Pegasus - a blast of nostalgia

[Yasashii-kun]

I thought I might share with you guys a nostalgic piece of my childhood: the Pegasus.

Let me tell you about Poland of the 90s. We just broke free of Russian influence and as a result of years of dependence, we found ourselves way behind western countries when it comes to technology... and pretty much everything else.

I admit that I'm not even sure if the actual NES was even sold in Poland at all, but I didn't know anyone who owned one. None of us was even aware of it's existence. We made do with whatever we had and this is what we had:



It was a Famicom clone that everyone had. It was manufactured in Taiwan and sold in China, Russian and Poland. It grew huge popularity in here. So huge in fact, that you can still buy them online and on flea markets. Although now, it's considerably harder to find the real thing. Now it's mostly cheap ripoffs out there (yeah... ripoffs of something that was essentially a ripoff in itself).


I can't tell you how it compares to the original Famicom or NES, because I've never actually even played either of them. Nobody has that stuff. Even retro gamers. Nobody cares. The important thing is, it was easy to get, not all that expensive for a game console and it worked.

So yeah, as you should imagine, the game industry worked in a particular way. Nobody had a huge collection of games. Well, maybe the rich kids (of which there weren't many back then) but the rest of us had up to ten cartridges. To be fair, many of those were "many in one" cartridges but my point is, one person didn't own that many games. That's why game trading was blooming. Everyone traded cartridges with their friends and on trade points of which every hick town had at least one.

The tradition was pretty much woven into our national identity at that time and it moved on to the computer era. In the early 2000s, if you wanted to get a game, you either got it from a friend who had it from another friend and so on, or you went to a computer hardware market and got a hold of some games there. And I'm talking about pirated games here. Before you condemn us know this: we didn't have game stores. Even if you had the money and desire to buy an original game, it was very difficult. Especially in small towns like mine. Anyway, that's how it worked until internet got popularized in Poland. Now, we are in the slow process of moving on from downloading pirated games online to buying at least a small amount of games on Steam.

What I'm trying to say here is that the Pegasus had such an impact here that it defined the way things work even up till now. Since Pegasus was most popular in Poland, I guess I could say that it became a part of our history.

So yeah, I thought I would share a bit of it here for no particular reason other than sharing itself.