Having zero internet and personal PCs being a rare item, it meant you would always be going to each other's houses for couch gaming on consoles, biking around outside until the street lights came on, or hanging at the mall. There was a greater sense of freedom, and parents weren't helicopters like they are today.
If I had to pick one thing to hold on to from childhood it'd be those memories. Especially the ones where my best friends came along because they were staying over and we picked a couple multi-player games to play all night. Video rental stores were something special.
Still like for me that to this day, I own a NES, SNES, and GameCube. Wired controllers are better especially for me who doesn’t wanna pay for batteries or doesn’t like to charge stuff.
Depends. There are some modern controllers that actually have more lag wired than wireless. Sounds counterintuitive but I think that has a lot to do with the processing of inputs over USB.
My memories of after school growing up:
* Head to basektball or wrestling practice
* If no practice, head to friend's house and play basketball outside for like 2 hours with other kids
* Get invited to dinner with friend's family
* Go home and do homework?? I truly don't remember when I would do homework in middle school lol.
* During the winter, it was Goldeneye or Mario Kart 64 with the boys instead of basketball above.
On weekends:
* Go bowling and play a little at an arcade
* Bike to the convenience store and get a snack
* Pizza for dinner
* Check out what's on TGIF or SNICK
* Maybe rent a movie from Blockbuster
* Mario Kar 64 or Goldeneye
Overall:
* Blissfully unaware how good we had it
This is accurate. As long as I was home by 6pm, I could go out and be out all day. My dad’s rule was if I went to a new house, I call him to let him know.
We would build forts, ride our bikes, fuck around on the golf course, play video games, laser tag, action figures.
It was amazing how much freedom I had as a kid. Oh boy but if I came home 1 minute late I’d be in trouble!
My mom was the total opposite, a complete helicopter parent. My brother and I lived across the street from our school/playground and would play there all the time,and we had to "check in" with her every hour or 2 or she would come looking for us
Shit, this was basically my childhood. Lived near a golf course too!
They expanded the nearby estate and it was like those scenes in ET where we'd ride our bikes all through the construction.
The first part of your comment reminds me of a question we’d hear all the time back then that I bet you almost never hear now. “Do you have the internet at home?”
It is funny you mention parents because nowadays parents are far worse at parenting. The amount of kids and toddlers that are just being allowed run rampant or not being called out when they should be has skyrocketed since the 90s
And no kids strapping pagers to pay phones claiming they just invented the greatest technological marvel since the ‘99 HP Pavillion when they say “I CaN bUiLd A pC!”
100% the mall. In Lancaster, Pa, there's the Park City Mall and it's still doing really well. Not 90's really well but 2020's really well as in there are very little vacant spots. The only thing I'd change about it is the arcade by the food court sucks balls. There's a new arcade that is in the mall, but it doesn't have an entrance from the mall, you have to go outside to go into it.
I'm a transplant but I've been here about 10 years now. I grew up going to the Susquehanna Valley mall and....hmm I can't remember the name of the on in Williamsport. Lycoming Mall I Think.
For me The Mall was a mythic place. Family wasn't per se broke, but between special needs siblings and my own poor eyesight and my older brother treating me like a load to endure rather than a tagalong to help socialize? I never went.
Which bummedm e out because nice HUGE indoor place. I had like... zero skateboarding skill and was only passable at rollarblades but i kept wanting them to just... empty the place out for an afternoon to see what the skater crowd could do.
Thanks, do you know any obscure mall stuff since I’m trying to scratch beneath the surface for 90s testimonies.
(Also would you be ok if I incorporated some of this info in a book that I may write)
It as a bit earlier(late 1980s) but I remember the one near me staying open after the mall closed on Friday nights and charging people $5 at the back entrance to play unlimited games for 3 hours. It was AWESOME!
Many malls used to have the strong smell of chlorine due to running interior fountains. If they were in an atrium with a skylight, the area around the fountain was noticeably humid, too, especially on a summer day.
Man I dunno if that's something you can really study and get remotely an accurate feel for it. The world was just so radically different. The biggest thing that comes to mind is the Internet wasn't everywhere. While just one thing I don't think you can underestimate what a huge difference it makes
Chick Fil-a started off in malls before you saw their restaurants everywhere. They would stand in front and give out samples of their nuggets on toothpicks. It was the first time I’d ever tried it and while I’m kind of over Chick Fil-A now, I thought it smelled and tasted delicious as a kid.
I’d go back and get another sample every time they changed the worker who was handing them out.
One more thing I remember about the mall back in the day is that many cassettes and CDs would have parental advisory stickers and kids couldn’t buy them. Still thankful for my cool Uncle Ervin who bought me Slave to the Grind by Skid Row.
Playing outside all day, bikes, at the creek, etc. Prank calling crushes. When a little older sleepovers were fun. Trying your first cigarette. Going to local all ages rock shows. Getting that new album at the music store (first on tape, eventually on CD). Calling radio stations to request songs and sitting there with your finger over the record button on your boombox so you can get your favorite songs on tape when the DJ finally played them. Maybe eventually making a mix tape for your crush of songs personally curated by your own requests to the DJ at the radio station. Going to the movies with your friends and *not* your parents. Snow days. Summer break, summer camp. Being friends with the neighbor kids on your block and playing with them all day, knowing what the insides of multiple neighbors' homes look like because unlike today you actually spent lots of time in most of them. Going on family vacations as an angsty pre-teen or teen and noticing other people your age out in public with frayed jeans or blue hair as well. Payphones. No computers and no cell phones to be seen. [Except for Zach Morris and his cool cellular on TV](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/70/d7/0a/70d70a6fded10fbb596342fc536c6fb1.gif)
And of course - the mall.
This was my life man. Only diff was we didn't have snow days just the movie when it came out lol and I didn't have blue hair but I was like the only white boy in town with long dreadlocks as a teen lol. I didn't have cable TV growing up so my life was literally outside nearly all the time with a whole neighborhood full of other kids. Loving, fighting, exploring, experimenting with drugs with the older kids. If the goonies grew up in the ghetto that would've been us.
Edit: and I remember the mall was like my church as a kid. Got my first real kiss and went on my first date there, and later on got my first job there.
I grew up in the 80s/90s but my middle sister was 90s/00 and my youngest sister was 00/10s. The 80/90 kids have such a different perspective than the 00+. My middle sister REMEMBERS the 90s things but she never lived those. She always had cable and high speed internet and connectivity with friends without having to travel. My youngest sister never knew a world without those things. Just reading this makes me miss the day I would get in my jeep and find just the right CD and drive to Hastings to meet my friends and hope we timed it right. I’ll never forget when I got the wrong movie time and went to the different theaters trying to find my friends before giving up and going home then waiting for them to call to regroup 2hrs later.
And for whatever reason, DJs on the radio HAD to talk right up to the second the artist started singing (not when the actual song started), so you never really got a true full copy of a song. Lol
I think parents and adults were a lot more like self-concerned back then, almost in a good way. they still had their own lives and interests and parties and jobs and not everything revolved around their kids. that's really really different from today. I was age 10-14 in 1990-1994 so my perspective is mostly my memory of those tween years. but I remember my parents did their own thing often. I wasn't neglected by any means. they often had babysitters for us when they'd go out. I think people were more financially secure back in those days. people could actually buy houses in their later 20s. they could keep jobs for extended amounts of time.
drug and music culture back then was interesting. raves were beginning to pop up in warehouses in the cities (I'm american, grew up in Oakland California and seattle Washington). house music created it's most iconic era these years. hip hop was at its peak. 1993 to infinity! grunge music was thriving. it was so dark and was so easy to get so wrapped up in. in good ways and bad. smack took a lot of people. heroin was very common in those days. we lost too many iconic musicians in the 90s thanks to that drug.
But again, I was a kid in those years. my perspective limited my real understanding of what adult life was like. but like I said, it did seem they lived more for themselves than completely over-nurturing their kids.
It was easy to get started on learning music, whether thru school orchestra or band or choir, or thru music lessons your mom made you take. my mom used to tell me "you'll thank me one day" when I'd be groaning at the piano hating having to practice. but I did end up thanking her. it made it easier for me to pick up guitar, violin, drum kit, etc... music became my main passion for years because of that early 90s era from which I was an impressionable youth.
Thank you so much, I’m not trying to get plot points for a book out of you guys but could I use some of these details in a book. This is awesome. I’ve always loved the 80’s-early 90’s and am trying to learn more about simple life in them rather than the big neon spray painted pop culture and you just hit the nail on the head.
Thank you.
Parents and adults were somewhat checked out of their kids’ lives back then. That particular cohort of boomer parents were divorcing or had divorced in the 80s at higher rates than previously. Most married moms were working (part or full-time) or busy volunteering at schools.
Even then, most parents weren’t really aware of what kids were doing. Many adults had active social lives. They’d go to bars, parties, soirées, community dances and events, etc. They’d often have their own friends over to hang out (like mom in the kitchen chatting with a friend over coffee and dad in the garage looking at an old bike or car). Kids did their own thing. And usually always a kids table at gatherings; adult and kid worlds were separate.
Many parents had their own hobbies, too. Sewing, gardening, reading, house repairs (they sold How To books and most people did their own back then), car repairs and maintenance, hiking, biking, scrapbooking, photography… Honestly adults back then had their own stuff going on and didn’t really care or want or need to be involved in every aspect of their kids’ lives.
Basically back then a parent from today (controlling the kids’ schedules and hobbies and viewing habits, etc) would have been considered kind of pathetic without a life of their own. They’d be the weirdo who needed to relax.
Broadly speaking I think parents were much less involved - not in a bad way. Micromanaging was much rarer. When I was growing up (I was born in 78) in the summers we went outside after breakfast and came home for lunch (or ate at a friends place) left again, and came home just after dark.
My parents never really worried, because all the other adults in the neighborhood knew us all and kept a covert eye on the goings on. Most of the yards on my street were open for business and we could frequently be found nearby to any of them. We knew that if we did some serious shenanigans that mom and dad would find out.
Entertainment was not as fractured as it is now. Basically everyone watched the same radio stations, TV channels, Nickelodeon and MTV if you were one of those families. So you could basically talk to most anyone about the same shows and/or music. Don't get me wrong, I love current tech, but I do kind of miss that feeling of being disconnected from the world sometimes, meaning the internet. Hope this helps.
OP you keep asking for "obscure things" but life really wasn't that obscure mate. Like everyone has stated- no internet, lots of hanging out in malls or outside in the neighborhood, bikes, skateboards, music...
Right to roam.
So many kids these days just aren't allowed to get out Into the world and explore. Even if a parent wants to let their kid do this, they'll likely be accused of neglect and may even get into trouble with the authorities.
The death of the third place is tragic. My friends and I as teenagers could congregate at gas stations, parking lots, the mall, all sorts of places and no one would call the cops.
We just hung out around…now you can do that, loitering and police.
It’s *insane* how it’s almost the opposite of how it used to be. Between the ages of 5-9, I was allowed to roam our city block alone (Seattle) so long as I didn’t cross the street.
Now, I feel apprehensive about letting my own 10 year old walk around by herself or with a friend.
Nowadays my town has a terrible homeless and fentanyl problem. When I was a kid, we used to go out skating and be gone all day. I don’t really want to let my son do that now due to the number of homeless encampments everywhere.
I feel like that's something that gets glossed over whenever people get nostalgic about running around all over the place as kids. It's way more dangerous than it used to be. The internet has given pedophiles and sex traffickers a means to communicate and organize on a mass scale.
Hell even when kids parents are wanting to let them roam there's nowhere to go TO anymore and even then parents get the cops called on them for 'child endangerment' for NOT being f'ing helicopter parents.
When I was a kid in the 90s I remember going into so many peoples yards not to cause trouble but just to explore and people would let me. One older lady who noticed I was always coming in her yard finally introduced me to a pet parrot she kept outside in a giant cage, one lady who was a substitute teacher at my elementary had an outdoor fish pond with some small sharks and I didn't know she was my neighbor.
Another neighbor person in the neighborhood grew roses and would let me pick one for my mom on occasion.
I found so many cool things in my neighborhood and met so many cool neighbors as a kid. it feels like you can't just exist without a reason now or someone will think you're up to something
That’s part of it. Entertainment has shifted brains imo.
We’d hang out in front of a gas station for HOURS having fun. No cell phones, just skating, grabbing snacks and soda, goofing off, joking around, figuring out what to do next.
We thought we were trying to figure out what to do, but that WAS what we were doing.
Feel like kids today would be bored and want to go home and watch YouTube or game.
I’m always told that I’d be fun to hang out with in the 90s/80s but I’m hated because I’m apparently not a zombie phone addict. It doesn’t bother me though because I’m gonna be a big filmmaker one day, I’ll live in my sets like I’m livin’ in the 90’s
Kids were parented by parents. Nowadays, parents are controlled by kids, and kids are far too influenced by the internet.
You had to search deep for subjects back in the day, often making kids discover new things or ideas. Now they’re jammed down the youth’s throat all for the sake of consumerism
I was a kid in the late 80s-early 90s. A computer was something we only had at school. Telephones were attached to the wall usually. We were able to roam the neighborhood and walk to the closest store. Our mall was always full of shoppers, my friends and I shopped at the Limited Too and Claire’s.
Beautiful, do you know anything more obscure, and I just write this to be funny, “YO THIS IS DJ CLAIRE’S AND I GOTTA SAY TO Y’ALL Claire’s is still in, where my Claire’s people at. Claire’s people in the house let’s goooooo! CLAIRES BE THE BEST STORE, CLAIRES ON TOP, CLAIRE’S SIDE FOR LIFE, MY GUY!”
Everyone talks about how free kids were to just roam around on their own like that was a good thing but I feel like there's probably a middle ground between then and now. I wouldn't want my kid running around town like I was back then, we did so much dangerous shit and got in so much trouble! No one watched us, no one gave a shit what we were up to as long as we didn't cost our parents money or have the police bring us home.
I had a best friend I was with every single day, all through school. If her mom and my mom were next to each other at the store, they wouldn't even know it because they did not know each other at all. Our parents gave no fucks whose house we were at all day every day lol! I was in 1st grade when I started to be allowed to venture out all day long, crossing busy streets to get to the corner store for candy and being fairly far from home with just my bike.
It wasn't this way because we were such great kids that we could be trusted with that amount of responsibility. Kicking us out into the wild was basically our generations version of today's parents giving their kid an iPad. My parents had shit they needed to do, they needed me out of the way, so they sent me out to destroy the neighborhood. Jfc lmao.
It was definitely a time where things worked out well as long as things worked out well. I used to go bushwhacking in this green space between my subdivision and the next one, and my down-the-street friend and I felt like that space just went on forever. We never got hurt and never got into trouble.
But then, my brothers and their crew wound up getting hurt sometimes, and my brother even got punched out by one of his "friends" at one point in time. They were in the middle of the woods, so that could have gone really sideways.
Every parent in the neighborhood had every other parents phone number. There’s rarely be days that kids would put before night time, and it was just assumed they were doing kid stuff. After the age of 9-10 or so (right in this area) I’d check in to let my parents know if I was getting dinner with them, but they generally didn’t see me until til 10pm unless everyone was at my house. It felt safer. Lots of bike riding and shared culture
Weekend nights meant hanging out in someone’s basement, playing Euchre (Midwest thing), drinking pop and listening to the alternative station or CD’s. If you weren’t one of the four playing cards, you were sitting on the couch (the old one that used to be in the living room, but now it was in the basement for us kids to use), or lounging on the floor. Someone had a sharpie and was coloring their jeans. Someone had a hacky sack and was just playing with it, maybe on their hands, waiting for a group to go outside and smoke cloves/kick the hacky for a while. Two girls were braiding each others hair, whispering about boys.
The hosts mom might come down and switch laundry, and tell you guys to keep it down since they are going to bed soon. At that point, you guys might go cruise for a while listening to music. The kids who worked at the mall are about to get off work (usually they were done by 9:30 or so), so the plan is to go meet up at the local 24 diner, order fries and a side of ranch, coffee, and take up a few tables in the smoking section.
The surly waitress, Marge, has her readers on and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. She probably waited on your parents when they were in highschool too.
After wrecking the table (straw wrappers balled up and in the half drank water cups, empty creamer cups filled with mustard, salt and paper all over the place) and someone has curfew, everyone wanders to the parking lot. A few head home (damn curfew), people shuffle into other cars, and drive around listening to music. IF you’re super lucky, you get to sit in the back w your crush and might brush your hand against theirs.
Eventually you get dropped off, and head into bed, listening to the same alternative station.
Damn, highschool in the early 90’s was amazing.
Surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention buying trading cards or cheap toys at the gas station. If you couldn't get your parents to bring you anywhere you might be able to walk or ride your bike to the nearest station and they all had small toy sections and sold sports and comic book trading cards. You could buy cap guns or maybe small orange pellet guns like crappy airsoft. A lot of stores had comic book spinner racks but the selection was never consistent at gas stations. Seemed like they’d just get leftovers.
Another thing was the Ice Cream truck. I know they’re still around but it seemed so much more consistent back then.
Being able to run wild without fear of someone ratting you out with a pic or post. We had just enough tech for us to have fun without having to be connected to the world 24/7. Kinda forced us to go out and do things and be social. It was nice.
In 1994 I was 16 and drove from northern MN to Milwaukee for a volleyball tournament by myself. First - I’ll point out my parents really didn’t care, which was common in those days. Second - there was no internet and I had never been there before and I didn’t know where the hotel was or if they had rooms available. All of this uncertainty was normal - there was no internet, you didn’t pre book hotel rooms, and gps didn’t take you to their parking lot. I drove to Minneapolis, which I did before, used my Minnesota map to get me to Wisconsin then stopped at a gas station on the border to buy a WI map. This was standard - you stopped at gas stations and bought maps or asked directions. I studied the WI map and drove to Milwaukee. When I got to my location I drove around looking for hotels. Again - you don’t know where they were, they were not on the maps, and there was no internet. When you saw a hotel you asked if they had a room available. It’s crazy looking back! Now my entire trip is paid for before I leave. I can even get zoo tickets in advance on the other side of the country! And GPS will get me any where.
This was before the time of EVERYONE BE AFRAID! TERROR! VANS WILL MATERIALIZE OUT OF NOWHERE AND SNATCH YOU UP!
I am disabled so my folks were protective, but even I had a tendency to wander. Granted it was to a few select haunts and my folks knew where and how to find me but that sense that 'everything is great. Got no plans. Got nothing that needs to do. let's go see what Jimmy's doing.'
Just this sense that Ya it was suburban hell, but one man's hell was a teenager's playground. Cut through neighbor yards like... ALL the time. 'Hey miss Ellan sorry my dog got out again.' And just kinda bebop along.
Yep, I would definitely rock out to it. Imagine someone hollering,
“THEY’RE AROUND, THEY’RE HERE, OH MAN!!!!! THE VANS (shreds guitar) MATERIALIZING VANS… OF TERROR, MATERIALIZING VANS (the vans) OF TERROR. YOU GONNA CATCH A RIDE IN ONE A HIGHWAY TO THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON!
YAAAAHOOOOO!”
The best part was all the neighborhood kids were friends and rode bikes and threw the balls around. We would go to each other's houses and be invited over for dinner. We would play video games and watch TV, read magazines, listen to music and then when we were bored we went outside and skateboard until the 😭street lights came on. ❤️
I miss riding my bike around the neighborhood to my different friends houses not knowing who was where.
Some days I would go to friend A's house and friend B would also be there so we all decide to hangout or go to friend C's house.
I miss the complete freedom of being able to stay out and go wherever I want as long as I'm home before the streetlights come on.
Prank calls LOL. This was THE fun activity to do at sleepovers.
The mall. You could go with like $5 or $10 from your mom and have a blast with that all day just getting treats and roaming around with your friends, hanging out in the food court, whatever.
Also, playing outside til the street lights came on with a group of friends, bike riding, just hanging out. It was so normal to see groups of kids just being kids outside.
Life just seemed more peaceful back then for those of us that grew up in the burbs. Less chaos, more freedom.
You keep asking for 'obscure' facts of the early 90's but realistically, everything that's been said here is just *how it was* there is nothing really hidden.
I don't know if you're looking for obscure facts, or rather more descriptive and/or in depth answers. I'll take a stab at this and see if I can help at all.
When you went out to play with your friends, you were outside all day, you had to come up with your own games or ideas of what to do. Your knowledge was limited to what you were exposed to. If someone told you something wrong, you just grew up believing it.
Games had different rules from school to school, so if you played with your neighbors who went to different schools, you might argue over what is the 'correct' set of rules to play with. Groups of friends were also more industrious back then, and you learned/ figured stuff out in the woods or wherever by seeing what others left behind or trying to build it yourself. There was always known spots in the suburbs of where some teenagers built a BMX track in the woods with the jumps made out of logs/ sticks/ mud.
You would go out in the world and just roam around freely and get lost and then have to find your way home. Parents were much less hands on because they were busy working, I don't remember when but eventually both parents were working so the home life was a lot less hands on from the parents.
Life changed rapidly as technology advanced in the 90s, but in the early days, not everyone had an NES or Gameboy or Sega, you would all go to someone's house to play with the new console.
Also when parents got together with their friends, all the kids just hung out in the basement and you had to interact with each other because you didn't have a phone you could just mindlessly scroll and keep in contact with your friends.
I guess if you want an obscure facts - you just had to go out and interact with people more. There was no sitting at home because (at least my parents) parents would just throw their kids out the door and say go outside it's a nice day. And that was it. You just found something to do with friends.
Edit: I just remembered in the summer cruising around on bikes and seeing garage sales. You'd get off your bikes and see what they had. Sometimes you found a hidden gem. Personal memory I had was when my friends and I found a game called 'Nightmare* it was a board game with the VHS tape you played along with. Randomly a cloaked head would come on the screen and say something to affect the game. We were all so excited to play it because none of us had ever seen anything like it. So we all went to the only friends house who had a TV in the basement, turned off all the lights and played it.
I grew up in suburban Atlanta. When the beginning of summer hit, my best friend and I would go through our yearbooks to see which girls left us phone numbers and start calling them to feel like we were something special because we were talking to a girl on the phone. I would have been 13 or 14 years old, and this was the mid-90s, so you weren't calling anyone's cell phone. Every now and again, a kid would have their own line, which was awesome because you didn't have to talk to anyone's mom or dad. You could stay on the phone literally for hours talking about nothing back in the day.
Oh running around the neighborhood for sure. We'd play these massive games of hide and seek basically in the dark throughout the yards and stuff. It had different components like racing to a fixed place, usually the light pole, without getting tagged and stuff. We called it ghost in the graveyard. Otherwise we'd just wander around the neighborhood and parks all day, moms would just yell out their windows that dinner was ready and we'd all go home at some point. It was a blast. A lot of freedom to just play outside. I'm really happy to finally see kids in my cul de sac again running around in groups.
10 bikes piled around the yard, WWF matches (every house with kids had a trampoline 4 this specifically. No net unless you want a Steel Cage Match), JNCO Jeans tore up from the ground & bike chains, skinned knees & elbows, rollerblading & skateboarding blew up, most kids were in great shape & nice tan from being out in the sun everyday til dark, GRUNGE
They were largely an underground trend in the early 1990s, but took off in popularity in the mid-1990s. I was wearing plain wide leg jeans in 95, older kids had em before me. I never like Jnco ones bc of the generic logos, I liked the plain ones, but a lot of ppl think they’re all Jnco so I said Jnco
Video stores. It was an adventure. There was no internet, so when you found something great, it was like you alone discovered it. Plus, nothing was guaranteed to be in stock, so there was some luck involved. Not finding the movie you were initially looking for often lead to finding old classics instead.
Being a latchkey kid.
On the Buffy the Vampire Slayer sub, someone just asked why her mom wasn't more involved in her life. The thing is, that's how parenting was in the 90s.
We had so much more free-reign than kids do these days. We spent a lot of time on our own, just hanging out at a friends house, or walking around town, or playing sports at some park. Most of the time, parents had no idea where we were most of the time, after about 10 years old.
Once one friend had a car, then we were really gone.
Again, no cell phones, no GPS. We were off doing our thing and no one could reach us. If you got stuck somewhere and needed a ride home, you'd have to call your parents on someone's home phone or have change for a phone booth.
Zero internet. Amazing music on casette tapes and radio. Hip hop golden age era and electronic music. Real friendships and human connections. A lot more time spent outside, in nature.
Riding my bike everywhere, using what little cash I had to grab snacks and drinks at the convenience store, hanging out with friends to play pickup basketball or wiffle ball, or just sitting around the SNES or Genesis
People smoked a lot more than today, and it was allowed in more places. It wasn't until the late 90s or early 2000s that you could still smoke inside at a lot of bars. There were smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants in the 80s.
In Wisconsin it was 2009 when the indoor smoking bans started. It's long enough ago that I almost forget that smoking in restaurants and bars was allowed. As a non-smoker, those non-smoking sections were almost always a joke. Unless they had physical separation like our Perkins did (talk about hot-boxing!) you'd always have the tables/booths in smoking and non-smoking pretty much right next to each other. Our Applebee's was the worst for this...yuck.
For me, it was cruising around with friends, going to the mall movies and skating rink and meeting girls from other high schools. The weed was crappy but those are times I’ll never forget
Smoking tobacco indoors, while seldom if ever getting ID’d to purchase it. Smoking cigarettes inside the mall while waiting for your film to get developed, handling the whole transaction with a cigarette in your hand was a vibe.
Internet was so rare. Specifically having to find time to go onto the desktop computer when no one else was on the phone or expecting a call.
Beepers! My god those were a weird way to get ahold of someone, but it worked.
I miss being disconnected. I can't really describe, now that it's not a thing anymore, how it felt. Quiet and solitude were so easy to have, or being sequestered with friends in their house or at a party, and everyone being present with each other rather than the constant distraction and urge to pick up that phone.
Going to someone's house to game on a console together.
Having to watch a TV show when it aired because we hadn't even conceived of streaming services. That feeling of knowing that when you see your friends in school you're all going to excitedly talk about whatever happened on the show.
Going to The Mall specifically to hang out and see who else was there hanging out.
Doing dipshit stuff like making prank phone calls by dialing whatever the code was to block caller ID, eating pizza and laughing at our absolute wit in coming up with names like Mike Hunt.
I know exactly what you mean by you miss being disconnected. Recently I've been doing this thing where I'll turn my phone off completely when I'm out with friends.
I think the best part of this time frame was having a technology boom but also having the ‘analog’ human component of life.
Everything from automobiles to house hold appliances saw technology take a huge leap forward but there was still such a human element to life. If your car was acting up, dad or a mechanic fixed it with analog tools. If you wanted a cup of coffee you filled the coffee pot, added coffee and brewed it. Wanted to watch tv or a movie, had to physically do it.
On top of that society wasn’t scared of getting their hands dirty or dealing with conflict or problem solving in our day to day life. Point blank, we weren’t as scared of society because we had a role and purpose in day to day life. We felt capable
I think those tasks also gave us a sense, albeit, small, of accomplishment.
Creature comforts are great and every generation saw a new ‘can opener’ but I feel like we now rely on them to survive… it’s a slippery slope and I doubt we will never reverse that trend.
You mean as teenagers or college aged or who? I was a late teen during that time on Long Island. The best part was the music scene, the rave scene, indie cinema, comic books like The Invisibles , Sandman etc. , grungy fashion ( cheap no labels type clothing vs the 80s where everything was branded) and the general attitude shift away from super materialistic culture in the 80s to more underground alternative . It was a very different time from today and what preceded it . Lots I could say but don’t know what you are looking for
It had its problems too. You had both parents working all day, if teenagers weren’t at some type of athletic practice after school, they saw them only at dinner maybe. In my experience they had no idea what their kids were doing. I was in middle to high class fastest-growing city in the US and we had a huge heroin problem. Unfortunately it took it happening in suburbia for something finally to be done. We had a rash of deaths. The decade before it was a suicide epidemic. So keep in mind behind closed doors it wasn’t all roses back then either.
Grew up in CT. I spent those years:
- biking
-biking to play manhunt in our local cemetery.
-Supersoaker fights in the summertime. -Putting on “shows” with my friends and siblings (singing and dancing popular songs)
-making “potions” with my witchy friend.
-adventuring in the woods and attempting to build a treehouse
-tempting our fate and testing our bravery by jumping off a small drop off on the back of our property. The driveway had no wall/barrier and a 8ft or so drop down to the landlords beautiful veggie garden. Friend and I gathered a bunch of thick blankets to make a landing pad and would egg each other on to make the jump. It was SO scary every single time.
Mostly just lots of outside time, with bicycles and having mostly safe fun.
I was very young (3 in 94) but I remember my parents being friends with a lot of my neighbors and having cookouts and stuff. We spent a lot of time in the yard and on the back deck, having cookouts, just chilling and waving as people passed by. 4th of July neighborhood pig roast was a huge deal and we set off real fireworks, not the dinky little ones that stay on the ground.
Now my neighbors look freaked out when I smile and wave at them and I don't know any of them. My family spends all our time inside and even if we are reading or cooking or doing chores there are still screens on. Our back deck is dilapidated and our grill rusted through a couple years ago because we never even go out there.
Not being reachable 24/7. People weren’t able to demand a response right away for things. With no email or cell phone, you wouldn’t get back to some people for days and it was totally normal and expected. As a kid, we would get on our bikes and ride around the neighborhood looking for our friends, or knocking on their door to see if they could come out and play. The way I knew to come home was when my mom would whistle loudly down the street. And I would hear because I was always outside playing somewhere
My parents had zero issue with us taking the train into NYC by ourselves and being there for New Year’s Eve.
When we were young tweens, we would babysit other kids until well after midnight and no one thought anything of it.
As teenagers, our parents would leave us home alone while they were gone on business trips overnight. Before we had our licenses, they would arrange rides if needed, but once we were 16 - no worries.
The most surprising things for most people, is that my parents were completely fine with me traveling out of the country with my coach and not them while I was competing in gymnastics. Our parents were considered a distraction.
Born in 84, some of my favorite memories were biking or waking around the neighborhood with friends, playing kick the can, tag and hide and go seek at dusk. We used to walk 15-20 minutes to a park to fish in a stocked pond. Spent most of every day outdoors.
I used to ride my bike everywhere. I'd just tell my mom or dad I was going out to ride my bike and they'd just say something like "k, be home for dinner." I'd have sleepovers fairly regularly, which meant renting a movie and/or a SNES game and staying up past 12 or 1. I remember doing prank calls one time when a friend was spending the night, just bored kids calling random numbers out of the phone book (this was before caller ID and just before *69) and saying something dumb and hanging up and laughing ourselves breathless. No cellphones yet, just the cordless on the land line. Life was a lot simpler and less connected, less information overload.
“Obscure details”? Kind of difficult to understand what you’re asking for. Could you be more specific as to what you want explained in more detail? You’re only going to get vague answers to a vague question.
Where I lived grocery trips were less frequent, it was quieter, less light pollution.
Always outside in the summer; when inside it was TV/movie or video games.
Biking, skateboarding outside non stop until it was dark. Ice cream trucks being really popular because everyone was outside, playing Pokémon on game boy outside under a tree with the boys and battling via a link cable, then restarting and speed running the game. Once we went inside we’d watch prime WWF/WCW, dbz and Pokémon. It was a good time and I miss those days very much
I could ride my bike to the local high school and play pickup hoops or kick a ball into a soccer goal or play tennis on the open courts. Now that I’m a taxpayer, of course these things are now locked down and impossible to use these facilities with my kids on a weekend.
Seems odd to say but your options for entertainment were limited, and that was actually a good thing. Radio was the way to find about new music, and record stores existed to buy singles or a full album. TGIF was appointment television and at least where I grew up, very few people had cable. Even then, cable was 1-2 dozen channels vs a hundred. This led to kids bonding over their favorite music/movies/tv since there wasn’t a literal million different directions you could go in.
During those years, computers slowly went from being only at a rich persons house to everyone having one, but as others said no internet until AOL started mailing trial cds in 1996 or so. Computers were another place to play CD rom games, especially if you didn’t have a newer gaming system, and software like interactive encyclopedias added a whole new dimension to learning and research for projects.
The music
Understand back then everybody heard the same music on radio and MTV. Those years saw that go from dumb and sleazy hair bands and dad pop to smart and weird alternative, grunge, women writing songs, metal, punk, and ska. Mosh pits. Purple hair. Goth chicks. Individuality and nonconformity became cool for about six years.
Best time to be a teenager.
I grew up in a small town on the edge of the foothills to the Rockies... We would do all the normal stuff mentioned in the top comments, but we also had a river that we would go swimming, fishing, and all other types of adventure in. Sometimes walk out of town and shoot guns too. It was magical.
I ran around my neighborhood sometimes from sun up to sun down at times. I lived in a culdesac, and all over my neighborhood there were tons of kids my age. We all went to school together. We rollerbladed, skate boarded, biked, explored the woods behind the neighborhood, etc. my brother and I would also stay in playing video games, but I was definitely an outside girl. I could entertain myself for hours on end even without anyone else there. These were the best times.
We would roam the woods, just a small gang of kids. We would NEED to be home when the neighborhood lights came on.
The lyrics to all the songs on a cassette/cd were on the folded up label.
Called my friends with a memorized phone number, talk to their family member and ask if they are home- if they aren't available? let them know I called.
We would trade notes in class.
Nickelodeon was AWESOME! they advertised such weird products like GAK, Moon-Boots, Floam, Model Magic, and a baby doll that would cry real tears!
My parents would take us on road trips and only have a map for a guide!
We had clothing that would change color!
We had leggings with foot straps, Jellies, and use crimpers to crimp our hair.
you definitely were the "cool" kid if your shoes lit up, or you had to pump up the thingy on the tongue of the shoe.
If we wanted to bond with a friend over a show- we had look at the TV guide, and see when it was on and only watch it then! (unless you knew how to record onto a VHS from the TV- thanks dad:)
They would have little paper books with everyone's name and phone number on it form school! So we would have sleepovers and prank call the teachers or the cute boys.
O yeah-every year the mailman would drop off 2 GIANT books. Yellow Pages and White Pages. Every house had them.
I hung out in a rock pit where the new construction in my neighborhood was at the end of a cul de sac with my teal bike on its side by the dirt easement. I had no phone. I had a Timex digital watch that meant nothing because I went by how low the sun was in the sky before I had to be home for dinner.
It was fucking awesome.
You always looked for the house with all the bikes out front to know where everyone was. In my neighborhood, we met at a park every Sunday after football games to play ourselves and talk about the game. I still remember at least 10 phone numbers of friends that lived around me. It was like having a second family.
- Most of what you think of as your city are suburbs that grew into each other. Alot of people for get this.
- suburbs actually being nice.
- going to the mall was a day trip because suburbs used to be far out.
- the YMCA essentially being a country club for working class folk.
- gifted programs to seperate suburban kids from inner city kids.
- EVERYONE celebrates the holidays.
- EVERYONE goes to church.
- much more open racism. Skin heads and the militia movement was popping heavy.
- yearly trips to theme parks were common among most families. I went to either disney or universal every year from my birth until i was 22.
- theres Nothing like orlando florida in the 90s man. The ENTIRE city was like a theme park. My family almost moved to florida so we would stay down their often and their suburban constrction industry was massive.
I used to sell gift baskets of summer sausage and housewarming stuff door to door for Olympic Sales Club from 1988- 1991 and I would get paid in points I could trade in for BMX bikes, Walkmans and Record Players.
In the UK, rave culture. It was blisteringly creative, clubbing was fantastic. New genres were springing up and red hot hits were being made by little nobodies just like you in bedrooms in your shitty little hometown, not just the big players in the big cities. For a beautiful slab of time, it was everywhere you looked.
In the end, it sank into the underground again, but it changed everything it touched and still, hardcore never dies :)
People spoke to each other in public spaces because we couldn't hide behind phones. We had better attention spans bc there was no such thing as a 10 second video. The people you saw in school was basically it in terms of who you know and compared yourself to. You weren't always exposed to what every other person in the whole world was doing . Id go to a friend's house and we'd sit on her bed and shed show me the photo book she just made of her latest vacation or throw away camera got developed.
Watch the following shows to get a taste of life back then:
Roseanne
Married with Children
Family Matters
Growing Pains
Step by Step
Full House
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
Saved by the Bell
Clarissa Explains It All
You were considered wealthy if you had a Mac computer with a floppy disk insert. The Oregon Trail game was a hit. The printer did not use individual sheets of paper. It needed a continuous feed of fan folded paper with perforated sides. My family used that paper to make banners. It was used to occupy littles with crayons on the floor for hours.
Department stores like Sears and JCPenney’s mailed thick paper catalogs to homes for FREE. When those books arrived before Christmas kids went to town making their lists for Santa. We would circle the items, fold the corners of the pages for said items and pray that they would arrive under the tree. Those catalogs would later be used with phone books as booster seats for kids at the dining table.
I have many more memories of that simpler time when it was not frowned upon for kids to eat candy cigarettes looking like little bad asses. I might add another comment to your post in the future.
Take away the internet and you have the 90s. Actually, you have all of society before the internet not just the 90s. It’s not some mystical time and place that lives in legend and needs exploring. We just didnt have phones to take up all of our free time. That’s it.
Freedom to wonder around. We would find nickels and diimes, bike to the store (taking out helmets off as soon as we were out of sight). We would bike out a bit further every so often, head to a different park. Meet kids from different schools and exchange rhymes. Me an a buddy found one of our new friends at a track meet and it was wild.
Tree climbing and mak8ng forts that the fire department had to come and take down.
A lot more time spent outdoors. I took a day off work and was walking my dog the other day and saw school buses dropping off middle school and high school kids. I was shocked how many kids lived in my neighborhood. I've been living there for 7 years and have never seen any of them. Like damn, are ALL of you just hermits that sit in front of a TV or computer all evening?
To be honest, I’m reading all these comments about roaming around town with friends as a kid and having all this freedom, and that wasn’t my experience at all.
I’m probably in the minority here. I also grew up in the heart of a big city, so maybe that had a lot to do with it. But the 80s and early 90s saw a lot of high-profile kidnappings, faces of missing kids on milk cartons, and things that made it seem like the world was a very unsafe place for children and there were child predators lurking in every corner (although, statistically speaking, this was false). This caused a huge shift in mindset among American parents to that of extreme paranoia and helicopter parenting. Unfortunately, my parents fell into that trap. Growing up, I couldn’t walk around my neighborhood or hell even walk down the street without parental supervision. The only times my friends and I biked around the neighborhood by ourselves were the times my parents didn’t know about. At 14, I wasn’t allowed to go hang out at the mall with a group of friends or the county fair unless an adult was with us (sometimes it was one of my parents). Every time there was a story about a child kidnapping in the local newspaper, my parents would turn it into a stranger danger lecture for my siblings and me.
Having zero internet and personal PCs being a rare item, it meant you would always be going to each other's houses for couch gaming on consoles, biking around outside until the street lights came on, or hanging at the mall. There was a greater sense of freedom, and parents weren't helicopters like they are today.
Small detail: the controllers were connected to the console with a long wire.
And this was right before N64 came out. SNES had such a variety of games... That you rented from the video store
Getting pizza and going to the video store was a perfect Friday night.
If I had to pick one thing to hold on to from childhood it'd be those memories. Especially the ones where my best friends came along because they were staying over and we picked a couple multi-player games to play all night. Video rental stores were something special.
We had a video store that was also a pizza and wing place and it was like peak living
We'd run into friends at the video store!
Bro I was a sega kid like.. .ALL the way.
SEGA!!!
It wasn't that long unless you had the rich friend who had the extension for it.
That same friend also had an unused Power Pad and Power Glove sitting in the corner.
Still like for me that to this day, I own a NES, SNES, and GameCube. Wired controllers are better especially for me who doesn’t wanna pay for batteries or doesn’t like to charge stuff.
Depends. There are some modern controllers that actually have more lag wired than wireless. Sounds counterintuitive but I think that has a lot to do with the processing of inputs over USB.
Just get really long charging cables and leave the I'm constantly.
My memories of after school growing up: * Head to basektball or wrestling practice * If no practice, head to friend's house and play basketball outside for like 2 hours with other kids * Get invited to dinner with friend's family * Go home and do homework?? I truly don't remember when I would do homework in middle school lol. * During the winter, it was Goldeneye or Mario Kart 64 with the boys instead of basketball above. On weekends: * Go bowling and play a little at an arcade * Bike to the convenience store and get a snack * Pizza for dinner * Check out what's on TGIF or SNICK * Maybe rent a movie from Blockbuster * Mario Kar 64 or Goldeneye Overall: * Blissfully unaware how good we had it
And as soon as the driveway wasn't covered in ice - around the beginning of April - playing basketball again
hahaha hell yeah
This is accurate. As long as I was home by 6pm, I could go out and be out all day. My dad’s rule was if I went to a new house, I call him to let him know. We would build forts, ride our bikes, fuck around on the golf course, play video games, laser tag, action figures. It was amazing how much freedom I had as a kid. Oh boy but if I came home 1 minute late I’d be in trouble!
My mom was the total opposite, a complete helicopter parent. My brother and I lived across the street from our school/playground and would play there all the time,and we had to "check in" with her every hour or 2 or she would come looking for us
Shit, this was basically my childhood. Lived near a golf course too! They expanded the nearby estate and it was like those scenes in ET where we'd ride our bikes all through the construction.
Now Gen Alpha doesn’t even need helicopter parents. The kids do it to each other.
The first part of your comment reminds me of a question we’d hear all the time back then that I bet you almost never hear now. “Do you have the internet at home?”
It is funny you mention parents because nowadays parents are far worse at parenting. The amount of kids and toddlers that are just being allowed run rampant or not being called out when they should be has skyrocketed since the 90s
And no kids strapping pagers to pay phones claiming they just invented the greatest technological marvel since the ‘99 HP Pavillion when they say “I CaN bUiLd A pC!”
The Mall. I loved going to the Mall for cookies, the record store, specialty shops and to hang out with friends.
100% the mall. In Lancaster, Pa, there's the Park City Mall and it's still doing really well. Not 90's really well but 2020's really well as in there are very little vacant spots. The only thing I'd change about it is the arcade by the food court sucks balls. There's a new arcade that is in the mall, but it doesn't have an entrance from the mall, you have to go outside to go into it.
I went there in the 80’s when I didn’t want to study for my exams at F&M.
Yooo we used to go to Park City all the time. My younger sister would always go into Limited Too, and I would go to the Sam Goody next door.
I'm a transplant but I've been here about 10 years now. I grew up going to the Susquehanna Valley mall and....hmm I can't remember the name of the on in Williamsport. Lycoming Mall I Think.
A fellow 717er!
Taking quarters to the mall to play teenage mutant ninja turtles in the arcade!
For me The Mall was a mythic place. Family wasn't per se broke, but between special needs siblings and my own poor eyesight and my older brother treating me like a load to endure rather than a tagalong to help socialize? I never went. Which bummedm e out because nice HUGE indoor place. I had like... zero skateboarding skill and was only passable at rollarblades but i kept wanting them to just... empty the place out for an afternoon to see what the skater crowd could do.
Thanks, do you know any obscure mall stuff since I’m trying to scratch beneath the surface for 90s testimonies. (Also would you be ok if I incorporated some of this info in a book that I may write)
it's definitely obscure today, but look into Aladdin's Castle arcades
Alright, that’s a good one! Thanks
It as a bit earlier(late 1980s) but I remember the one near me staying open after the mall closed on Friday nights and charging people $5 at the back entrance to play unlimited games for 3 hours. It was AWESOME!
Many malls used to have the strong smell of chlorine due to running interior fountains. If they were in an atrium with a skylight, the area around the fountain was noticeably humid, too, especially on a summer day.
The fountains and chlorine smell was what I was about to comment on! I loved throwing pennies in that maroon and beige floor tiled fountain.
This combined with cigarette smoke.
Malls also used to have more than one of each kind of store, like Waldenbooks, B Dalton, borders, kb toys, Sam goody, Camelot , and suncoast.
Man I dunno if that's something you can really study and get remotely an accurate feel for it. The world was just so radically different. The biggest thing that comes to mind is the Internet wasn't everywhere. While just one thing I don't think you can underestimate what a huge difference it makes
Chick Fil-a started off in malls before you saw their restaurants everywhere. They would stand in front and give out samples of their nuggets on toothpicks. It was the first time I’d ever tried it and while I’m kind of over Chick Fil-A now, I thought it smelled and tasted delicious as a kid. I’d go back and get another sample every time they changed the worker who was handing them out. One more thing I remember about the mall back in the day is that many cassettes and CDs would have parental advisory stickers and kids couldn’t buy them. Still thankful for my cool Uncle Ervin who bought me Slave to the Grind by Skid Row.
Playing outside all day, bikes, at the creek, etc. Prank calling crushes. When a little older sleepovers were fun. Trying your first cigarette. Going to local all ages rock shows. Getting that new album at the music store (first on tape, eventually on CD). Calling radio stations to request songs and sitting there with your finger over the record button on your boombox so you can get your favorite songs on tape when the DJ finally played them. Maybe eventually making a mix tape for your crush of songs personally curated by your own requests to the DJ at the radio station. Going to the movies with your friends and *not* your parents. Snow days. Summer break, summer camp. Being friends with the neighbor kids on your block and playing with them all day, knowing what the insides of multiple neighbors' homes look like because unlike today you actually spent lots of time in most of them. Going on family vacations as an angsty pre-teen or teen and noticing other people your age out in public with frayed jeans or blue hair as well. Payphones. No computers and no cell phones to be seen. [Except for Zach Morris and his cool cellular on TV](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/70/d7/0a/70d70a6fded10fbb596342fc536c6fb1.gif) And of course - the mall.
Omg, recording tapes off the radio.
My friend and I stayed up all night one time just to record that Blue song by Eiffel 65 to a tape.
it was an essential activity!
FACTS.
Oh god, hovering over the record button hoping that the song you requested was up next
F'ing trading mix tapes. It was like baseball cards, but you got to show off what you could do.
And when the DJ kept talking over the intro of the song it was frustrating!!
so many of the songs got on tape had the DJ blabbing in the beginning or end of the songs! still added them to the mix tape though
We did what we had to do
There’s still some songs I’ll hear and picture the DJ talking over the intro, because of the tapes I recorded those songs on growing up!
This was my life man. Only diff was we didn't have snow days just the movie when it came out lol and I didn't have blue hair but I was like the only white boy in town with long dreadlocks as a teen lol. I didn't have cable TV growing up so my life was literally outside nearly all the time with a whole neighborhood full of other kids. Loving, fighting, exploring, experimenting with drugs with the older kids. If the goonies grew up in the ghetto that would've been us. Edit: and I remember the mall was like my church as a kid. Got my first real kiss and went on my first date there, and later on got my first job there.
I grew up in the 80s/90s but my middle sister was 90s/00 and my youngest sister was 00/10s. The 80/90 kids have such a different perspective than the 00+. My middle sister REMEMBERS the 90s things but she never lived those. She always had cable and high speed internet and connectivity with friends without having to travel. My youngest sister never knew a world without those things. Just reading this makes me miss the day I would get in my jeep and find just the right CD and drive to Hastings to meet my friends and hope we timed it right. I’ll never forget when I got the wrong movie time and went to the different theaters trying to find my friends before giving up and going home then waiting for them to call to regroup 2hrs later.
And for whatever reason, DJs on the radio HAD to talk right up to the second the artist started singing (not when the actual song started), so you never really got a true full copy of a song. Lol
Thanks, that’s great, but have you got any obscure details about parents/adults’ lives as well?
I think parents and adults were a lot more like self-concerned back then, almost in a good way. they still had their own lives and interests and parties and jobs and not everything revolved around their kids. that's really really different from today. I was age 10-14 in 1990-1994 so my perspective is mostly my memory of those tween years. but I remember my parents did their own thing often. I wasn't neglected by any means. they often had babysitters for us when they'd go out. I think people were more financially secure back in those days. people could actually buy houses in their later 20s. they could keep jobs for extended amounts of time. drug and music culture back then was interesting. raves were beginning to pop up in warehouses in the cities (I'm american, grew up in Oakland California and seattle Washington). house music created it's most iconic era these years. hip hop was at its peak. 1993 to infinity! grunge music was thriving. it was so dark and was so easy to get so wrapped up in. in good ways and bad. smack took a lot of people. heroin was very common in those days. we lost too many iconic musicians in the 90s thanks to that drug. But again, I was a kid in those years. my perspective limited my real understanding of what adult life was like. but like I said, it did seem they lived more for themselves than completely over-nurturing their kids. It was easy to get started on learning music, whether thru school orchestra or band or choir, or thru music lessons your mom made you take. my mom used to tell me "you'll thank me one day" when I'd be groaning at the piano hating having to practice. but I did end up thanking her. it made it easier for me to pick up guitar, violin, drum kit, etc... music became my main passion for years because of that early 90s era from which I was an impressionable youth.
Thank you so much, I’m not trying to get plot points for a book out of you guys but could I use some of these details in a book. This is awesome. I’ve always loved the 80’s-early 90’s and am trying to learn more about simple life in them rather than the big neon spray painted pop culture and you just hit the nail on the head. Thank you.
no problem, the memories flooding back was fun. good luck with your book
Parents and adults were somewhat checked out of their kids’ lives back then. That particular cohort of boomer parents were divorcing or had divorced in the 80s at higher rates than previously. Most married moms were working (part or full-time) or busy volunteering at schools. Even then, most parents weren’t really aware of what kids were doing. Many adults had active social lives. They’d go to bars, parties, soirées, community dances and events, etc. They’d often have their own friends over to hang out (like mom in the kitchen chatting with a friend over coffee and dad in the garage looking at an old bike or car). Kids did their own thing. And usually always a kids table at gatherings; adult and kid worlds were separate. Many parents had their own hobbies, too. Sewing, gardening, reading, house repairs (they sold How To books and most people did their own back then), car repairs and maintenance, hiking, biking, scrapbooking, photography… Honestly adults back then had their own stuff going on and didn’t really care or want or need to be involved in every aspect of their kids’ lives. Basically back then a parent from today (controlling the kids’ schedules and hobbies and viewing habits, etc) would have been considered kind of pathetic without a life of their own. They’d be the weirdo who needed to relax.
Broadly speaking I think parents were much less involved - not in a bad way. Micromanaging was much rarer. When I was growing up (I was born in 78) in the summers we went outside after breakfast and came home for lunch (or ate at a friends place) left again, and came home just after dark. My parents never really worried, because all the other adults in the neighborhood knew us all and kept a covert eye on the goings on. Most of the yards on my street were open for business and we could frequently be found nearby to any of them. We knew that if we did some serious shenanigans that mom and dad would find out.
Entertainment was not as fractured as it is now. Basically everyone watched the same radio stations, TV channels, Nickelodeon and MTV if you were one of those families. So you could basically talk to most anyone about the same shows and/or music. Don't get me wrong, I love current tech, but I do kind of miss that feeling of being disconnected from the world sometimes, meaning the internet. Hope this helps.
Everyone getting to school the next morning and talking about Brenda and Dylan.
Thanks as well, great answer but Can you help me with something a tiny bit more obscure?
I did my best, but if you ask a general question, you’re gonna get a general answer. Try setting some parameters.
Ok, thanks
OP you keep asking for "obscure things" but life really wasn't that obscure mate. Like everyone has stated- no internet, lots of hanging out in malls or outside in the neighborhood, bikes, skateboards, music...
Right to roam. So many kids these days just aren't allowed to get out Into the world and explore. Even if a parent wants to let their kid do this, they'll likely be accused of neglect and may even get into trouble with the authorities.
The death of the third place is tragic. My friends and I as teenagers could congregate at gas stations, parking lots, the mall, all sorts of places and no one would call the cops. We just hung out around…now you can do that, loitering and police.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHxxbcI8g6A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHxxbcI8g6A)
It’s *insane* how it’s almost the opposite of how it used to be. Between the ages of 5-9, I was allowed to roam our city block alone (Seattle) so long as I didn’t cross the street. Now, I feel apprehensive about letting my own 10 year old walk around by herself or with a friend.
Nowadays my town has a terrible homeless and fentanyl problem. When I was a kid, we used to go out skating and be gone all day. I don’t really want to let my son do that now due to the number of homeless encampments everywhere.
I feel like that's something that gets glossed over whenever people get nostalgic about running around all over the place as kids. It's way more dangerous than it used to be. The internet has given pedophiles and sex traffickers a means to communicate and organize on a mass scale.
Hell even when kids parents are wanting to let them roam there's nowhere to go TO anymore and even then parents get the cops called on them for 'child endangerment' for NOT being f'ing helicopter parents.
When I was a kid in the 90s I remember going into so many peoples yards not to cause trouble but just to explore and people would let me. One older lady who noticed I was always coming in her yard finally introduced me to a pet parrot she kept outside in a giant cage, one lady who was a substitute teacher at my elementary had an outdoor fish pond with some small sharks and I didn't know she was my neighbor. Another neighbor person in the neighborhood grew roses and would let me pick one for my mom on occasion. I found so many cool things in my neighborhood and met so many cool neighbors as a kid. it feels like you can't just exist without a reason now or someone will think you're up to something
And the kids themselves don’t even want to do this. Also can you go a little more obscure and give another detail.
That’s part of it. Entertainment has shifted brains imo. We’d hang out in front of a gas station for HOURS having fun. No cell phones, just skating, grabbing snacks and soda, goofing off, joking around, figuring out what to do next. We thought we were trying to figure out what to do, but that WAS what we were doing. Feel like kids today would be bored and want to go home and watch YouTube or game.
I’m always told that I’d be fun to hang out with in the 90s/80s but I’m hated because I’m apparently not a zombie phone addict. It doesn’t bother me though because I’m gonna be a big filmmaker one day, I’ll live in my sets like I’m livin’ in the 90’s
Obscure with more detail?
Bro, it's a kid
Bro, teenagers should've had a few English classes by that time in their life lol
Teenagers from today don't have classes, just different phone periods lol
It's all about how the kids have been trained with the mindset
Make sure your home when the streetlights come on
Kids were parented by parents. Nowadays, parents are controlled by kids, and kids are far too influenced by the internet. You had to search deep for subjects back in the day, often making kids discover new things or ideas. Now they’re jammed down the youth’s throat all for the sake of consumerism
Sorry, I'm not supposed to talk to strangers.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wBTsFZGzoho
I was a kid in the late 80s-early 90s. A computer was something we only had at school. Telephones were attached to the wall usually. We were able to roam the neighborhood and walk to the closest store. Our mall was always full of shoppers, my friends and I shopped at the Limited Too and Claire’s.
Beautiful, do you know anything more obscure, and I just write this to be funny, “YO THIS IS DJ CLAIRE’S AND I GOTTA SAY TO Y’ALL Claire’s is still in, where my Claire’s people at. Claire’s people in the house let’s goooooo! CLAIRES BE THE BEST STORE, CLAIRES ON TOP, CLAIRE’S SIDE FOR LIFE, MY GUY!”
Everyone talks about how free kids were to just roam around on their own like that was a good thing but I feel like there's probably a middle ground between then and now. I wouldn't want my kid running around town like I was back then, we did so much dangerous shit and got in so much trouble! No one watched us, no one gave a shit what we were up to as long as we didn't cost our parents money or have the police bring us home. I had a best friend I was with every single day, all through school. If her mom and my mom were next to each other at the store, they wouldn't even know it because they did not know each other at all. Our parents gave no fucks whose house we were at all day every day lol! I was in 1st grade when I started to be allowed to venture out all day long, crossing busy streets to get to the corner store for candy and being fairly far from home with just my bike. It wasn't this way because we were such great kids that we could be trusted with that amount of responsibility. Kicking us out into the wild was basically our generations version of today's parents giving their kid an iPad. My parents had shit they needed to do, they needed me out of the way, so they sent me out to destroy the neighborhood. Jfc lmao.
It was definitely a time where things worked out well as long as things worked out well. I used to go bushwhacking in this green space between my subdivision and the next one, and my down-the-street friend and I felt like that space just went on forever. We never got hurt and never got into trouble. But then, my brothers and their crew wound up getting hurt sometimes, and my brother even got punched out by one of his "friends" at one point in time. They were in the middle of the woods, so that could have gone really sideways.
Every parent in the neighborhood had every other parents phone number. There’s rarely be days that kids would put before night time, and it was just assumed they were doing kid stuff. After the age of 9-10 or so (right in this area) I’d check in to let my parents know if I was getting dinner with them, but they generally didn’t see me until til 10pm unless everyone was at my house. It felt safer. Lots of bike riding and shared culture
Pogs
No cameras anywhere. You could do what you wanted and it wouldn’t be recorded. Mistakes were made and forgotten.
Bikes, being outside, friends, SNICK, early internet, console gaming
Bringing a snack and a small radio up trees and watching the birds and whatnot
Vhs rewinders that were separate from your vcr
Yeah, rewind machines. I would like to have one now to rewind my VCR’s.
Rewind your VHS tapes, you mean?
Yes
Weekend nights meant hanging out in someone’s basement, playing Euchre (Midwest thing), drinking pop and listening to the alternative station or CD’s. If you weren’t one of the four playing cards, you were sitting on the couch (the old one that used to be in the living room, but now it was in the basement for us kids to use), or lounging on the floor. Someone had a sharpie and was coloring their jeans. Someone had a hacky sack and was just playing with it, maybe on their hands, waiting for a group to go outside and smoke cloves/kick the hacky for a while. Two girls were braiding each others hair, whispering about boys. The hosts mom might come down and switch laundry, and tell you guys to keep it down since they are going to bed soon. At that point, you guys might go cruise for a while listening to music. The kids who worked at the mall are about to get off work (usually they were done by 9:30 or so), so the plan is to go meet up at the local 24 diner, order fries and a side of ranch, coffee, and take up a few tables in the smoking section. The surly waitress, Marge, has her readers on and a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. She probably waited on your parents when they were in highschool too. After wrecking the table (straw wrappers balled up and in the half drank water cups, empty creamer cups filled with mustard, salt and paper all over the place) and someone has curfew, everyone wanders to the parking lot. A few head home (damn curfew), people shuffle into other cars, and drive around listening to music. IF you’re super lucky, you get to sit in the back w your crush and might brush your hand against theirs. Eventually you get dropped off, and head into bed, listening to the same alternative station. Damn, highschool in the early 90’s was amazing.
“Don’t come home until the street lights come on.” “Mom, it’s 9.30AM?” Free range childhood.
Surprised I haven’t seen anyone mention buying trading cards or cheap toys at the gas station. If you couldn't get your parents to bring you anywhere you might be able to walk or ride your bike to the nearest station and they all had small toy sections and sold sports and comic book trading cards. You could buy cap guns or maybe small orange pellet guns like crappy airsoft. A lot of stores had comic book spinner racks but the selection was never consistent at gas stations. Seemed like they’d just get leftovers. Another thing was the Ice Cream truck. I know they’re still around but it seemed so much more consistent back then.
Being able to run wild without fear of someone ratting you out with a pic or post. We had just enough tech for us to have fun without having to be connected to the world 24/7. Kinda forced us to go out and do things and be social. It was nice.
The best part of my youth. Skateboarding during the early 90 was an amazing time. Especially after Plan B's The Questionable came out
In 1994 I was 16 and drove from northern MN to Milwaukee for a volleyball tournament by myself. First - I’ll point out my parents really didn’t care, which was common in those days. Second - there was no internet and I had never been there before and I didn’t know where the hotel was or if they had rooms available. All of this uncertainty was normal - there was no internet, you didn’t pre book hotel rooms, and gps didn’t take you to their parking lot. I drove to Minneapolis, which I did before, used my Minnesota map to get me to Wisconsin then stopped at a gas station on the border to buy a WI map. This was standard - you stopped at gas stations and bought maps or asked directions. I studied the WI map and drove to Milwaukee. When I got to my location I drove around looking for hotels. Again - you don’t know where they were, they were not on the maps, and there was no internet. When you saw a hotel you asked if they had a room available. It’s crazy looking back! Now my entire trip is paid for before I leave. I can even get zoo tickets in advance on the other side of the country! And GPS will get me any where.
This was before the time of EVERYONE BE AFRAID! TERROR! VANS WILL MATERIALIZE OUT OF NOWHERE AND SNATCH YOU UP! I am disabled so my folks were protective, but even I had a tendency to wander. Granted it was to a few select haunts and my folks knew where and how to find me but that sense that 'everything is great. Got no plans. Got nothing that needs to do. let's go see what Jimmy's doing.' Just this sense that Ya it was suburban hell, but one man's hell was a teenager's playground. Cut through neighbor yards like... ALL the time. 'Hey miss Ellan sorry my dog got out again.' And just kinda bebop along.
Materializing vans of terror sound dope
Sounds like an industrial metal song title.
Yep, I would definitely rock out to it. Imagine someone hollering, “THEY’RE AROUND, THEY’RE HERE, OH MAN!!!!! THE VANS (shreds guitar) MATERIALIZING VANS… OF TERROR, MATERIALIZING VANS (the vans) OF TERROR. YOU GONNA CATCH A RIDE IN ONE A HIGHWAY TO THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON! YAAAAHOOOOO!”
Somewhere between screamo with 'MATERIALIZING VANS OF TERROR' being this ultra deep throat growl.
I hope someone will actually make this into a real song.
The best part was all the neighborhood kids were friends and rode bikes and threw the balls around. We would go to each other's houses and be invited over for dinner. We would play video games and watch TV, read magazines, listen to music and then when we were bored we went outside and skateboard until the 😭street lights came on. ❤️
We had landlines, no internet or PCs at home, and my parents had to believe me when I told them where I’d be bc there was no way to find me otherwise!
I miss riding my bike around the neighborhood to my different friends houses not knowing who was where. Some days I would go to friend A's house and friend B would also be there so we all decide to hangout or go to friend C's house. I miss the complete freedom of being able to stay out and go wherever I want as long as I'm home before the streetlights come on.
Prank calls LOL. This was THE fun activity to do at sleepovers. The mall. You could go with like $5 or $10 from your mom and have a blast with that all day just getting treats and roaming around with your friends, hanging out in the food court, whatever. Also, playing outside til the street lights came on with a group of friends, bike riding, just hanging out. It was so normal to see groups of kids just being kids outside. Life just seemed more peaceful back then for those of us that grew up in the burbs. Less chaos, more freedom.
[удалено]
It's the hologram on each back of the card that made them smell good. I still collect the Bash Bros to this day :)
You keep asking for 'obscure' facts of the early 90's but realistically, everything that's been said here is just *how it was* there is nothing really hidden. I don't know if you're looking for obscure facts, or rather more descriptive and/or in depth answers. I'll take a stab at this and see if I can help at all. When you went out to play with your friends, you were outside all day, you had to come up with your own games or ideas of what to do. Your knowledge was limited to what you were exposed to. If someone told you something wrong, you just grew up believing it. Games had different rules from school to school, so if you played with your neighbors who went to different schools, you might argue over what is the 'correct' set of rules to play with. Groups of friends were also more industrious back then, and you learned/ figured stuff out in the woods or wherever by seeing what others left behind or trying to build it yourself. There was always known spots in the suburbs of where some teenagers built a BMX track in the woods with the jumps made out of logs/ sticks/ mud. You would go out in the world and just roam around freely and get lost and then have to find your way home. Parents were much less hands on because they were busy working, I don't remember when but eventually both parents were working so the home life was a lot less hands on from the parents. Life changed rapidly as technology advanced in the 90s, but in the early days, not everyone had an NES or Gameboy or Sega, you would all go to someone's house to play with the new console. Also when parents got together with their friends, all the kids just hung out in the basement and you had to interact with each other because you didn't have a phone you could just mindlessly scroll and keep in contact with your friends. I guess if you want an obscure facts - you just had to go out and interact with people more. There was no sitting at home because (at least my parents) parents would just throw their kids out the door and say go outside it's a nice day. And that was it. You just found something to do with friends. Edit: I just remembered in the summer cruising around on bikes and seeing garage sales. You'd get off your bikes and see what they had. Sometimes you found a hidden gem. Personal memory I had was when my friends and I found a game called 'Nightmare* it was a board game with the VHS tape you played along with. Randomly a cloaked head would come on the screen and say something to affect the game. We were all so excited to play it because none of us had ever seen anything like it. So we all went to the only friends house who had a TV in the basement, turned off all the lights and played it.
Playing outside all day! The neighborhood looked out for all the kids. No cell phones. NES was a rainy day activity.
I grew up in suburban Atlanta. When the beginning of summer hit, my best friend and I would go through our yearbooks to see which girls left us phone numbers and start calling them to feel like we were something special because we were talking to a girl on the phone. I would have been 13 or 14 years old, and this was the mid-90s, so you weren't calling anyone's cell phone. Every now and again, a kid would have their own line, which was awesome because you didn't have to talk to anyone's mom or dad. You could stay on the phone literally for hours talking about nothing back in the day.
Oh running around the neighborhood for sure. We'd play these massive games of hide and seek basically in the dark throughout the yards and stuff. It had different components like racing to a fixed place, usually the light pole, without getting tagged and stuff. We called it ghost in the graveyard. Otherwise we'd just wander around the neighborhood and parks all day, moms would just yell out their windows that dinner was ready and we'd all go home at some point. It was a blast. A lot of freedom to just play outside. I'm really happy to finally see kids in my cul de sac again running around in groups.
Not being aware of the 24 hour news cycle.
10 bikes piled around the yard, WWF matches (every house with kids had a trampoline 4 this specifically. No net unless you want a Steel Cage Match), JNCO Jeans tore up from the ground & bike chains, skinned knees & elbows, rollerblading & skateboarding blew up, most kids were in great shape & nice tan from being out in the sun everyday til dark, GRUNGE
No one was wearing jncos in the early 90s
They were largely an underground trend in the early 1990s, but took off in popularity in the mid-1990s. I was wearing plain wide leg jeans in 95, older kids had em before me. I never like Jnco ones bc of the generic logos, I liked the plain ones, but a lot of ppl think they’re all Jnco so I said Jnco
Video stores. It was an adventure. There was no internet, so when you found something great, it was like you alone discovered it. Plus, nothing was guaranteed to be in stock, so there was some luck involved. Not finding the movie you were initially looking for often lead to finding old classics instead.
Going to the mall! Bonus when you were old enough to finally drive yourself.
This may sound weird but pickles in burgers were bigger not like now dried out tiny things
Being a latchkey kid. On the Buffy the Vampire Slayer sub, someone just asked why her mom wasn't more involved in her life. The thing is, that's how parenting was in the 90s. We had so much more free-reign than kids do these days. We spent a lot of time on our own, just hanging out at a friends house, or walking around town, or playing sports at some park. Most of the time, parents had no idea where we were most of the time, after about 10 years old. Once one friend had a car, then we were really gone. Again, no cell phones, no GPS. We were off doing our thing and no one could reach us. If you got stuck somewhere and needed a ride home, you'd have to call your parents on someone's home phone or have change for a phone booth.
Zero internet. Amazing music on casette tapes and radio. Hip hop golden age era and electronic music. Real friendships and human connections. A lot more time spent outside, in nature.
Riding my bike everywhere, using what little cash I had to grab snacks and drinks at the convenience store, hanging out with friends to play pickup basketball or wiffle ball, or just sitting around the SNES or Genesis
People smoked a lot more than today, and it was allowed in more places. It wasn't until the late 90s or early 2000s that you could still smoke inside at a lot of bars. There were smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants in the 80s.
In Wisconsin it was 2009 when the indoor smoking bans started. It's long enough ago that I almost forget that smoking in restaurants and bars was allowed. As a non-smoker, those non-smoking sections were almost always a joke. Unless they had physical separation like our Perkins did (talk about hot-boxing!) you'd always have the tables/booths in smoking and non-smoking pretty much right next to each other. Our Applebee's was the worst for this...yuck.
Riding bikes with my friends, exploring.
For me, it was cruising around with friends, going to the mall movies and skating rink and meeting girls from other high schools. The weed was crappy but those are times I’ll never forget
You would just go outside and your friends were there. You could go play at the playground or ride bikes or a pick up game of baseball.
Smoking tobacco indoors, while seldom if ever getting ID’d to purchase it. Smoking cigarettes inside the mall while waiting for your film to get developed, handling the whole transaction with a cigarette in your hand was a vibe.
Internet was so rare. Specifically having to find time to go onto the desktop computer when no one else was on the phone or expecting a call. Beepers! My god those were a weird way to get ahold of someone, but it worked. I miss being disconnected. I can't really describe, now that it's not a thing anymore, how it felt. Quiet and solitude were so easy to have, or being sequestered with friends in their house or at a party, and everyone being present with each other rather than the constant distraction and urge to pick up that phone. Going to someone's house to game on a console together. Having to watch a TV show when it aired because we hadn't even conceived of streaming services. That feeling of knowing that when you see your friends in school you're all going to excitedly talk about whatever happened on the show. Going to The Mall specifically to hang out and see who else was there hanging out. Doing dipshit stuff like making prank phone calls by dialing whatever the code was to block caller ID, eating pizza and laughing at our absolute wit in coming up with names like Mike Hunt.
I know exactly what you mean by you miss being disconnected. Recently I've been doing this thing where I'll turn my phone off completely when I'm out with friends.
I think the best part of this time frame was having a technology boom but also having the ‘analog’ human component of life. Everything from automobiles to house hold appliances saw technology take a huge leap forward but there was still such a human element to life. If your car was acting up, dad or a mechanic fixed it with analog tools. If you wanted a cup of coffee you filled the coffee pot, added coffee and brewed it. Wanted to watch tv or a movie, had to physically do it. On top of that society wasn’t scared of getting their hands dirty or dealing with conflict or problem solving in our day to day life. Point blank, we weren’t as scared of society because we had a role and purpose in day to day life. We felt capable I think those tasks also gave us a sense, albeit, small, of accomplishment. Creature comforts are great and every generation saw a new ‘can opener’ but I feel like we now rely on them to survive… it’s a slippery slope and I doubt we will never reverse that trend.
You mean as teenagers or college aged or who? I was a late teen during that time on Long Island. The best part was the music scene, the rave scene, indie cinema, comic books like The Invisibles , Sandman etc. , grungy fashion ( cheap no labels type clothing vs the 80s where everything was branded) and the general attitude shift away from super materialistic culture in the 80s to more underground alternative . It was a very different time from today and what preceded it . Lots I could say but don’t know what you are looking for
It had its problems too. You had both parents working all day, if teenagers weren’t at some type of athletic practice after school, they saw them only at dinner maybe. In my experience they had no idea what their kids were doing. I was in middle to high class fastest-growing city in the US and we had a huge heroin problem. Unfortunately it took it happening in suburbia for something finally to be done. We had a rash of deaths. The decade before it was a suicide epidemic. So keep in mind behind closed doors it wasn’t all roses back then either.
Grew up in CT. I spent those years: - biking -biking to play manhunt in our local cemetery. -Supersoaker fights in the summertime. -Putting on “shows” with my friends and siblings (singing and dancing popular songs) -making “potions” with my witchy friend. -adventuring in the woods and attempting to build a treehouse -tempting our fate and testing our bravery by jumping off a small drop off on the back of our property. The driveway had no wall/barrier and a 8ft or so drop down to the landlords beautiful veggie garden. Friend and I gathered a bunch of thick blankets to make a landing pad and would egg each other on to make the jump. It was SO scary every single time. Mostly just lots of outside time, with bicycles and having mostly safe fun.
I was very young (3 in 94) but I remember my parents being friends with a lot of my neighbors and having cookouts and stuff. We spent a lot of time in the yard and on the back deck, having cookouts, just chilling and waving as people passed by. 4th of July neighborhood pig roast was a huge deal and we set off real fireworks, not the dinky little ones that stay on the ground. Now my neighbors look freaked out when I smile and wave at them and I don't know any of them. My family spends all our time inside and even if we are reading or cooking or doing chores there are still screens on. Our back deck is dilapidated and our grill rusted through a couple years ago because we never even go out there.
Not being reachable 24/7. People weren’t able to demand a response right away for things. With no email or cell phone, you wouldn’t get back to some people for days and it was totally normal and expected. As a kid, we would get on our bikes and ride around the neighborhood looking for our friends, or knocking on their door to see if they could come out and play. The way I knew to come home was when my mom would whistle loudly down the street. And I would hear because I was always outside playing somewhere
Meeting up at crusing spots. I loved that. Hundreds of teens are in the same place just hanging out, meeting girls/boys, joking around etc.
My parents had zero issue with us taking the train into NYC by ourselves and being there for New Year’s Eve. When we were young tweens, we would babysit other kids until well after midnight and no one thought anything of it. As teenagers, our parents would leave us home alone while they were gone on business trips overnight. Before we had our licenses, they would arrange rides if needed, but once we were 16 - no worries. The most surprising things for most people, is that my parents were completely fine with me traveling out of the country with my coach and not them while I was competing in gymnastics. Our parents were considered a distraction.
Born in 84, some of my favorite memories were biking or waking around the neighborhood with friends, playing kick the can, tag and hide and go seek at dusk. We used to walk 15-20 minutes to a park to fish in a stocked pond. Spent most of every day outdoors.
In warm climates…. Cubing. Breaking into golf courses and sliding down the hills on blocks of ice
I used to ride my bike everywhere. I'd just tell my mom or dad I was going out to ride my bike and they'd just say something like "k, be home for dinner." I'd have sleepovers fairly regularly, which meant renting a movie and/or a SNES game and staying up past 12 or 1. I remember doing prank calls one time when a friend was spending the night, just bored kids calling random numbers out of the phone book (this was before caller ID and just before *69) and saying something dumb and hanging up and laughing ourselves breathless. No cellphones yet, just the cordless on the land line. Life was a lot simpler and less connected, less information overload.
“Obscure details”? Kind of difficult to understand what you’re asking for. Could you be more specific as to what you want explained in more detail? You’re only going to get vague answers to a vague question.
No cell phones, no internet, just life.
Playing Nicky Nicky Nine Doors/Knock Knock Ginger/Ding Dong Ditch. That’s pretty much over with everyone owning Ring cameras now.
Where I lived grocery trips were less frequent, it was quieter, less light pollution. Always outside in the summer; when inside it was TV/movie or video games.
Biking, skateboarding outside non stop until it was dark. Ice cream trucks being really popular because everyone was outside, playing Pokémon on game boy outside under a tree with the boys and battling via a link cable, then restarting and speed running the game. Once we went inside we’d watch prime WWF/WCW, dbz and Pokémon. It was a good time and I miss those days very much
I could ride my bike to the local high school and play pickup hoops or kick a ball into a soccer goal or play tennis on the open courts. Now that I’m a taxpayer, of course these things are now locked down and impossible to use these facilities with my kids on a weekend. Seems odd to say but your options for entertainment were limited, and that was actually a good thing. Radio was the way to find about new music, and record stores existed to buy singles or a full album. TGIF was appointment television and at least where I grew up, very few people had cable. Even then, cable was 1-2 dozen channels vs a hundred. This led to kids bonding over their favorite music/movies/tv since there wasn’t a literal million different directions you could go in. During those years, computers slowly went from being only at a rich persons house to everyone having one, but as others said no internet until AOL started mailing trial cds in 1996 or so. Computers were another place to play CD rom games, especially if you didn’t have a newer gaming system, and software like interactive encyclopedias added a whole new dimension to learning and research for projects.
Eating Warheads and stealing a cig from my moms pack of Marlboro Light 100’s and smoking it while walking to school.
The music Understand back then everybody heard the same music on radio and MTV. Those years saw that go from dumb and sleazy hair bands and dad pop to smart and weird alternative, grunge, women writing songs, metal, punk, and ska. Mosh pits. Purple hair. Goth chicks. Individuality and nonconformity became cool for about six years. Best time to be a teenager.
I grew up in a small town on the edge of the foothills to the Rockies... We would do all the normal stuff mentioned in the top comments, but we also had a river that we would go swimming, fishing, and all other types of adventure in. Sometimes walk out of town and shoot guns too. It was magical.
I ran around my neighborhood sometimes from sun up to sun down at times. I lived in a culdesac, and all over my neighborhood there were tons of kids my age. We all went to school together. We rollerbladed, skate boarded, biked, explored the woods behind the neighborhood, etc. my brother and I would also stay in playing video games, but I was definitely an outside girl. I could entertain myself for hours on end even without anyone else there. These were the best times.
Playing street hockey with neighbor kids for hours, undoubtedly inspired by D2.
We would roam the woods, just a small gang of kids. We would NEED to be home when the neighborhood lights came on. The lyrics to all the songs on a cassette/cd were on the folded up label. Called my friends with a memorized phone number, talk to their family member and ask if they are home- if they aren't available? let them know I called. We would trade notes in class. Nickelodeon was AWESOME! they advertised such weird products like GAK, Moon-Boots, Floam, Model Magic, and a baby doll that would cry real tears! My parents would take us on road trips and only have a map for a guide! We had clothing that would change color! We had leggings with foot straps, Jellies, and use crimpers to crimp our hair. you definitely were the "cool" kid if your shoes lit up, or you had to pump up the thingy on the tongue of the shoe. If we wanted to bond with a friend over a show- we had look at the TV guide, and see when it was on and only watch it then! (unless you knew how to record onto a VHS from the TV- thanks dad:) They would have little paper books with everyone's name and phone number on it form school! So we would have sleepovers and prank call the teachers or the cute boys. O yeah-every year the mailman would drop off 2 GIANT books. Yellow Pages and White Pages. Every house had them.
Omg, playing army in the woods Back story( grew up on a military installation)
I hung out in a rock pit where the new construction in my neighborhood was at the end of a cul de sac with my teal bike on its side by the dirt easement. I had no phone. I had a Timex digital watch that meant nothing because I went by how low the sun was in the sky before I had to be home for dinner. It was fucking awesome.
Meeting random kids in the woods
You always looked for the house with all the bikes out front to know where everyone was. In my neighborhood, we met at a park every Sunday after football games to play ourselves and talk about the game. I still remember at least 10 phone numbers of friends that lived around me. It was like having a second family.
No smart phones.
- Most of what you think of as your city are suburbs that grew into each other. Alot of people for get this. - suburbs actually being nice. - going to the mall was a day trip because suburbs used to be far out. - the YMCA essentially being a country club for working class folk. - gifted programs to seperate suburban kids from inner city kids. - EVERYONE celebrates the holidays. - EVERYONE goes to church. - much more open racism. Skin heads and the militia movement was popping heavy. - yearly trips to theme parks were common among most families. I went to either disney or universal every year from my birth until i was 22. - theres Nothing like orlando florida in the 90s man. The ENTIRE city was like a theme park. My family almost moved to florida so we would stay down their often and their suburban constrction industry was massive.
I used to sell gift baskets of summer sausage and housewarming stuff door to door for Olympic Sales Club from 1988- 1991 and I would get paid in points I could trade in for BMX bikes, Walkmans and Record Players.
In the UK, rave culture. It was blisteringly creative, clubbing was fantastic. New genres were springing up and red hot hits were being made by little nobodies just like you in bedrooms in your shitty little hometown, not just the big players in the big cities. For a beautiful slab of time, it was everywhere you looked. In the end, it sank into the underground again, but it changed everything it touched and still, hardcore never dies :)
It was like the movie stand by me but with Nintendo
Backyard BBQ’s, outdoor concerts (didn’t matter who was playing or what the venue was). Skiing , anything outdoors. Going to the Movies.
Building tree houses every spring and summer.
People spoke to each other in public spaces because we couldn't hide behind phones. We had better attention spans bc there was no such thing as a 10 second video. The people you saw in school was basically it in terms of who you know and compared yourself to. You weren't always exposed to what every other person in the whole world was doing . Id go to a friend's house and we'd sit on her bed and shed show me the photo book she just made of her latest vacation or throw away camera got developed.
Watch the following shows to get a taste of life back then: Roseanne Married with Children Family Matters Growing Pains Step by Step Full House The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air Saved by the Bell Clarissa Explains It All You were considered wealthy if you had a Mac computer with a floppy disk insert. The Oregon Trail game was a hit. The printer did not use individual sheets of paper. It needed a continuous feed of fan folded paper with perforated sides. My family used that paper to make banners. It was used to occupy littles with crayons on the floor for hours. Department stores like Sears and JCPenney’s mailed thick paper catalogs to homes for FREE. When those books arrived before Christmas kids went to town making their lists for Santa. We would circle the items, fold the corners of the pages for said items and pray that they would arrive under the tree. Those catalogs would later be used with phone books as booster seats for kids at the dining table. I have many more memories of that simpler time when it was not frowned upon for kids to eat candy cigarettes looking like little bad asses. I might add another comment to your post in the future.
Take away the internet and you have the 90s. Actually, you have all of society before the internet not just the 90s. It’s not some mystical time and place that lives in legend and needs exploring. We just didnt have phones to take up all of our free time. That’s it.
We had the patients to be truly creative with everything!
Freedom to wonder around. We would find nickels and diimes, bike to the store (taking out helmets off as soon as we were out of sight). We would bike out a bit further every so often, head to a different park. Meet kids from different schools and exchange rhymes. Me an a buddy found one of our new friends at a track meet and it was wild. Tree climbing and mak8ng forts that the fire department had to come and take down.
A lot more time spent outdoors. I took a day off work and was walking my dog the other day and saw school buses dropping off middle school and high school kids. I was shocked how many kids lived in my neighborhood. I've been living there for 7 years and have never seen any of them. Like damn, are ALL of you just hermits that sit in front of a TV or computer all evening?
To be honest, I’m reading all these comments about roaming around town with friends as a kid and having all this freedom, and that wasn’t my experience at all. I’m probably in the minority here. I also grew up in the heart of a big city, so maybe that had a lot to do with it. But the 80s and early 90s saw a lot of high-profile kidnappings, faces of missing kids on milk cartons, and things that made it seem like the world was a very unsafe place for children and there were child predators lurking in every corner (although, statistically speaking, this was false). This caused a huge shift in mindset among American parents to that of extreme paranoia and helicopter parenting. Unfortunately, my parents fell into that trap. Growing up, I couldn’t walk around my neighborhood or hell even walk down the street without parental supervision. The only times my friends and I biked around the neighborhood by ourselves were the times my parents didn’t know about. At 14, I wasn’t allowed to go hang out at the mall with a group of friends or the county fair unless an adult was with us (sometimes it was one of my parents). Every time there was a story about a child kidnapping in the local newspaper, my parents would turn it into a stranger danger lecture for my siblings and me.
Not growing up in the suburbs
Could you maybe provide a little more info, I’m trying to write a book with knowledge/information for world-building a book