Nah. Let me get the vacuum. And the duster. And some wipes.
Now there’s a face that says “If you came down 60 seconds earlier, you would’ve seen me with my dick out”
Window too big… surprisingly not a basement!
From the wood paneling to the Papasan chair to the CRT to the Xbox to the Hollister T-shirt, this photo is aggressively early-00s. 2001 to 2002, I’d say.
Cannot be earlier than 2002, based on someone further down the thread identifying the game as THPS 4.
TV and gear says 90s?
Jeez, edits take forever to federate. I almost immediately edited that to say ‘early-00s’, but I guess the edit didn’t federate to your instance yet.
But, yeah, except for the Xbox, it all says “late 90s.” since the Xbox came out in 2001, I speculate at this photo is from around then
No i just forgot that one living room can contain multiple decades. 🤦♂️
Oh, no, that’s definitely a basement. That may look like a window in the background, but if you zoom in, you can see that it’s just a whiteboard.
But your observation still applies
And his “go away” sign points up, leading unwelcomed guests to the upper floors
That Duke and the stack of Xbox discs says at least 2000s.
I’m trying to figure out what the poster under the playboy one is, it feels super familiar
I think it’s a Conan The Barbarian movie poster
Maybe not. But it does look very familiar. Great, now it’s gonna drive me crazy for the rest of the day until I figure it out, lol.
The Playboy poster!
That dude was drowning in pussy.
I had a bedframe, but it broke.
Bare mattresses on the floor are just more practical after a certain point. There are only so many bedframes I can salvage from the dump.
Just do like I do and use some of the many millions you were given to buy yourself a new one.
Pretty baller setup by the looks of it! Our console had to be living room based by parents decree, so they had more grip on our playtime. Ugh…
I heard tell of families that didn’t even keep their Nintendo connected to the TV. They would set it up each time they wanted to play it.
When I was very young, a friend of mine’s parents removed the start and select buttons from the second controller to prevent Player 2 spamming pause. This sucked, because hella games used select as a necessary action for the game like changing weapons. So basically, if you were the guest player, you couldn’t do everything you may have needed to do to actually play.
Double ugh.
Yes, needed to search for the signal every time
Hey, at least you got a console.
Very true, but 14yo me preferred 16h long gaming sessions. We even got that OG Xbox for Christmas, although my dad did have to prank us by first only putting the DVD remote under the tree and be like “yeah, so when you do get it, you have this upgrade already, isn’t that neat??”. Then he went up and got the final surprise gift: the OG Xbox. That actually might be the first time I remember being exhausted from hype. Wtf, me and my brother were so happy with it.
He never got to know this, but we already knew what was coming. We knew the secret gifts hiding spot they used, and took our time to professionally open and repackage that gift when our parents were out one night. We didn’t even need to really fake our surprise, we were so hyped to be finally able to play on it.
My parents only packed the controller for me and put it under the tree, then joked about getting the Xbox later (but of course I got it). I was so happy I cried.
I really-really wanted that console, not due to any marketing, but after playing on it during a weekend at my friends. I have been a PC player until that time, but the OG Xbox got me over to the console side, and I haven’t left since (though I play mostly on PS now).
It’s incredible to think how much Microsoft had to fuck up to go from that and the 360’s hype to whatever they are doing called Xbox today.
Wow, real jokesters our parents, lol. Pfff, I was so hyped for the same reason. Playing Halo at a friends house impressed me almost as much as playing Super Mario 64 at a relatives house did. I never really played Goldeneye so playing Halo felt like 3d shooters were finally a thing on consoles to me, and the co-op was hella fun too! And i liked the big chonker controller!
I remember when I finally scraped together enough dough to get a used XBox in 2008
We were lucky indeed, but we were limited on ‘electronic entertainment’ overall and had to maintain a logsheet of use.
Yeah, we had that too. Also no sugar.
PC gamers would have known what scrolling was even back then. You just scrolled with a mouse sitting at a desk instead of anywhere you are with a finger on a phone.
I think scrolling started with cable TV. You could scroll through 100+ channels looking for something worth watching. When you get to the end it’s 30 minutes later and you’d start all over. It’s no different from social media
They’d understand the word, but not the modern meaning. Back then ‘scrolling’ meant exactly that and nothing more; to navigate up and down in a webpage by moving the viewport.
If - as a time traveller - you said to someone “I just spent all day scrolling” then you’d absolutely get a confused what-the-fuck response, because the modern meaning of “endlessly consuming Internet (social) media content” didn’t yet exist.
The term as it’s used today, was also used in cyberpunk fiction written in the 80s.
People been scrolling since they got control of screens. The common term shifted from “surfing” around when connections got good enough to deliver content in a steady stream vs loading wave after wave, surfing connotated a level of skill in keeping the next one lined up and there were all kinds of tools to help with that. Forums, webrings, link aggregators, RSS. This pic would’ve been taken around the time of that transition and I feel like the guy in it was probably one of the trendsetters already scrolling chan sites at that point
I didn’t really think of the Xbox as happening that long ago, but it really has been a few hasn’t it.,…
Why can I smell this photo?
It’s not a bad smell, despite the clutter. A faint hint of mustiness as the basement for a bit of water in it in 1996, mixed with air freshener and your buddy’s laundry detergent.
Parallax scrolling
That’s the term we used when I was a young one, looking through ancient scrolls of lore.
You mean Usenet groups?
Same I used to scroll for hours, when I first heard it applied to social media/smartphones I was like “???”
I used to have one of those round chairs, iirc, they were cheap crap, sold as the back to school furniture. I think mine ended up breaking or falling apart in some way.
A lot has gotten better since then. A LOOOOOT.
But there’s also a lot of good we lost along the way…
If you asked me if I’d trade now for then, I don’t know if I could answer that question absolutely. Maybe there was a time between then and now that would be the best of both, but 2002 vs 2026? That’s a toughie. Maybe 2016 or 2015. But even then, there was some serious shittiness.
I want to re-invoke Picard’s Inner Light notion, and remind people to try to stay in the “now” and to treat now as the most important time, because “now” will never come again.
Papasan chair. Originally made of sturdy rattan, and the seat bowl was separate from the base, allowing it to change in angle. Yes, the cheap versions are crap.
The papasan chair gained popularity in the west when American World War II veterans brought them home from Asia. During the 1960s, the chairs became a favorite among college students due to their low price and unconventionality. The chair was introduced by Pier 1 Imports in 1975 and soon became one of the retailer’s iconic products. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the papasan had become a common piece of furniture in American homes.
What game is he playing?
That’s tony hawks pro skater 4, looks like he was loading his save file on the main menu when the image was taken
Confirmed:
I was trying to figure that out too. The background sort of looks like a halfpipe. Maybe one of the Tony Hawk games?
Number 4 specifically.
Maybe Deathrow? I only ever rented it a couple times, but I looks like a depressing arena so… could be 😆
I had those speakers. I miss them. 😭
“Playing Elder Scrolls.”
Also this?
analognowhere.com/gotta be morrowind, right? doesn’t look like oblivion to me. but it’s been a while
the background is confusing me. doesn’t look like that type of game.
No, he’s playing Tony Hawks Pro Skater, I’m just answering his question.
Love me some Morrowind tho.
yeah I completely missed that joke
Nope, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4. That’s a skate ramp in the background.
That’s ramping, not scrolling.
(I can see what the game is that the dude is playing, I’m just answering his question. Besides, scrolling was a computer term far before that.)Oh my bad, good one, flew right over my head.
It’s a basic function of your mouse on your desktop PC, when you click on the bar on the right and pull down or up. What do they teach in schools these days?
Or hardware horizontal/vertical scrolling on consoles like the NES
