People Explain What They Miss The Most About The 90s

The music. The music and movies do it for me. "Titanic, Scream, American Beauty, Seven," those are just some of the classics. And who doesn't remember the first time they heard Nirvana?

The Edge

"My Super Nintendo being cutting edge technology." ~ detectivebabylegz

IRC

"I honestly miss the internet from the 90s. I spent so many hours exploring, reading things. Every webpage felt like I was visiting someone's house, they were so personal as design standards did not exist yet. I enjoyed my netscape navigator. And I LOVED my IRC chat rooms. Keep in mind I was like 9 and 10. lol, so I mostly spent time in Pokemon Chat rooms that had bots. Discord is not the same as the IRC days." ~ UnusualSoup

Fridays

"Blockbuster/Pizza Hut on Friday nights." ~ EdwardPackard

"My parents would always rent a movie and they'd let me rent a game. We'd walk to pizza hut, place our order, then walk to the brand new blockbuster and browse. It was amazing as a kid."

"I remember they had an N64 kiosk in the middle, and I actually begged my parents to let me stay and play Starfox 64. Got it for Christmas that year and played it all night into the morning. I fell asleep at my grandma's house at the table during Christmas dinner that night haha. Good freaking times man." ~ Hammose

Go outside. That was it.

"That Friday afternoon after school feeling, when you knew you had two glorious days before you had any responsibility again, so you'd call your friends on the land line and hope their parents didn't pick up so it wouldn't be awkward, and you'd get together and just. Go outside. That was it. There was no plan, but maybe somebody would bring a football, and you'd have a pickup game at the park." ~ Surewhynot62189

MUSIC

"Music, MTV, and listening to my huge 5 disc CD changer boom box." ~ jasdq

Oh MTV. What happened?

Too Much

"The quietness before every freaking idiot in the world had access to the internet and a camera phone." ~ -RUNPMT-

Everything

"Building cubby houses, playing in the creek, rollerblading, then coming home and playing Sega/Nintendo. I miss taping stuff off the tv 🤷🏻♀️ hanging out in my room, still playing with toys, reading cool magazines, going through my card collections. The hype of the cinema back in the 90's. Not being a slave to technology, but still having wicked gadgets like Walkmans." ~ Ultimatelee

Trajectory

"Watching grunge music videos on MTV and Keebler chips." ~ kittenya

"MTV has had such a weird trajectory over the past 25 years. First into just not playing music anymore by the mid-2000's, and now it is literally just Ridiculousness 24/7 with an occasional 16 and pregnant thrown in. I don't even know what demographic they are going after. Who the hell is wanting to watch a middle aged bro comment on YouTube videos so much?" ~ TogarSucks

Like it's 1999!

"Think about some of the biggest hits of '99. The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich. These movies (and a few more around this time) all had a unifying theme of the general ennui of living in a time without strife. They were about people making problems for themselves because they didn't have enough real ones."

"I'd love if the world were going so well that the escapism was about nitpicking how pleasant the world is. The Onion had it right in 2001. Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over." ~ GavinBelsonsAlexa

The Good Ole Days

"Going to the mall, and hanging out with friends. Malls were awesome, and I hate that the strip mall style has taken over."

"Especially up in Canada, where it gets to -40 in the winter. Back in the day you could legitimately spend hours wandering the mall, indoors and warm. Now it is depressing. Maybe the big malls like Mall of America or West Edmonton Mall are still okay, but the ones in my city are crap." ~ Lexi_Banner

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Looking Back...

"I found my mom's Geocities page from 1996 using some super specific keywords and lots of digging. Seeing her guestbook with her friend's little messages to her, then lurking around their pages and seeing her's to them, it was surreal to see that the way she typed back then was the same as the way she'd send text messages to me in modern days. "

"She died in 2016 from cancer. She was a very private person in general with no modern social media presence at all so being able to go and visit those little time capsules is very special to me." ~ yoobikwedes

The Calm

"The 80's was Cold war paranoia, and the 00's was Terrorist paranoia after 9-11. The 90's was this oasis of calm in between two paranoid decades." ~ Scallywagstv2

"Yeah. I grew up in that chill period which actually lasted into the late 2000s outside the USA and Iraq and now I find myself in a Transformers setting of robots, autonomous cars, disasters, and government/oligarch misconduct that I have no precedent for...as I grew up almost entirely in a desert for Transformers media." ~ NineteenSkylines

Hollywood New...

"Think about some of the biggest hits of '99. The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, Being John Malkovich. These movies (and a few more around this time) all had a unifying theme of the general ennui of living in a time without strife. They were about people making problems for themselves because they didn't have enough real ones. "

"I'd love if the world were going so well that the escapism was about nitpicking how pleasant the world is. The Onion had it right in 2001. Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over." ~ GavinBelsonsAlexa

Back when...

"Before we had mobile phones, my wife and I would plan to meet at a certain street corner at a certain time after work. We sometimes had to wait for the other person to show up, but we knew they would." ~ i-will-be-dead

From a Distance

"In 1998, I was flying to California from Florida, with a stop in Atlanta. My boyfriend lived there; he was flying back to California the following day. While I was on my layover, I went to the customer service desk and asked if I could just stay overnight in ATL and fly out the next day, on his flight."

"The lady said, 'Sure,' and booked us seats together on his flight, no charge. I just took my carry-on and went to his house for the night. When we got to LA my bag was waiting. Try that now, it would cost $2,000." ~ ObjectSmall

And so it began...

"We didn't live online yet. The internet was in it's infancy and was a fun way to pass the time, but it hadn't consumed us. Business was still being done in brick and mortar stores, our social lives were offline, etc. There was almost nothing to be purchased online, other than the online bookstore called Amazon. Pretty cool because they had a bigger inventory than you could fit in a building. And so it began." ~ Scrappy_Larue

Leave Me Alone

"The privacy. I was just a kid/young teenager but I only knew my best friends intimately. The rest of my class I didn't know or care. Now it's like all your followers are in your bedroom/home when you post to social media. Anyway." ~ Phishstyxnkorn

"I can tell give you the details of the lives of people who I haven't spoken one word to in 17 years, simply because they friended me on Facebook back in 2005. I've started to realize that the best sign of a happy relationship is there being barely any mention of it on social media." ~ Dahhhkness

The Fun!

"Arcades. Music stores everywhere. Music TV. People buying music." ~ nohumanape

What's on the newsstand?

"Something my wife just brought up while talking about this post... Magazines man! Everyone had their favorites for what ever hobby or interest you had. For me it was Guitar World, picking up the issues with bands I loved and plinking along to the Tab on my crappy electric guitar! For my wife it was 17, checking out the most recent trends! Or Thrasher when it was just a skate magazine and not a clothing brand."

"Even Rolling Stone was a big deal for mainstream artists. Then those of us into an alterna crowd there were tattoo mags like Savage. Me and my wife used to scour our local 7-11's waiting for the new issue of Savage to show up! I get that you can find blogs, etc online with the same info and most of these mags still exist but it's just not the same!" ~ jackfairy80

Painful

"Not for myself but I feel bad for kids who have to experience bullying 24/7. When I was a kid in the 90s I went to school and these kids made fun of me but then I went home and it stopped. Now, with social media, the bullying can invade kid's lives outside of school." ~ METAL_AS_F*CK

The 90s were a special era. And we learn just how special by each passing year. Let's keep digging, because there is still much to discuss.

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