam od igrača došao do ranka ownera ali sam hteo da skratim priču u prvom komentaru, i nas par je kao vodilo server dok nisam prso
I'm German and was so happy when Moorhuhn appeared on the screen. It was in German not because that's where you got it from, but because it literally is a German videogame. There's actually a bunch of German videogame franchises from the late 90's and early 00's that I used to play. Thanks for the nostalgia
Brate ne znas kolko sam srecan sto si napravio ovaj video. Ima jedno 5 igara koje sam igrao jos sa jedno 4 godina i nikad nisam mogao ponovo da ih igram jer ih nikad nisam nasao. HVALA TI na ovom videu
I have played HOMM 2 quite extensively (hot-seat) for months when we heard HOMM 3 was announced. Also M&M 6, 7 and 8. HOMM 3 was THE shit. I remember that we got the CD just before the bombing, and then that CD exchanged a few hands until we got the no-cd crack. Also I gave HOMM 4 a chance and played the campaigns, then WoG and ERA, and I currently have HOTA installed. And just recently got HOMM 3 The Board Game. A 13kg box with minis for most of the units of majority of the factions (and will cover all of them with the upcoming expansion). The most expensive board game I own, but I just couldn't pass it. Of course, the publisher is Polish.
@@69605komsa(neighbors from hell), gadjanje kokosaka za morhuhn, nasao sam stari cd sa igricama na nemackom, pola imena teca nazvao na srpskom kad je doneo komp iz nemacke😆😆Lepo bilo
13:33 You mentioned friv and that fireboy and watergirl game, and quite literally, I saw my whole childhood flash before my eyes omg. As a latinoamerican, I never thought you'd play them too over there
@@KartingRulesIt absolutely is. I still remember being at my school's computer lab with a bunch of others kids trying to find out how to actually solve the puzzles, we all were gathering our wits just in order to do so lol.
Romanian here,we had a bunch of dudes in the late 90's / in early 2000's that we called "pirati" ( obviously pirates) that sold cracked games burnt in 700 mb CD ( traxdata ,verbatim etc ). Mostly bunch of dudes in their 20's that were still in college.The games used to cost about 10 to 20 lei back then and worked flawless. It was the way most kids bought games ,classics and gems from a different time ( CS 1.6,HL 1 / 2 ,Soldier of fortune,Max Payne,Gta series ,Serious Sam,Re-Volt etc ). When internet became more wide spread and affordable we would use file sharing software like DC++ / Strong DC++. Tbh...great times,we were kids and all we wanted to do is game. I have fond memories of those days.
One thing you forgot to mention is that most people didnt even play at their friends place but at that one dingy cybercafe next to every elementary school that all of us would spend our lunch money on. Also, the reason why LoL was so popular when it came out in 2009 was because most people grew up with warcraft 3 and DoTA 1 that started as a map series for the game!
@@floricel_112 he doesn't, he only talks about the cybercafes in a later era with lol, but realistically, they were there since the early 2000s and we're big reason why stuff like age of empires, command and conquer and magic 3 were so big to begin with
@@dimitrijearsenijevic5597 Cybercafes were in every country in the early 2000s. In the west they were mostly seen as seedy places not suitable for kids as most families did have a computer at home by this point in history. Only poor kids and kids who skipped school tended to live in them.
@@cattysplat In the Balkans they werent seen as shady though, they were usually near schools since at that time playing video games was mostly seen as a childrens thing by the general public (in the Balkans, not at large, although it was less accepted globally aswell) so it wasnt seen as weird for kids to go to them after school to play since most families didnt have a PC at home and consoles were even more of a rarity
Maybe for younger ,we played games also in 80s ,2 joystick at friend house or mine on commodore 64 and later on Amiga .Its obvious this dude makes video is younger so have 0 idea that we in 80s played games like crazy also .Half off my class had some home computer and there were also many places with arcade games.Just 100 meter from primary school there was place with 50 Arcade games and pinball and we spend money there
You forgot one of the most important games of that time: Neighbors from hell 1 & 2 (srb. Komšije). I'm sure everyone has played this. One of my earliest memories is when I was a kid playing through all the levels of Neighbors from hell 2, except for the last one with the ship. Then me and my little brother would call our dad and he would go through that last level only to see the last scene of the neighbor being beaten by his mother for sinking the ship and our main character laughing in the background. It was the funniest scene in the game for me, and my dad was a legend to me because he managed to beat the game that I couldn't. After that I would just start the game from the beginning and so all over again. Recently I bought the remaster version on steam and passed that level for the first time in my life after so many years. I felt... powerful.
I once transported a 300mb game called "How to annoy your neighbor" or something, using nothing else than a bunch of defective floppy discs. I'd chop up the game using Winrar into 8kb chunks, and copied the chunks into the floppy. If any of the chunks were copied into a bad sector, I would not be able to copy them back into my PC. So I put the defective chunks into a separate folder on the floppy itself, and just left them there. This allowed me to only use the good part of the floppy. Still, I started the process with ~10 diskettes, and by the time I was finished I only had maybe six still working.
Lithuanian here. Everything you said here is true about our country too!!! We received games by either trading with each other or by buying gaming magazines with full/demo version games attached to it as a bonus prize. Man, what magical times it was.. Gta vice city, cs, serious sam... We also played dragonballz multiplayer game in cyber cafes, it was called ".. Smtg forces". What a game!!
Metin 2 was a widely played game for some many eastern countries even here in Hungary too. I never liked and only played a very short time but never ever knew how people could like a game like that.
@@belstar1128 Metin 2 was infamous in many ways and in my country mostly the local minorities played it whom haven't fluent in english nor they have had money for world of warcraft. I preferred Silkroad and Kal online but these games are also old and maybe not works anymore. Honorable mention is guild wars 1-2 I played more with the second game and to this day still looks good. Nowadays I do not really playing mmos anymore because they are very time consumers also if you have not friends whom playing it it gets boring very quick. My experiences in the Metin 2 was basically kill some animals, get back, go speak with someone do another quest etc and there was a lot of bugs in that game. Sometimes the quest giver not worked properly and no matter on what I clicked it does not respond at all. After 11-13 hour of playtime I decided to ditch.
@@sziklamester1244 i tried to get into metin because romanians recommended it to me and i am trying to learn it .but the game wasn't very fun maybe it was better when it came out a lot of mmos got bad around 2010 because of some bad trends like pay2win .and making things too easy i was a big runescape fan the game made metin look high tech. it was very popular in the Netherlands northern Europe and Baltic states but not in the Balkan .probably because of the language barrier .but after they made a big mistake in 2012 they made old school runescape and its good .but most mmos are too stubborn like when they made wow classic they added a lot of the bad changes back in. unlike most people i got way more free time now than in high school in the 2000s but the mmos have mostly gone downhill .quite annoying i wish i played more back in the day. i also got into gulid wars 2 recently it was fun but its not my favourite. but i noticed wow ripped off guild wars 2 withy the legion expansion.
Heroes of might and magic II, Starcraft, Diablo II, Unreal Tournament ('99), Half-life (multiplayer), Mortal Kombat 1, 2, 4, bunch of MS-DOS games... and many more. We used floppy disks and rar to copy them to other computers, the floppy disks often got corrupted, so you had to figure out which one of the 20 was corrupted, and walk back and forth between the houses, because you had only 3 floppy disks instead of 20.
as an egyptian myself i can tell you that in 2000s these games here 1:56 were in every pc in all netcafes in the country and even today it shaped the nostalgia of what that era looked like. 90 percent of games mentioned were popular in egypt, my favourites was jazz 2 even if it was the shareware demo and chicken invaders 2. i think it's amazing that despite we live in different countries and cultures, we somehow share the same nostalgia especially that related to the pc and video games culture thanks friend for this awesome video you awakened the nostalgic vibes of my childhood 😁👍☺
I played many "western" videogames thanks to the completely legit Polish Nintendo-something with 83 games preinstalled (11 of them are variants of Super Mario Bros). My parents bought it in one of those shops where you could buy anything from a wooden spoon to a second-hand Balkan grandmother.
I got Sims 1 from a street vendor selling burnt CDs. The cursor would straight up not show up during some parts of the game and I just got used to "imagining" where the cursor was supposed to be and playing it that way. Not to mention all the crashes. Then when I got my first non pirated game for my birthday some years later I was so shocked that it came in a nice box with a booklet, artwork and everything worked fine. A whole different experience. They were good times given what we had, but it also makes me thankful for what we have today.
There was a "ripped" version of Might & Magic 6 which could fit on 1 CD (instead of 2 CDs) which was missing lots of graphics - higher value object graphics being replaced with lowest value object image e.g. all swords were displayed like a worthless basic rusty sword you find at the very beginning of the game and so on. It also messed up paper-doll display (character inventory with your character wearing/wielding the stuff). My friends played game like that for weeks (two of them on a single pc, as usual) until I told them that the graphics is crap and something's wrong. Only then they realized there's a correct version which looks so much better. Also with one game (I think it was Caesar III) the whole town got infected by a CIH virus from the same CD. Street vendors were the worst. There were more reliable "sources" who knew their "stuff", but it basically resolved itself at the dawn of torrent age where you could read the comments before downloading :)
Only cultured people knew about those, the non-english speaking balkaners used to play most games mentioned in this video instead. Games like Tribes, Savage, etc, were games that many in the west remember fondly, but for most balkaners, they haven't even heard of them at that point.
Gaming magazines in the early-2000s introduced me to series like Monster Hunter & Devil May Cry from their demos. Mercenaries, which I originally got as a demo, ended up being one of the most widely played franchises in my family.
As a Balkan, i don't know wth Heros 3 is but every balkan guy played these: Tanks 1990, Super Mario 1985, Neighbours From Hell, Feeding Frenzy, Sheep Fking, Collecting beer bottles to strip women, Santa Claus in Trouble, Zoo Tycoon 2, Gta San Andreas, Counter Strike 1.6 and Condition Zero, Call Of Duty 1, Need For Speed Underground, Stronghold Crusader, Jazz Jack Rabbit 2, Prince Of Persia The Two Thrones ( rare but played )
I was born in Romania and my dad is from Lebanon. In Romania we had all these games you described, but I was surprised to find when going to Lebanon that most of what you said in this video is true for there as well. Same games, same atmosphere, games were all pirated and sold like that, and every PC had the same games, except most kids there didn't own computers, so we'd go to internet cafes. One game you didn't mention that was very popular there is Neighbors From Hell.
Bravo, man! That was my go-to. But I would also add that WoW, at least in my town, was played heavily in internet cafes. Especially Burning Crusade circa 2007. The store owner had two or three accounts that were shared somehow, but we did play the real thing. It was like 50 cents per hour, and everyone would rush to pay more when a raid would last a bit longer.
Me too. II loved the game, and I loved the music even more. Medieval Jam, Jazz Castle, Carrotus, Colonius, Beach Bunny, Diamondus Remix, Jungle Fenah, Hell Freezes Over, Dark Groove, Jazz Be Damned, and Streetwise, are still the best music pieces to hear once in a while
In the 90s (in Hungary) I was excitedly waiting as an elementary school kid for the weekend to play Doom at my grandma's house on her computer and beating the big boss with a cheatcode I got on a piece of paper from my brother who got it from a classmate. Also we had a nintendo but couldn't afford the games so we had to borrow it from the neighbours. I still remember being pissed at how difficult the Adams Family game was. The first game I ever played was Snoopy where the tv was the monitor and the keyboard was on the floor. We had games on cassettes. The early 90s was truly a magical time for gaming.
I am 28 years old Romanian guy, born in 96', I swear to god, there was not 1 game that I didn't knew/played, you have put my childhood in 1 video, took me back on a memory trip, thx dude, keep up the good work !
one thing id like to add, from personal expirience, for the majority of us balkans, we played english games, without EVEN knowing a bit of english, i recall and still have my psp games, crash mind over mutants, crash of the titans
LOVED those two Crash games, despite everyone hating on them. I just played them on PS2, and even at 8 years old I was kinda disapointed in them. Still loved the ideas and designs they had.
Jazz the Jackrabbit 2 was the best game I've played in my childhood, primarily because of just how unbelievably great the art style was. And how great the soundtrack was. I still remember most of the songs from the various levels there.
I live in Belgrade for 2 years now and have moved here from Russia. I guess one of the reasons we get so well along here is that the games we played and how we played them was actually the exact same way! I've got goosebumps when you were talking about Vice City and Sand Andreas. We couldn't afford a computer and I've played these at a club - and even that was expensive so I was not wasting my time doing missions, wrecking havoc was a way to have fun!
Age of empires, heroes 3, battle realms, Call or duty, counter strike, Delta force 2, sudden strike, medal of honor allied assault, jazz jackrabbit, bootleg Mario, pirated Sega Dreamcast games and super Nintendo
I grew up playing games like Serious Sam The Second Encounter (which was my favorite game as a child and also my first game), Serious Sam 2, Quake 3 Arena, Counter Strike 1.6, Unreal Tournament, AstroAvenger 1, AstroAvenger 2, Alien Shooter 1, Alien Shooter 2, Zombie Shooter, Theseus Return of the Hero, Half Life 1 and Half Life 2. There are other games but those were the most memorable.
@@DrAntePavelić Who told you Croatia is not a balkan country when it's literally in the balkans? If you search on the internet you'll see that it says Croatia is a balkan country. And what does that have to do on a video that talks about what games balkans grew up with? All the games i said there aren't even made by balkans except for Serious Sam.
Me growing up with games in Czech rep.: "Who is Mario? What's this 'SimCity'? I have no clue what you're talking about. All my dudes play magazine games, cereal games, sharewares (Herní Výběr, Špidl Data Processing), flash games and some odd games."
*Mario. First name Mario and last name Mario, Mario Mario. Te comeu atrás do arMário* *You can't get the joke, but in portuguese it would be read as peak humor, like biggus dickus joke levels of risible*
I can perfectly well relate to this because majority of games mentioned were part of my childhood and i also played some at my friends place too. Very fun times.
I can't believe you live in Romania and didn't mention Metin2. It was huuuuge here and it's still talked and memed to this day, some people even still play it
Lived in a small village in Romania, circa 2001. This one kid had parents that came home from Germany with a bunch of old cassette Nintendo consoles and one PS1. It was like an underground cinema, you pay the equivalent of lunch money and you get to step in the room to play for one hour. Place was swamped!
You didn’t mention the first Prince of Persia game. It was always in our family computer and from time to time the 5 year old me would try to play that game and fail to get past the second level.
As a kid I didn't understand the whole concept in CS so I always played terrorists in hostage rescue maps and instantly executed all the hostages. I thought I was a genius by preventing the other team from ever rescuing them
@@afz902k LMAO! I remember doing that too and getting banned from servers. I was also very confused why my money would drop whenever I killed them, thinking I should be getting paid for doing my job instead.
We had a huge internet cafe subculture in Bulgaria with cafes ranging from a room with 4 computers to huge halls with over 100 computers. It was THE place to go to socialize and meet people regardless if you played video games or not and regardless of age. I worked in internet cafes in Bulgaria from 2002 until 2006, this ended with more and more people being able to afford a home computer and internet but it was great while it lasted. Many of these games you show were staples and this video got me a bit nostalgic.
My experience was similar. Growing up in the Philippines playing 80s arcades in Billiards from the morning to the middle of the night in the provinces. Then comes the PC which came with CS 1.6 and GTA SA. Both of them being a touchstones lasting up to the 2010s. Majority of the games here at the time were pirated cracks that came in separate disks. These disks would cost a doller by the amount of storage needed. Steam at the time was a total nightmare as many of us still hadn't registered an ATM Card. Meaning that we resorted to buying steam cards in a game store at a mall very far from our home, often with added tax. Not until the IT and internet infrastructure went to full swing did buying games become easier and simpler.
My dad : "Surprise ! I bring a video game !" (Everytime, it was a flash game they had at work, something about golfing or egg hunting). My mom : "I bought this game at the store, they told me it was very fun." (Most of the time, it was a discount game ....but once, we get DISCIPLES II SACRED LANDS so......). My aunts/grand parents : "Here is this game you asked for your birthday/christmas. Have fun !" (said game : WARCRAFT, Age Of, Star Wars, HITMAN...). God, we had a good family. I miss the 2000's sometimes. ;)
Not from balkan but PC with pre-installed cracked games was a norm in Slovakia too. PCs didn't come with windows, stores did that and they usually added some games because nobody gave shit about copyright in 90s :D My first PC had Liero, Doom, Prehistorik, Command & Conquer and Lion King and a whole bunch of shareware and demos of games. My first pirated games from a friend were Age of Empires 1, Commandos and Earthworm Jim on CD (USB wasn't a thing back then). Later we formed a pact at school and started to alternate in buying gaming magazines which included legal copies of games but you could install them on any number of PCs you wanted and hence I got my hands on my life-changing game Fallout (fully translated to Czech language... I taught myself English by playing Fallout 2 and had this one installed on all my PCs ever since btw) and other classics for cheap etc. Man those were the days! :)
I grew up in Austria and we always had PCs, N64, SNES, Xbox etc at home - but the best part was when I took my Xbox/N64 to Kosovo and the whole neighborhoodwas coming at my home to play Multiplayer (Halo, FIFA, Star Wars Battlefront, GTA San Andreas MP, etc) or even stuff like Super Smash Bros, Goldeneye and Zelda. But we also loved going into cafes and then playing neighborhood vs neighborhood CS 1.5 and CS 1.6 - it got always late like REALLY late into the morning lol. Like damn my friends waited always a year just to play again Battlefront/Halo with me when I came back. The crazy part is they always REMEMBERED the controls/skills like they played yesterday lol. I know how the West and Balkan grew up, but damn balkan was more fun always. Miss those times, now this kids they suck ass with Fortnite and Twitch.
[Slovakia here] I started with computers when we had DOS installed on my old machine and the two games i had were DOOM and Mortal Kombat 2 and old flight simulator LHX(i didn't counted this in becuase i didn't knew how to play it). This was still game era where everything i wanted had to be copied from floppy disks and copied to your disk. Which was amazing because it was like 94 and as a kid i had no idea how to use dos and the only thing i had was book which was published in 1985 of course whole in english so i had no idea but since i wanted to play i had to actually start learning english even if i didn't wanted too. Later it was better and it was kind of similar to what you have shown in the video but when internet started to spread out we used to play more likely a warcraft 3 rather then WOW that came later we were playing on fun server where you could travel along the mountain and reach level 255 at the peak. Counter-Strike basically started with 1.5 which had that classic half-life like menu and the from singleplayer's vice city, max payne 1, Vietcong for sure but that was possible to play via internet which we definitely did once internet was more spread and Mafia 1 but that being said we used to download also a Game Maker i think it was version 6.0 back then and we made a lot of our games at the top of this we played flash games too.
you missed Project I.G.I, Project Powder (was very popular in internet cafes), Warcraft III The Frozen Throne (DOTA before it became dota 2), Tropico, that game that "taught" you how to write, Farm Frenzy 2 and Pet Soccer.
Damn, it's really incredible to see people from other countries having a very similar experience to you. One thing I'd add to the list, especially for games played in school computers, is a climbing game called the Icy Tower. From the music to the sound effects, I remember it very vividly to this date.
I am so happy you included jazz jackrabbit in this list as well as pocket tanks. I was that generation that grew up on these games, and jj2 was my top favorite game of all time, as well as the first game i played ever. I also played pocket tanks too by the way
This dude is probablu younger and have 0 knowledge off gaming in Yugoslavia in 80s.We did not have NIntento but more then half off my class had some home computer ,i had Commode 64 ,others Amdsrad ,Atari ,Spectrum .Games were pirated with multiply games on one cassete or flopy disk and were mark as like Sport complete 1 ,or adventure games etc.THere were also computer magazines where game recensions were like "svet kompjutera" and there was also 4=5 pages in them with ads for pirated games
Yep. Yugoslavia pretty much followed gaming trends in europe at time, which were computers. Nintendo come very late in europe and was pretty much irrelevant until Wii everywhere expect France. Rest of video is balkans so quirky when that is pretty much gaming in europe, computers dominated gaming landscape, except Sony, PS1 was first console in europe that was actually massive hit, its arguably european version of NES, and Sony was and is popular in Croatia at least, cant really say about rest of exYu here. Playstation 1 was massive, playstation 2 less so, people switched to PC at that time, but 3, 4 and 5 were hit again. As for piracy, yea piracy was massive but so was everywehere else.
@@plivajucipauk7742 My first computer commodore 64 in 1986 ,then Amiga 500 1mb with 20 mb hard drive in 1990 ,then came sanction ,war ,dissolution off Yugoslavia so new computer was last thing on my parents mind so Amiga was my only computer until 1998 when half off my family cheeped in and i bought PC with AMD 300 mhz .But i still played all games from PC since 1991 becase some off my friends had PC so we played at their home ,but allready in 1992/93 gap in gaming between Amiga and PC was obvious .When we instaled in 1993 game Michael Jordan in Flight i know then that wont see never such game on Amiga.Also still remember when my first neigbour in 1995 bought PC with Pentium 90 mhz and on them NFS ,FIFA ,NBA 1995 ,F1 ,we played like whole night
The guy is just trying to gather followers from other Eastern European countries with stereotypes but forgot that we had a different kind of socialism (and a different history). If you had enough money you could buy nearly everything that was produced in the west. My mother had Beatles vinyls and my father played Pong in the 70s. My older cousin had the first Nintendo console bought in 86 in Sarajevo from a little store (private enterprise) that sold Western, Eastern, and Yugoslavian electronics together with original consoles and some NES clones..... (and yes in Yugoslavia you could have a private business and employ even up to 10-15 people and import-export stuff from all over the world.....how do you all think our Мafia started and laundered their money if they weren't on the payroll of the secret service...especially the guys with gas stations and restaurants).
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bro liked his own comment
Our Nintendo equivalent were old DOS games, like Prehistoric, GP, Doom, MK1-2 and many more. There was even a PC version of Mario, where you could not go through level 4 (or we were just dumb). Later we got emulators for SNES and SEGA and we played a lot of those games with one keyboard. The problem was, these old keyboards does not like when you press like 6 buttons at the same time :D
Marshal Tito Version? I want to hear like a god emperor
Ili znas otidji na kupujem prodajem i kupi zapravo dobre slusalice od tome iz subotice za upola para
2:12 OMG I HAD THAT forgot it's name but yes had that stress relieve game 🤣
Zuma and Luxor too
OMG JAZZ JACKRABBIT 2 HELL YEAH
Need for Speed Underground 2 was obligatory to install on every Balkan PC
and the Underground before the Underground 2
Most wanted and carbon too, maybe a bit later but still and ofc “offical licensed” version…
True.
I Especially was one of the best in our city 😂
I played underground 2, Most Wanted, and Carbon
Burning CD-s with latest games was like being a cartel boss during early 2000s, every town had that one guy.
Decent chance that 100% of the money my family spent on games back then never went to the devs.
i know that guy , we all know him
@@staberasI saw age of empires 2
My dad used to do this back in the late 90's to and early 2000's, during the PS1 and PS2 eras.
He'd smuggle shit tons of CDs and DVDs and Playstations across the Italy-Yugoslavia border. He'd program and solder custom chips on the consoles himself and had a dozen or so dvd burners working constantly.
Everyone in town knew him and people to this day recognize him as "The video games guy" lol.
Praise these people who brought us bootleg games. They were the REAL HEROES of kids that were hooked on dat pixel crack, but were broke as heck.
I wish them health and long life! XD
Neighbours from Hell was also quite beloved
I once transported the game, from a friend's computer to mine, using nothing else than a bunch of defective floppy discs.
I'd chop up the game using Winrar into 8kb chunks, and copied the chunks into the floppy. If any of the chunks were copied into a bad sector, I would not be able to copy them back into my PC. So I put the defective chunks into a separate folder on the floppy itself, and just left them there. This allowed me to only use the good part of the floppy. Still, I started the process with ~10 diskettes, and by the time I was finished I only had maybe six still working.
Oh yes, the second one was so good as well, I still have the pirated CD with it.
I called that game "komša" when I was a kid LMAO. (I'm from Serbia btw)
@@hunnid17 You mean Swen?
@@dusanstojsin4938 Komšooooo!!!!!
Things you forgot:
Java phone games.
The crappy bootleg handheld consoles you'd buy at Chinese stores.
Tekken and Mortal Kombat.
FIFA and PES.
Those Yu-Gi-Oh games on PC (Joey, Kaiba and Yugi).
TV game shows: Hugo, Secret Agent Izzy, etc.
Damn, being a kid was fun.
9999999 in one tetris?
Nobody played postal 2?
@@gregorgerzson1767 I did, but it was obscure in Serbia.
@@YB_. Ah, good. I'm glad Hungary just half-balkan then
Man I remember those consoles with the gun and controller that they sold on the same stands in the flea markets that had fake yugioh cards
As a Hungarian, the moment I seen Chicken Invaders on the screen, like a sleeper agent my memories came back of that game, holy shit.
It's still around actually. You may want to check out Chicken Invaders Universe, which is basically a galaxy-exploring game with RPG elements like enhancing your spacecraft and accomplishing various tasks.
Right? I never thought anyone would mention the games online.
Btw they're all on Steam which is cool.
AS a fellow Hungarian, I came here to say that :D
Hehe...
I am a Serbian and we also remember it
There's zero romanians who haven't played CS 1.6 and GTA SA
You just found the first
For cs go not gta
I loved gta sa
And Metin 2 apparently.
In fact, GTA inspires them in daily life.
🇷🇸 🤝 🇷🇴
da
can't belive this list is missing metin 2
Exactly my thought! 😂
every once in a while metin 2 just pops back into my consciousness and forces me to relive my childhood from beginning to present day
Tell me you ar romanskaja without telling me you are romanskaja
FMS+9 and you were a king (needed atleast 30% of that one attack bonus tho)
da ba coaie =((((((((9
brother, you forgot the black sheep that fucks the white sheep game. a true classic
Sven
WTF???
Growing up in Romania, it was completely normal to me that videogames were played on a PC (in my case, my mom's work PC). When I started following gaming news online, it was so weird to me to find out that, at the time, Americans would primarily play on consoles. I never even heard of anything like the Playstation or Xbox until the late 2000's and I was born in '95.
Nobody I knew had a console, we all just shared a bunch of floppy disks and later on CD's with cracked games on them. Good Times :)
Didn't you have knock-off consoles like Terminator for Nintendo and Rambo for Atari? It was full of them in Bulgaria and they were relatively cheap
Nush in ce ghetto ai crescut lmao dar eu jucam PS2 cu amici in 2008, dar si acela crack-uit :)) dar totusi
@@nihil1234 We did have them , Black with 2 blue buttons , good times
Romanians were PCMR before it was cool xDD
I remember back in 2011 my parents managed to buy me a ps2 SH with a bunch of CD disks ( amongst which was a NFS MW Black Edition disk ). I had a PC with a cracked version of NFS MW on it too before the PS2. I've played some of the disk games on the ps2 but then I've noticed I had to put up my savefiles on some external SD cards I had to slot in the ps2? That just made me go back to the pc. I've only kept the ps2 in case my dad wanted to play C&C generals when I wanted to get on.
We're getting closer to "Balkan Marriage" "Balkan Midlife Crisis" and "Balkan Retirement Was Different"
"Balkan deaths/funerals were different"
Honestly, those are different too
Balkan genoci- oh nvm
Before GTA 6 💀
Balkan balkans
The internet cafe phenomenon in the early 2000's was such that even people who had a PC at home often didn't have an internet subscription, as it was SO affordable to just sit at the net cafe for hours. People would often spend their whole Saturday night playing CounterStrike at the cafe.
As far as games that are local favorites, the German games Gothic and Gothic 2 became literal national treasures in Poland, while a free South Korean MMO named Metin 2 became the most popular game in Romania.
Hey, Polish here. About Metin, you can basically say the same like Romanians. Poles we're I believe the third biggest Playerbase at some point, right behind Russians and Brazilians. ... To this day I hate Brazilian playerbases.
I didn't have an internet subscription for years back then, I only used the school's internet sometimes and when I went to the internet cafe.
We had two we went the most to: one of them was inside a mall so we just ate icecream and played CS 1.6 all day every day after school. 1€/hour. The other one was a small PC store that on Saturday mornings charged 1 cent per hour, so we took what essentially amounted to a single piece of bubblegum's worth of money and spent the entire morning playing Tibia there.
Man I'm overdosing on nostalgia right now.
@@john_john_john and people would bring CD's and just burn them full of music/movies. No need for home internet.
@@john_john_johntibia is a classic here in brazil lol
@@leogaio7990Brazil and Poland still play it a lot. They were the two biggest nationalities playing even back then.
So much nostalgia! From maybe a more girly perspective - Farm Frenzy, Dinner Dash, Sims, and Superstar Chefs were some of my faves. Madagascar video game was a joy as well
Bulgarian here, can say that Counter Strike 1.6 is one of the most played and influential games of all time in the Balkans.
My first encounter with CS was either in 99 or 2000 in a webcafe on my street. It was a pre 1.5 beta that only had the "deathmatch" level. For those of us who had played quake and halflife before - we all switched instantly even before the game was finished.
Kinda natural in these areas... 😂
First time I played 1.6 locally I got dunked on, so my kid brain got so stubborn I spent the next 8 or so years playing so I'd be the one to do the dunking
I remember once as a kid i played CS1.6 in some internet cafe, with other kids( there was like 5-6 of us) and some doomer came like 25+ years old to kill all of us with a white sniper we called "Ptičarka"
I mean dude find something to do in your life
or hell ... if you are a bit older... you started out with 1.3 then went on 1.5 and finaly the perfect 1.6 xD... there was also all the custom maps of WC3 ...
Re-Volt the RC racing game was the GOAT! You could have raced through houses, a shopping center, history and science museum and the best one was a Toy Factory!
OH SHIT! I completely forgot about that one, man this game was an absolute banger holy fk
YES! Holy fuck. It's still a crazy good game, to be honest.
I remember writing down "CARNIVAL" in a little notebook so I remember the cheat code that unlocked all cars 💀
I prefer Rollcage more.
You can also play it to this day. It's called the rvgl project.
I work in a retro video game shop. Sometime last year, in 2023, we had a man come in mesmerized by everything we had. He was from Serbia, and wanted to know if the *Dendy* he still had could play our NES games. Amazing to see it in real life.
I remember counterfeit "99999 in 1" cartridges being literally sold at marketplaces next to fruits and vegetables or by random people of the streets 😂
@Parkinski27 Yeah, we had an adapter for it. Surprisingly it fit snuggly and still worked.
@@lindemann316 Same thing happened to my cousins In Hungary 30 years. They went to the chinese market and saw someone selling Dendy cassettes. One of the cassettes wrote "99 in 1". My small cousins asked the man: "Does this have lots of games on it?". And the man said "yes, yes, suuure, lots of games". When they got home and put the cassette in it only had 1 game on it xD
I've seen Dendis sold by junk dealers next to the green markets like 10-15 years ago. I guess nowadays they would be bought out with the retro-gaming resurgence :)
It was nice. He brought his machine in so we could see if it even turned on. With the right adapter, it did, and it happily played Mario 2.
Jesus christ I thought so many of these games were obscure and no one else played them, my entire childhood flashed before my eyes
I'm Polish, and I can completely relate. Heroes of Might and Magic III is the absolute GOAT. I also have fond memories of playing Carmageddon 2, CS 1.6, Quake III Arena, and Diablo over LAN at cybercafes with friends. Those were precious times that, sadly, will never return.
yep, Diablo
Tell me about it. Internet cafes before PC's with internet became widely available playing CS 1.6 and Quake III with your childhood friends is perhaps one of the sweetest memeories from my childhood.
The rush you would get from playing with friends like that is something I doubt many of us can relive again.
@@Vlad_-_-_ Our teacher would let us play Unreal Tournament LAN after class. Also there was this Mario clone that for the most part looked like the original, but that you could not finish, because the last level ended in an endless corridor, but somehow it had a bonus level hidden at the "choose your save" "level", and on this bonus level all the goombas were replaced with little babies that you had to jump on, the turtle is replaced with the programmer holding his keyboard, and if you jumped on him, the guy lost his keyboard, and started running around, yelling "Where's my keyboard !", and the hammer-throwing turtle was replaced with a polish olympic hammer-thrower, yelling "HOPPA", among other things. I've downloaded it from the internet archive recently.
I would also add Jagged Aliance and Fallout and our central european brotherhood would be total...
Damn, I actually played Carmageddon 2 on a CD with friend pretty recently, still very fun.
38 years old Romanian here. I was a lucky kid. My dad was a sales representative for steel factory so he traveled around Europe on delegation trips. In 1995 he bought me a SNES from Germany. I had super mario world, donkey kong country, mk1 and mk2. In 1998 he bought me a ps1 also from germany. My house was the most popular house in town, we were like 10-15 kids in the living room playing Twisted metal 2 and tekken 3 taking turns, the loser wold have to give up he`s place...such fun times.
26 here, had a Playstation in the early 2000's (modded to play pirated discs, of course). My father knew this guy who would burn discs for him. Playing Crash Team Racing with my cousins has to be the most fun I've ever had with a video game.
Lucky bastard...
Same age. Didn t have a SNES. But, we had a neighbor that owned a console with Mario and Duck Hunt. In 98 or 99 my parents bought me a PC. You are right, fun times.
Who asked 🫣😂
@@Romulu5 I had my first pc in 2000, that was the year i stopped playing on consoles, have not owned a console since then. The only "console" that i own is a batocera emulation station with ps2(pcsx2) and gamecube(dolphin) games on it that i built for my son. Far better than buying modern consoles in my opinion.
-50 aura points for not mentioning Serious Sam which was a childhood game for kids growing up in the Balkans, but also one of the few games that were actually made in a Balkan country
also DOTA, and warcraft strategy
this is the most truest comment ever. ever.
Captain Claw is up there too
@cosminmazilu7509 You just triggered some long lost memories from my childhood with that name. God that game was so hard
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH yourself!"
This + the random mobile games people had on their Nokias, so nostalgic.
As a 33 year old man from Bulgaria, this video hits hard. ❤
Factsss
amazing that all if balkans played these games
For some reason this video brought up a different memory.... How I would go to the Library (because only that had internet) watch porn and play the game "don't jerk it if the Librarian is watching" XD
@@humorpalanta 🤣🤣🤣
yeah, he pretty much nailed it. I would've liked at least mentioning starcraft, warcraft 3 and dota on garena
The more i watch your videos, the more i realize south america and the balkans are literally two parallel universes. As a 23 yrs old peruvian i can tell you: there is not a single peruvian who hasn't played gta sa, vice city and cs 1.6. i remember playing vice city in the exact same way you described. I even had a friend in class who would pass everyone the cheat codes list handwritten on a ripped off page of his notebook. There was also the fact that some cracked games that you could buy from the dude who sold games, movies, anime, music all on dvd and some even had an internet cafe, could be set on english or even japanese by default. Luckily we had english as an assignment on school so pretty much everyone had a dictionary that we could use and try to decipher what the hell was saying on the screen.i remember trying almost all the games on the video on the internet cafe near my house. The only clear diference i found was that here the popular moba was dota.Ah the memories.
Oh DOTA's popular in the Balkans as well, don't worry
started dota way back in the day, like when i was 13 y.o , in the LAN cafe. now I'm 35 ))))
As a Lebanese guy, it's the exact same thing, except it took us even longer to get internet.
Man I was just waiting for the South American comment, I met a Brazilian guy on SAMP who actually introduced me, a Serb, to the remove kebab meme as a kid. So I know about the similarities in our cultures and I love it honestly is essentially what I'm trying to say.
Oh my god, the shitty piece of paper that looked like it went through 10 world wars with all of GTA SA cheat codes gives me so much nostalgia
you forgot about the "256 games" CD
I HAD THAT OMG, remember installing it with my dad as we go through all the games to see which to keep xD
I had one with 5000
256? I had one with 5000
Yes exactly, i was searching list of that cd’s but i cannot find anywhere. I forgot name of one game.
@@NikolaJovanic The cd was called GameHouse Collection if I recall correctly. I had that too with 256 games.
This timeline is 4-5 years off... in bulgaria computer clubs where very common even before 2000s(warcaft 2, halflife, deltafoce, cs 1.4 1.5, C&C, doom, blood, starcraft, diablo 1, ultima online... where the main games played in the clubs) and by 2010 they died off, cause everyone got a pc and internet
I remember a friend of mine playing the Pilsner game in IT-class. Our 60 yo IT teacher passed by and told him turn it off. The friend, not taking his eyes off the screen, said something like " I just need to finish taking off her cloths" . The IT teacher then spent the following 2-3 minutes patiently watching and adding comments like " that game is fixed" , "watch out, don't miss that bottle" and was sadly disappointed when the student failed to complete the task at hand....
🤣🤣
I'm from Croatia and I remember the dudes that sold burnt games, pržene as we called it. Those guys were competing who would pull a better Neo from Matrix. Black trenchcoats, sunglasses and all. There was a huge police crackdown on those guys somewhere in 2000s so my friend decided to buy a pack of blank cds, write GTA San Andreas on them and sold them for 50 kuna. Half of the neighbourhood was afer him. Ah man, such great times.
mi nismo balkan
Više od pol teritorija Hrvatske spada pod Balkanski poluotok. Od cijele Hrvatske jedino se Panonija ne nalazi na Balkanskom poluotoku. Zemljopisno gledano. Od kud tebi informacija da se ne nalazimo na Balkanu?
@@milemile4813 dečko natrag knizi.
Hrvatska je dio srednje i zapadne europe
@@CroatianUltraNationalist1 Čuj njega, dečko. Malo se pušiš tu na internetu. Slusaj, ako ne znaš šta je balkanki poluotok nemoj pričat o knjigama.
I think proper term is pirated in english. In serbia we used same term, probably from burning a CD.
I am born in 1986 in Bulgaria and lived through that period as child and teenager.
The lack of PCs in peoples homes was addressed by Computer Cafes where you had usually 8-20 PCs and we used to play connected by LAN.
You would pay per hour.
I still remember playing 4 v 4 on Starcraft!
Ot koi kvartal si
We even had Warcraft 3, StarCraft 2, CS:GO, H3, AoE1&2, AoM, MoH:AA tournaments at multiple net cafe's in my city. Our 50k town had 5 net cafe's that I was aware of and probably a few others that I didn't know.
I used to spend my weekends there during high school, mostly grinding away at Adventure Quest and Dark Throne. Good times.
Im tunisian and holy shit u just described exactly what a kid from tunisia’s childhood looks like. Like to a freaky degree. I didn’t know we are balkans
The Balkan-MENA-LATAM pipeline is thin
GTA was so popular here in Romania that around mid-2000 people made modded versions of the game and distribute them like GTA Bucuresti or GTA Romania and even to this day I know people who prefer to play a modded version of San Andreas which added multiplayer SAMP on short over the official GTA 5 multiplayer
Yeah in Serbia there was also GTA Serbia with cities renamed and european cars
In Moldova also.😂
Granted, it was just a few new cars and some reskinned billboards, and whatnot, but it existed. 😂
same in Lithuania :D
GTA Mamaia Vice 😎
Same in Brazil, there was GTA Rio de Janeiro, GTA São Paulo and even GTA Tropa de Elite, which just had a ton of random mods and some music from the movie. This was all on PS2 though.
3:40 not a flash drive, but my mother (who's a teacher) had a friend at school whose husband engaged in the habit and would occasionally gift us cd's with games (mostly demos) and animated movies. You haven't lived until you watched the first Shrek movie in two parts because the cd can only fill up that much space
Agreed! 😁
True true
You haven't lived until you watch the first Matrix movie in 2 parts, BUT one week apart, because the second cd was scrached and no longer working, so you need to find a replacement.
Just like the PlayStation games
@@yankeevictor9055 Ooof, that sounds a bit of a cliffhanger!
4:40 I remember young naive me playing san andreas, and having no clue what the N word actually meant. So for a while after noticing how the word was used in game, i thought it meant something like friend or bro. So me and my friends always used to greet each other like this.
ua-cam.com/video/2XTkfJGSUgA/v-deo.html
This is exactly what it means
Same fr
Even today
We're from the Balkans, we all have the N word approval. That was my logic (and still is 😅) because we suffered as much as our afro brothers and sisters.
being a child that didnt speak much english yet, it took me like half a year to realise i control the blue guys in aoe2, not the green ai
I am 35y old from Serbia, and I have never, ever, talked with a person from Balkans who played Halo. But Counter Strike 1.6 was played by millions and it is still played by thousands of people. I co-owned one of the best ranked CS 1.6 servers in the world, and I had to "retire" from CS because people were so into it that they would fight, live and breathe CS 1.6. it was so stressful, like it was World Cup, but it was just amateur people who liked that game.
I was in the same boat, I fking loved Halo and it was so hard to come across a normal CD with Halo on it, they were all either defected or a bad pirated game with half the files corrupted. As soon as I got internet I pirated Halo myself and loved every second of it. CS 1.6 was only good on LAN with a few friends, when everyone got the internet it started to become hell. League of legends was my jam for a long time in gaming cafes and still is actually, been playing since season 2
Koji server je bio u pitanju?
Ne mogu se setiti druze, ako pitas za CS samo smo se povezivali preko LAN-a, a posle gde smo igrali stvarno ne znam
@@STR-sd4rt Da ne prdim na Englskom više pošto vidim da smo naši :D Ja sam Halo tek skoro igrao prvi put, 20 godina nakon izlaska, a LOL nisam nikad probao, tako da meni jedino CS 1.6 ostaje kao neka nostalgična multiplayer igra
@@cefa1337 Fatality Family je bio u pitanju. Ako se ne varam, ja kada sam otišao bili smo u top10 na svetu, a valjda su posle dogurali do top3.
Nisam bio "pravi" vlasnik nego sam od igrača došao do ranka ownera ali sam hteo da skratim priču u prvom komentaru, i nas par je kao vodilo server dok nisam prso
I'm German and was so happy when Moorhuhn appeared on the screen. It was in German not because that's where you got it from, but because it literally is a German videogame. There's actually a bunch of German videogame franchises from the late 90's and early 00's that I used to play. Thanks for the nostalgia
Sven Bømwøllen? 😁
The carting game was my favorite!
I'm from Croatia and its one of my favorite games i used to play as a kid with my friends all the time
Gothic series is to date my favorite rpg - veri advanced and organic story ahead of its time
i remember playing its russian version
Brate ne znas kolko sam srecan sto si napravio ovaj video. Ima jedno 5 igara koje sam igrao jos sa jedno 4 godina i nikad nisam mogao ponovo da ih igram jer ih nikad nisam nasao. HVALA TI na ovom videu
Pre nekolila godina sam pokusala da igram igre sa starih diskova, ali vise ne rade😢
Bate i az sum taka, gotino video
Ja nisam ocekivao da vidim i cujem Heroje III
@@lazubug ja imam stotine dvd-ova i svi rade al cuvam ih u onim velikim kutijama mozda zato jos nisu isparili bas sad radim backup na hard disk
@@I-use-ArchbtwWow! To je super; blago tebi! Da li bi bilo moguće uploadovati ih na neki sajt tako da i mi ostali možemo da ih igramo? 🥹
I am from Romania, born in 99, and you just gave me so much nostalgia 🤩
Forgot Captain Claw, Gothic, Metin2, Unreal Tournament, all legacy of kain & prince of persia games
Actually, when I start to think about how many video games I played as a Balkan kid, the list is literally at least 500 games.
Came down in the comment section to see if someone mentioned Captain Claw. Thank you. Metin 2 not being in the video is also an L.
Fuck yeah LoK is still my fav game series of all time
And Warrior within was goated too
Captain Claw is the first game i ever played on pc. Best game ever.
Finally someone mentioning Captain Claw, never finished it
Every slav is has an inborn ability to play Heroes of Might and magic
Have 3 and 4 still in box. As well as M&M games. So.. Yes.
The best game ever made,
i played dark messiah.
I have played HOMM 2 quite extensively (hot-seat) for months when we heard HOMM 3 was announced. Also M&M 6, 7 and 8.
HOMM 3 was THE shit. I remember that we got the CD just before the bombing, and then that CD exchanged a few hands until we got the no-cd crack.
Also I gave HOMM 4 a chance and played the campaigns, then WoG and ERA, and I currently have HOTA installed.
And just recently got HOMM 3 The Board Game. A 13kg box with minis for most of the units of majority of the factions (and will cover all of them with the upcoming expansion). The most expensive board game I own, but I just couldn't pass it. Of course, the publisher is Polish.
My father's gift to my mother for their first anniversary was apparently a copy of a Heroes 3+4 bundle that we still use.
You forgot to mention how we never called the games by their real name, and had our own explanatory names
kaunter, getea
@@69605komsa(neighbors from hell), gadjanje kokosaka za morhuhn, nasao sam stari cd sa igricama na nemackom, pola imena teca nazvao na srpskom kad je doneo komp iz nemacke😆😆Lepo bilo
tomb rajder
Kala djuti, nitfor spid
13:33 You mentioned friv and that fireboy and watergirl game, and quite literally, I saw my whole childhood flash before my eyes omg. As a latinoamerican, I never thought you'd play them too over there
Its PEAK
@@KartingRulesIt absolutely is. I still remember being at my school's computer lab with a bunch of others kids trying to find out how to actually solve the puzzles, we all were gathering our wits just in order to do so lol.
Romanian here,we had a bunch of dudes in the late 90's / in early 2000's that we called "pirati" ( obviously pirates) that sold cracked games burnt in 700 mb CD ( traxdata ,verbatim etc ). Mostly bunch of dudes in their 20's that were still in college.The games used to cost about 10 to 20 lei back then and worked flawless.
It was the way most kids bought games ,classics and gems from a different time ( CS 1.6,HL 1 / 2 ,Soldier of fortune,Max Payne,Gta series ,Serious Sam,Re-Volt etc ).
When internet became more wide spread and affordable we would use file sharing software like DC++ / Strong DC++.
Tbh...great times,we were kids and all we wanted to do is game. I have fond memories of those days.
One thing you forgot to mention is that most people didnt even play at their friends place but at that one dingy cybercafe next to every elementary school that all of us would spend our lunch money on. Also, the reason why LoL was so popular when it came out in 2009 was because most people grew up with warcraft 3 and DoTA 1 that started as a map series for the game!
@@dimitrijearsenijevic5597 he does later in the video
@@floricel_112 he doesn't, he only talks about the cybercafes in a later era with lol, but realistically, they were there since the early 2000s and we're big reason why stuff like age of empires, command and conquer and magic 3 were so big to begin with
@@dimitrijearsenijevic5597 Cybercafes were in every country in the early 2000s. In the west they were mostly seen as seedy places not suitable for kids as most families did have a computer at home by this point in history. Only poor kids and kids who skipped school tended to live in them.
@@cattysplat In the Balkans they werent seen as shady though, they were usually near schools since at that time playing video games was mostly seen as a childrens thing by the general public (in the Balkans, not at large, although it was less accepted globally aswell) so it wasnt seen as weird for kids to go to them after school to play since most families didnt have a PC at home and consoles were even more of a rarity
Maybe for younger ,we played games also in 80s ,2 joystick at friend house or mine on commodore 64 and later on Amiga .Its obvious this dude makes video is younger so have 0 idea that we in 80s played games like crazy also .Half off my class had some home computer and there were also many places with arcade games.Just 100 meter from primary school there was place with 50 Arcade games and pinball and we spend money there
You forgot one of the most important games of that time: Neighbors from hell 1 & 2 (srb. Komšije). I'm sure everyone has played this. One of my earliest memories is when I was a kid playing through all the levels of Neighbors from hell 2, except for the last one with the ship. Then me and my little brother would call our dad and he would go through that last level only to see the last scene of the neighbor being beaten by his mother for sinking the ship and our main character laughing in the background. It was the funniest scene in the game for me, and my dad was a legend to me because he managed to beat the game that I couldn't. After that I would just start the game from the beginning and so all over again. Recently I bought the remaster version on steam and passed that level for the first time in my life after so many years. I felt... powerful.
THIS UNLOCKED SO MANY MEMORIES FOR ME
I once transported a 300mb game called "How to annoy your neighbor" or something, using nothing else than a bunch of defective floppy discs.
I'd chop up the game using Winrar into 8kb chunks, and copied the chunks into the floppy. If any of the chunks were copied into a bad sector, I would not be able to copy them back into my PC. So I put the defective chunks into a separate folder on the floppy itself, and just left them there. This allowed me to only use the good part of the floppy. Still, I started the process with ~10 diskettes, and by the time I was finished I only had maybe six still working.
YES
100% bro, best game ever
Lithuanian here. Everything you said here is true about our country too!!! We received games by either trading with each other or by buying gaming magazines with full/demo version games attached to it as a bonus prize. Man, what magical times it was.. Gta vice city, cs, serious sam... We also played dragonballz multiplayer game in cyber cafes, it was called ".. Smtg forces". What a game!!
"metin 2" was a classic in Romania
Metin 2 was a widely played game for some many eastern countries even here in Hungary too. I never liked and only played a very short time but never ever knew how people could like a game like that.
It is still most played mmo in Turkey, it did leave crazy effect on a generation
@@sziklamester1244 probably because they don't like English so they play the one game that was translated in Romanian
@@belstar1128 Metin 2 was infamous in many ways and in my country mostly the local minorities played it whom haven't fluent in english nor they have had money for world of warcraft.
I preferred Silkroad and Kal online but these games are also old and maybe not works anymore. Honorable mention is guild wars 1-2 I played more with the second game and to this day still looks good.
Nowadays I do not really playing mmos anymore because they are very time consumers also if you have not friends whom playing it it gets boring very quick. My experiences in the Metin 2 was basically kill some animals, get back, go speak with someone do another quest etc and there was a lot of bugs in that game. Sometimes the quest giver not worked properly and no matter on what I clicked it does not respond at all.
After 11-13 hour of playtime I decided to ditch.
@@sziklamester1244 i tried to get into metin because romanians recommended it to me and i am trying to learn it .but the game wasn't very fun maybe it was better when it came out a lot of mmos got bad around 2010 because of some bad trends like pay2win .and making things too easy i was a big runescape fan the game made metin look high tech. it was very popular in the Netherlands northern Europe and Baltic states but not in the Balkan .probably because of the language barrier .but after they made a big mistake in 2012 they made old school runescape and its good .but most mmos are too stubborn like when they made wow classic they added a lot of the bad changes back in. unlike most people i got way more free time now than in high school in the 2000s but the mmos have mostly gone downhill .quite annoying i wish i played more back in the day. i also got into gulid wars 2 recently it was fun but its not my favourite. but i noticed wow ripped off guild wars 2 withy the legion expansion.
GTA San Anreas was the gold standard for video games in the Balkans, well actually it still is
I still prefer SA to GTA 4 and 5
san andreas škola rp
Heroes of might and magic II, Starcraft, Diablo II, Unreal Tournament ('99), Half-life (multiplayer), Mortal Kombat 1, 2, 4, bunch of MS-DOS games... and many more.
We used floppy disks and rar to copy them to other computers, the floppy disks often got corrupted, so you had to figure out which one of the 20 was corrupted, and walk back and forth between the houses, because you had only 3 floppy disks instead of 20.
as an egyptian myself i can tell you that in 2000s these games here 1:56 were in every pc in all netcafes in the country and even today it shaped the nostalgia of what that era looked like. 90 percent of games mentioned were popular in egypt, my favourites was jazz 2 even if it was the shareware demo and chicken invaders 2.
i think it's amazing that despite we live in different countries and cultures, we somehow share the same nostalgia especially that related to the pc and video games culture
thanks friend for this awesome video you awakened the nostalgic vibes of my childhood 😁👍☺
I played many "western" videogames thanks to the completely legit Polish Nintendo-something with 83 games preinstalled (11 of them are variants of Super Mario Bros). My parents bought it in one of those shops where you could buy anything from a wooden spoon to a second-hand Balkan grandmother.
My mother and grandmother called them Bazar.
I was in one in olsztyn where they even sold second hand cars
Im almost sure you mean Pegasus
What was the RAM on the Balkan Grandmother?
@@Dracopol Enough to count all your relatives you never heard about or knew they even excited.
i used to emulate N64 and the gameboy to play nintendo games, best decision i ever did!
I got Sims 1 from a street vendor selling burnt CDs. The cursor would straight up not show up during some parts of the game and I just got used to "imagining" where the cursor was supposed to be and playing it that way. Not to mention all the crashes.
Then when I got my first non pirated game for my birthday some years later I was so shocked that it came in a nice box with a booklet, artwork and everything worked fine. A whole different experience.
They were good times given what we had, but it also makes me thankful for what we have today.
There was a "ripped" version of Might & Magic 6 which could fit on 1 CD (instead of 2 CDs) which was missing lots of graphics - higher value object graphics being replaced with lowest value object image e.g. all swords were displayed like a worthless basic rusty sword you find at the very beginning of the game and so on. It also messed up paper-doll display (character inventory with your character wearing/wielding the stuff).
My friends played game like that for weeks (two of them on a single pc, as usual) until I told them that the graphics is crap and something's wrong. Only then they realized there's a correct version which looks so much better.
Also with one game (I think it was Caesar III) the whole town got infected by a CIH virus from the same CD.
Street vendors were the worst. There were more reliable "sources" who knew their "stuff", but it basically resolved itself at the dawn of torrent age where you could read the comments before downloading :)
A Thai person growing up in 2000s Thailand 🇹🇭here.
Story about pirated video games and Internet cafe is also true over here too.
This is so fascinating, ty for another killer video!! & thanks for partnering with us, you're the best!! 💙🎧
NFS 2, NFS MW, Pain Killer, DOTA, Starcraft, Warcraft, Unreal Tournament, COD 2 what else help me bring some memories
WWE on ps2? Or Pes 2013?
Only cultured people knew about those, the non-english speaking balkaners used to play most games mentioned in this video instead. Games like Tribes, Savage, etc, were games that many in the west remember fondly, but for most balkaners, they haven't even heard of them at that point.
Mortal kombat 4
Will rock
Captain Claw comes to mind
Gaming magazines that offered full version's of games such as Level and PCGames4Fun were a godsend here in Romania in the mid 2000s
Gaming magazines in the early-2000s introduced me to series like Monster Hunter & Devil May Cry from their demos. Mercenaries, which I originally got as a demo, ended up being one of the most widely played franchises in my family.
ooooooh da
Enclave cred ca a fost jocu meu preferat de acolo parca l-am luat
Ah mai jucat si The Suffering ah da cosmarurile 🤣
God bless Level. I bought my first in September 1999 and I literally bought almost EVERY SINGLE EDITION after that for ten years.
@@Paul20661 Ma lovesti in memorii
@@P9HL2BETA also nu era din level dar *Need for Speed 2 SE* sau FlatOut am jucat cu toții cred
As a Croat I'm very proud of Serious Sam...
As a romanian I respect that game made by my fellow balkan bros that I did not dare to pirate and I bought honestly.
@@Vlad_-_-_ bro I pirated it, and I liked it so much I ended up buying it, the first and second encounters legit
@@floricel_112 Based. I enjoyed the fuck out of them too.
Respect, Serious Sam The First Encounter was the first game I've ever played.
were not balkan
As a Balkan, i don't know wth Heros 3 is but every balkan guy played these:
Tanks 1990,
Super Mario 1985,
Neighbours From Hell,
Feeding Frenzy,
Sheep Fking,
Collecting beer bottles to strip women,
Santa Claus in Trouble,
Zoo Tycoon 2,
Gta San Andreas,
Counter Strike 1.6 and Condition Zero,
Call Of Duty 1,
Need For Speed Underground,
Stronghold Crusader,
Jazz Jack Rabbit 2,
Prince Of Persia The Two Thrones ( rare but played )
I was born in Romania and my dad is from Lebanon. In Romania we had all these games you described, but I was surprised to find when going to Lebanon that most of what you said in this video is true for there as well. Same games, same atmosphere, games were all pirated and sold like that, and every PC had the same games, except most kids there didn't own computers, so we'd go to internet cafes. One game you didn't mention that was very popular there is Neighbors From Hell.
he did say in the beginning that videogames unite all cultures and people's.
Bravo, man! That was my go-to. But I would also add that WoW, at least in my town, was played heavily in internet cafes. Especially Burning Crusade circa 2007. The store owner had two or three accounts that were shared somehow, but we did play the real thing. It was like 50 cents per hour, and everyone would rush to pay more when a raid would last a bit longer.
It feels somehow nice knowing that all Balkans childhoods were basically the same.
Mom, can we have Zuma?
Mom: We already have Zuma at home.
Zuma at home: Luxor
Luxor and Zuma basically went hand in hand
@@lolwutbro724 but never together, you either loved/had one or the other, never both
My mum was a huge Zuma fan.
Pirate Poppers also
Nah, it was the other way around
Bosnian kid: Can we buy minesweeper?
Bosnian Mother: No. We have minesweeper at home
“Северина снимак” Nostalgic memories 😔
AHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAH
to budi sjecanja
Haha lol.
Da prvi put sam video toliko dlaka na jednoj zeni 🤣
Heroes 3 is the true balkan gem. Playing with the homies in one home and everyone had to leave the room after their turn.
I used to play Jack jazz rabbit with my cousin in my garage after he came from work , good ol' days
Me too. II loved the game, and I loved the music even more. Medieval Jam, Jazz Castle, Carrotus, Colonius, Beach Bunny, Diamondus Remix, Jungle Fenah, Hell Freezes Over, Dark Groove, Jazz Be Damned, and Streetwise, are still the best music pieces to hear once in a while
Alexander Brandon cooked with the soundtrack
Slovenian here, my first 2 games were Fifa football 2004 and NFS Underground 2 :DDD
Along with those 2, some of my favorite games from my childhood are Red Alert 2, NFS Most Wanted, Gothic 3 and Runescape (I still play OSRS lol)
"Crește Pateul" was a stable of Romanian childhood
"Fără Număr" also
There was a Romanian space strategy game that I still love to this day named Reunion. I played it on my 486dx2 back in the day.
The Tony Hawk games, Need for Speed, Unreal Tournament, FIFA are just some that come to mind. (Romania - late 90s , early 2000s)
THPS4, NFS2, UT LAN game at the school /transcarpatia/
tony hawk games are still the best skating game . also getting up was so influensial everyone aas a kid started doing grafiti
Tony Hawk's Underground 1 & 2 still the two best Tony Hawk games ever made.
Oh yeah, those were the good times and games...
In the 90s (in Hungary) I was excitedly waiting as an elementary school kid for the weekend to play Doom at my grandma's house on her computer and beating the big boss with a cheatcode I got on a piece of paper from my brother who got it from a classmate. Also we had a nintendo but couldn't afford the games so we had to borrow it from the neighbours. I still remember being pissed at how difficult the Adams Family game was. The first game I ever played was Snoopy where the tv was the monitor and the keyboard was on the floor. We had games on cassettes. The early 90s was truly a magical time for gaming.
Omg this was such a trip down nostalgia lane
I am 28 years old Romanian guy, born in 96', I swear to god, there was not 1 game that I didn't knew/played, you have put my childhood in 1 video, took me back on a memory trip, thx dude, keep up the good work !
one thing id like to add, from personal expirience, for the majority of us balkans, we played english games, without EVEN knowing a bit of english, i recall and still have my psp games, crash mind over mutants, crash of the titans
LOVED those two Crash games, despite everyone hating on them. I just played them on PS2, and even at 8 years old I was kinda disapointed in them. Still loved the ideas and designs they had.
Jazz the Jackrabbit 2 was the best game I've played in my childhood, primarily because of just how unbelievably great the art style was. And how great the soundtrack was. I still remember most of the songs from the various levels there.
That game just becomes an unforgettable memory.
The music is 100% amazing, I still listen to it, there's a bunch of playlist on YT, as well as a playlist of 20-year-anniversary remixes, I recommend
I live in Belgrade for 2 years now and have moved here from Russia. I guess one of the reasons we get so well along here is that the games we played and how we played them was actually the exact same way! I've got goosebumps when you were talking about Vice City and Sand Andreas. We couldn't afford a computer and I've played these at a club - and even that was expensive so I was not wasting my time doing missions, wrecking havoc was a way to have fun!
ahhh the cs1.6 whole night was something else
Age of empires, heroes 3, battle realms, Call or duty, counter strike, Delta force 2, sudden strike, medal of honor allied assault, jazz jackrabbit, bootleg Mario, pirated Sega Dreamcast games and super Nintendo
*Need for Speed 2 SE*
Hteo bih neko da me udari budakom o glavu da se vratim u 2008 i da ostanem tamo zauvek jebes mi sve
the feeding frenzy drop really sent me back that game was RAD
I grew up playing games like Serious Sam The Second Encounter (which was my favorite game as a child and also my first game), Serious Sam 2, Quake 3 Arena, Counter Strike 1.6, Unreal Tournament, AstroAvenger 1, AstroAvenger 2, Alien Shooter 1, Alien Shooter 2, Zombie Shooter, Theseus Return of the Hero, Half Life 1 and Half Life 2. There are other games but those were the most memorable.
Serious Sam is a game made by a Croatian dev team
@@krunoslavkovacec1842 I know
@@HellelLightbringer666 then you should know croatia is not balkan and remove it from the list
@@DrAntePavelić Who told you Croatia is not a balkan country when it's literally in the balkans? If you search on the internet you'll see that it says Croatia is a balkan country. And what does that have to do on a video that talks about what games balkans grew up with? All the games i said there aren't even made by balkans except for Serious Sam.
@@HellelLightbringer666 croatia is part of western europe not balkans.
the balkans are historical croatian enemies
Me growing up with games in Czech rep.: "Who is Mario? What's this 'SimCity'? I have no clue what you're talking about. All my dudes play magazine games, cereal games, sharewares (Herní Výběr, Špidl Data Processing), flash games and some odd games."
TORNADO TWISTER
*Mario. First name Mario and last name Mario, Mario Mario. Te comeu atrás do arMário*
*You can't get the joke, but in portuguese it would be read as peak humor, like biggus dickus joke levels of risible*
ale no ved 1.6 sme hrali vsetci
I can perfectly well relate to this because majority of games mentioned were part of my childhood and i also played some at my friends place too.
Very fun times.
As an Egyptian i never knew i was Balkan 😮
I think all developing countries share the same story when it comes to video games, computers, Internet, etc.
Brother you nailed every single game from Santa jumping on roofs and chickens racing to gta and heroes iii. Man nostalgia hit me hard. Svaka čast!
I can't believe you live in Romania and didn't mention Metin2. It was huuuuge here and it's still talked and memed to this day, some people even still play it
This video was a nostalgia trip ❤
Lived in a small village in Romania, circa 2001. This one kid had parents that came home from Germany with a bunch of old cassette Nintendo consoles and one PS1. It was like an underground cinema, you pay the equivalent of lunch money and you get to step in the room to play for one hour. Place was swamped!
You didn’t mention the first Prince of Persia game. It was always in our family computer and from time to time the 5 year old me would try to play that game and fail to get past the second level.
Nothing can beat playing Counter-Strike with friends in Iceworld map. Throwing all the nades in the first couple seconds of the round.
As a kid I didn't understand the whole concept in CS so I always played terrorists in hostage rescue maps and instantly executed all the hostages. I thought I was a genius by preventing the other team from ever rescuing them
@@afz902k You freed the hostages, from their mortal coil! So you were an out of box thinker.
@@janodefenua4603 oh shit! Counter-terrorists win after all!
@@afz902k LMAO! I remember doing that too and getting banned from servers. I was also very confused why my money would drop whenever I killed them, thinking I should be getting paid for doing my job instead.
@@simeonhaha I was like well that's just money, you get more next round anyway, but now the other team can't win
We had a huge internet cafe subculture in Bulgaria with cafes ranging from a room with 4 computers to huge halls with over 100 computers. It was THE place to go to socialize and meet people regardless if you played video games or not and regardless of age. I worked in internet cafes in Bulgaria from 2002 until 2006, this ended with more and more people being able to afford a home computer and internet but it was great while it lasted. Many of these games you show were staples and this video got me a bit nostalgic.
My experience was similar. Growing up in the Philippines playing 80s arcades in Billiards from the morning to the middle of the night in the provinces. Then comes the PC which came with CS 1.6 and GTA SA. Both of them being a touchstones lasting up to the 2010s. Majority of the games here at the time were pirated cracks that came in separate disks. These disks would cost a doller by the amount of storage needed.
Steam at the time was a total nightmare as many of us still hadn't registered an ATM Card. Meaning that we resorted to buying steam cards in a game store at a mall very far from our home, often with added tax. Not until the IT and internet infrastructure went to full swing did buying games become easier and simpler.
My dad : "Surprise ! I bring a video game !" (Everytime, it was a flash game they had at work, something about golfing or egg hunting).
My mom : "I bought this game at the store, they told me it was very fun." (Most of the time, it was a discount game ....but once, we get DISCIPLES II SACRED LANDS so......).
My aunts/grand parents : "Here is this game you asked for your birthday/christmas. Have fun !" (said game : WARCRAFT, Age Of, Star Wars, HITMAN...).
God, we had a good family. I miss the 2000's sometimes. ;)
Icy Tower, Yeti games, Clickomania, StarCraft, Paintball, Quake3Arena, Pocket Tanks are just ones on top of my head that you missed to mention.
OMG Yeti Games :D :D
Not from balkan but PC with pre-installed cracked games was a norm in Slovakia too. PCs didn't come with windows, stores did that and they usually added some games because nobody gave shit about copyright in 90s :D My first PC had Liero, Doom, Prehistorik, Command & Conquer and Lion King and a whole bunch of shareware and demos of games. My first pirated games from a friend were Age of Empires 1, Commandos and Earthworm Jim on CD (USB wasn't a thing back then). Later we formed a pact at school and started to alternate in buying gaming magazines which included legal copies of games but you could install them on any number of PCs you wanted and hence I got my hands on my life-changing game Fallout (fully translated to Czech language... I taught myself English by playing Fallout 2 and had this one installed on all my PCs ever since btw) and other classics for cheap etc. Man those were the days! :)
I grew up in Austria and we always had PCs, N64, SNES, Xbox etc at home - but the best part was when I took my Xbox/N64 to Kosovo and the whole neighborhoodwas coming at my home to play Multiplayer (Halo, FIFA, Star Wars Battlefront, GTA San Andreas MP, etc) or even stuff like Super Smash Bros, Goldeneye and Zelda. But we also loved going into cafes and then playing neighborhood vs neighborhood CS 1.5 and CS 1.6 - it got always late like REALLY late into the morning lol.
Like damn my friends waited always a year just to play again Battlefront/Halo with me when I came back. The crazy part is they always REMEMBERED the controls/skills like they played yesterday lol.
I know how the West and Balkan grew up, but damn balkan was more fun always. Miss those times, now this kids they suck ass with Fortnite and Twitch.
LOOL getting back home at 5 in the morning, hoping your grandparents didn't notice
Bosnjak here. my father is 38 and works at a computer repair shop. he used to sell games and shit, and hes a very experienced pirate. fire.
Cool!
[Slovakia here]
I started with computers when we had DOS installed on my old machine and the two games i had were DOOM and Mortal Kombat 2 and old flight simulator LHX(i didn't counted this in becuase i didn't knew how to play it). This was still game era where everything i wanted had to be copied from floppy disks and copied to your disk. Which was amazing because it was like 94 and as a kid i had no idea how to use dos and the only thing i had was book which was published in 1985 of course whole in english so i had no idea but since i wanted to play i had to actually start learning english even if i didn't wanted too.
Later it was better and it was kind of similar to what you have shown in the video but when internet started to spread out we used to play more likely a warcraft 3 rather then WOW that came later we were playing on fun server where you could travel along the mountain and reach level 255 at the peak. Counter-Strike basically started with 1.5 which had that classic half-life like menu and the from singleplayer's vice city, max payne 1, Vietcong for sure but that was possible to play via internet which we definitely did once internet was more spread and Mafia 1 but that being said we used to download also a Game Maker i think it was version 6.0 back then and we made a lot of our games at the top of this we played flash games too.
you missed Project I.G.I, Project Powder (was very popular in internet cafes), Warcraft III The Frozen Throne (DOTA before it became dota 2), Tropico, that game that "taught" you how to write, Farm Frenzy 2 and Pet Soccer.
I'm baffled that you didn't mention Serb Simulator GTA IV! Niko Bellic must be shaking his head in disbelief somewhere in Liberty City!
Damn, it's really incredible to see people from other countries having a very similar experience to you.
One thing I'd add to the list, especially for games played in school computers, is a climbing game called the Icy Tower. From the music to the sound effects, I remember it very vividly to this date.
THANK YOU, I was literally combing the comments to see if someone mentioned it!
Man, I remember all of my friends were playing MesterMc, cause none of us had money to buy Minecraft.
The BÉ grind was real back then
Brings me back those Hunger Games memories
I saw you one time in my dreams
Szövi?
I wonder if some of my old MesterMC friends are here but we will never again recognize each others.
This comment brings back so many memories
I am so happy you included jazz jackrabbit in this list as well as pocket tanks. I was that generation that grew up on these games, and jj2 was my top favorite game of all time, as well as the first game i played ever. I also played pocket tanks too by the way
This dude is probablu younger and have 0 knowledge off gaming in Yugoslavia in 80s.We did not have NIntento but more then half off my class had some home computer ,i had Commode 64 ,others Amdsrad ,Atari ,Spectrum .Games were pirated with multiply games on one cassete or flopy disk and were mark as like Sport complete 1 ,or adventure games etc.THere were also computer magazines where game recensions were like "svet kompjutera" and there was also 4=5 pages in them with ads for pirated games
Yep. Yugoslavia pretty much followed gaming trends in europe at time, which were computers. Nintendo come very late in europe and was pretty much irrelevant until Wii everywhere expect France.
Rest of video is balkans so quirky when that is pretty much gaming in europe, computers dominated gaming landscape, except Sony, PS1 was first console in europe that was actually massive hit, its arguably european version of NES, and Sony was and is popular in Croatia at least, cant really say about rest of exYu here. Playstation 1 was massive, playstation 2 less so, people switched to PC at that time, but 3, 4 and 5 were hit again.
As for piracy, yea piracy was massive but so was everywehere else.
@@plivajucipauk7742 My first computer commodore 64 in 1986 ,then Amiga 500 1mb with 20 mb hard drive in 1990 ,then came sanction ,war ,dissolution off Yugoslavia so new computer was last thing on my parents mind so Amiga was my only computer until 1998 when half off my family cheeped in and i bought PC with AMD 300 mhz .But i still played all games from PC since 1991 becase some off my friends had PC so we played at their home ,but allready in 1992/93 gap in gaming between Amiga and PC was obvious .When we instaled in 1993 game Michael Jordan in Flight i know then that wont see never such game on Amiga.Also still remember when my first neigbour in 1995 bought PC with Pentium 90 mhz and on them NFS ,FIFA ,NBA 1995 ,F1 ,we played like whole night
The guy is just trying to gather followers from other Eastern European countries with stereotypes but forgot that we had a different kind of socialism (and a different history). If you had enough money you could buy nearly everything that was produced in the west. My mother had Beatles vinyls and my father played Pong in the 70s. My older cousin had the first Nintendo console bought in 86 in Sarajevo from a little store (private enterprise) that sold Western, Eastern, and Yugoslavian electronics together with original consoles and some NES clones..... (and yes in Yugoslavia you could have a private business and employ even up to 10-15 people and import-export stuff from all over the world.....how do you all think our Мafia started and laundered their money if they weren't on the payroll of the secret service...especially the guys with gas stations and restaurants).