This is something I have been thinking about for quite a while, though more actively ever since last year when there were tons of discussions surrounding Super Mario 64, and Nintendo 64 in general and how it has affected gaming culture, with everyone remembering how they've played these games back in those days.
And while both undoubtedly are important to history, this discussion couldn't help but make me feel how Americanized (and possibly West-Europinized or UK-ified? I'm not sure, as far as I know for example Commodore PC gaming culture was pretty wide-spread in the UK which wasn't exactly the case in the US, so there could be more differences) is the discussion surrounding gaming history and culture.
So if we talk about Mario 64 for example... I'm from Moldova, and in those post-Soviet Eastern European countries like that, Ukraine, Russia itself even, pretty much nobody has owned N64 - it didn't really exist. Gaming culture was defined by other games, some of which were made in the area itself and didn't become popular in the West (or weren't released there at all).
Like, Eastern Europe was mostly a PC-based region. Yeah there was a bootleg NES called Dendy at one point, and then Sony Playstation became pretty popular, but still it didn't become as popular as PC, where the pirate culture was rampant in interesting ways. We actually had a lot of competing pirating groups - and competition was involved in who would release the best-cracked stable version + the best translation. There was even a site that would rate different pirate releases, and any official localizations that would SLOWLY start appearing would need to somehow get in within that pirating context. And as a result, games that were much more important for the overall culture were released for PC rather than consoles, which has included genres like strategy games and point'n'click adventures (and games that were MADE in these regions weren't directly influenced by games like Mario 64, but only through proxy at most - again, due to N64 not really being a thing).
Speaking of adventure games, it has always been weird to me that it is considered that at some point in time adventure games died before getting a sort of renaissance with the release of Telltale's The Walking Dead. While this might be true for the US, this has never happened in Central/Eastern Europe - this kind of genre was still popular there, and being made there as well (With most titles getting made in Germany, heh, but there was a lot of Russian, Czech, and other adventure games too). But researching this topic I see that many of those games didn't really see a widespread release in the US. Still, for us adventure games never died, I still vividly remember that time when I was sort of weirded out because the Internet was full of discussions how 'adventure games are dead' while I on the other hand was playing so many new regular releases of this supposedly dead genre, and was thinking 'what are you talking about? Adventure games aren't dead!'
And this got me thinking that there must be more examples of the development of gaming culture or history that is ignored simply because the discussions around it are very US-centric, so what would be examples of history proceeding differently in your region, or different games being popular than those that are traditionally known to have an impact?
And while both undoubtedly are important to history, this discussion couldn't help but make me feel how Americanized (and possibly West-Europinized or UK-ified? I'm not sure, as far as I know for example Commodore PC gaming culture was pretty wide-spread in the UK which wasn't exactly the case in the US, so there could be more differences) is the discussion surrounding gaming history and culture.
So if we talk about Mario 64 for example... I'm from Moldova, and in those post-Soviet Eastern European countries like that, Ukraine, Russia itself even, pretty much nobody has owned N64 - it didn't really exist. Gaming culture was defined by other games, some of which were made in the area itself and didn't become popular in the West (or weren't released there at all).
Like, Eastern Europe was mostly a PC-based region. Yeah there was a bootleg NES called Dendy at one point, and then Sony Playstation became pretty popular, but still it didn't become as popular as PC, where the pirate culture was rampant in interesting ways. We actually had a lot of competing pirating groups - and competition was involved in who would release the best-cracked stable version + the best translation. There was even a site that would rate different pirate releases, and any official localizations that would SLOWLY start appearing would need to somehow get in within that pirating context. And as a result, games that were much more important for the overall culture were released for PC rather than consoles, which has included genres like strategy games and point'n'click adventures (and games that were MADE in these regions weren't directly influenced by games like Mario 64, but only through proxy at most - again, due to N64 not really being a thing).
Speaking of adventure games, it has always been weird to me that it is considered that at some point in time adventure games died before getting a sort of renaissance with the release of Telltale's The Walking Dead. While this might be true for the US, this has never happened in Central/Eastern Europe - this kind of genre was still popular there, and being made there as well (With most titles getting made in Germany, heh, but there was a lot of Russian, Czech, and other adventure games too). But researching this topic I see that many of those games didn't really see a widespread release in the US. Still, for us adventure games never died, I still vividly remember that time when I was sort of weirded out because the Internet was full of discussions how 'adventure games are dead' while I on the other hand was playing so many new regular releases of this supposedly dead genre, and was thinking 'what are you talking about? Adventure games aren't dead!'
And this got me thinking that there must be more examples of the development of gaming culture or history that is ignored simply because the discussions around it are very US-centric, so what would be examples of history proceeding differently in your region, or different games being popular than those that are traditionally known to have an impact?
