I feel ya. I always get irrationally mad everytime an American says Mexico is in Central America. Hell, I've heard them say its actually South America! If you're from a country that doesnt speak English chances are the anglo-centric internet doesnt care.
You're not listening to the Giant Bombcast, are you.
Ehh..but even if you take UK aside the fact is computers WERE more popular than consoles in 80s and 90s. NES neve got even remotely close to how big Commodore 64 was in Europe as a whole.
Computers being more important than game consoles is pretty much a constant around the world (after Atari that is). Parents got C64s, kids got NESes.
Those were the good days. Afterwards we all had to wait months before localization was complete for our monolingual European brethren.
No you have europeans explaining americans that gaming didn't revolve around Nintendo and that they never saved it. That gaming beyond the NES existed and that it wasn't the be-all, end-all of gaming
A lot of kids got Commodore64 too. Consoles, especially in poorer countries, were luxury toys. At least with 8-bit computers you could convince your parents that it's educational tool, a tactics successfully employed by millions of game-hungry kids around the world :D
This. It was certainly much easier to convince my parents in the 80s that we needed a computer (that conveniently had a large range of cheap £1.99 games) than that we needed a games console that only played games at £40 a go.
What's that even supposed to mean?
Ahahe that s so true... :p and it worked, there was a big push by the governments to introduce kids to programming (8bit computers at school, tv programs advertizing the field, etc) since it was thought to be the field of future employment.
I think people like to think in binary terms. As you say, just because Nintendo didn't dominate the UK market due to the embedded home computer scene and competition from Sega, doesn't mean they weren't also fairly successful at launch in a contested market against strongly established competition. That's why the playground console warz were so bitter here, and why we had multiple multi-format TV shows with a fair bit of Nintendo coverage.
I actually played both on my Amiga 500... :P
May hasn't quite dragged these islands out into the Atlantic yet, so I think we're still technically associated with the continent for the time being.
My apologies noble man, my previous message came from the far future. I see now. Thanks for the insights!
Yes, oversimplification not just by "dumb Americans," but also the people delivering this information.
