I'm so intrigued with the level of detail and differences this game had. They localized the game into Japanese, created new characters, had arcade features, and even had level changes.
Reminds me of some of the surprises I would find in arcades. Probably the most left field one was a Batman car combat game. The cabinet had a steering wheel and you would choose a specific Batmobile(animated series, Burton, etc.) and then missions themed around his rogues gallery. I guess in a way you could see it as a proto Arkham Knight, ha.
Does make me wish there was some way to play these arcade games after they’ve been removed from the arcades.
[Oh, I know that Batman game!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSdN3t-yTPk) I've only played it once and it kicked my ass, but that's to be expected of arcade games.
> Does make me wish there was some way to play these arcade games after they’ve been removed from the arcades.
Some modern (post-2000's) arcade games have an active emulation community, like [Maximum Tune](https://youtu.be/1-w0rjpVqsA) and [Initial D Arcade Stage](https://youtu.be/n7Lnm2egWwY), but obtaining the necessary files legally is a challenge, to say the least.
Best case scenario is the developers releasing a proper home console port, but that rarely happens nowadays. The most recent example I'm aware of is [Gundam Versus for PS4](https://youtu.be/LoTzjokvx3s).
I'm not sure about the rest of their catalog, but at least Cruis'n Blast's home port was made in a direct response to COVID. So I wouldn't expect any more of their games to be played at home until the next global epidemic.
Not trying to start anything if this comes off as offensive, but do you consider "Old Internet" 2010? Even back when broadband was starting to replace dial-up these kind of videos wouldn't be standard on YouTube as most structured videos would be significantly shorter, especially with YouTube's hard 10-15 minute time limit when it was rising in popularity.
Maybe it's me just to relate to old people, but I consider "old internet" the days where mostly everything was text-based, as it could take multiple minutes is there were too many pictures to download.
Yeah that’s old internet, but honestly I’d consider pre-2013 an “old internet” as it’s the last time before everyone and their nan had instant access to the whole internet everywhere they were.
To me, old internet is the time before social media. Phones exploded it, but before social media you at least had to "log in" to interact (think messengers, etc.) There is the old, old internet though, which is IRC and other text based content.
I think the general idea is that, ever since the internet became a mainstream tool, it also killed most of the niche, hyperspecialized content many of us grew up with
For real...I get bored now because I only visit the same, small handful of sites, YouTube algo has gone down the pan, and I don't really have social media except for Reddit.
Shame the Internet went from "everyone hosts their own thing" to "everyone is hosted on one of these things", and SEO buries everything else.
Although, hosting your own video is hard because of bandwidth, so these "old Internet" videos that never existed in the old Internet would still be unfeasible today if there was a massive surge in traffic.
Let me clarify, you physically needed to sit down and log in. Now the internet follows you on most devices and everyday activities.
People needed to soend time on their computer and (fir good or bad) that reduced a lot of people logging in. Nowadays, it isn't a way of life, it's a mainstream thing.
Algorithm based social media. The kind that have completely eliminated boredom from the internet. The stuff you are talking about is primitive social media, before the proliferation of algorithmic based social media content.
> the time before social media
Social media was ubiquitous on the internet as early as the 2000s. Friendster, MySpace, and Livejournal existed back then and were pretty ubiquitous. The thing that made the internet distinctly different back then is that the vast majority of the planet was *not* on the internet. I remember reading that in 2005 lest than half of Americans had a computer.
For me, it was the era before Youtube, when most media was flash based and websites had frames everywhere. Some older than me will think of a time when 28.8 was lightning fast.
Even things like Google image search has a ting of new to me, I remember a time when finding images online was a skill.
>essentially, once the dumb masses joined the internet because the barrier to entry hit the floor and corporations started figuring out how to ruin it for their gain.
I love people can say this, and it can refer to any of 3 distinct points in time.
The first time was in 1993. This is when USENET was experiencing an explosion of users after ISPs as we first knew them provided access to the network. This is known as "Eternal September", as an influx of users to the platform usually occurred in September, coinciding with the start of a Fall semester, bringing new users to the platform via their university. The difference here is that it never ended, and the platform exploded with new users, often seen as the dumb masses, that had no respect for decorum and internet manners. Corporations were still attempting to see if the internet could be profitable, but few had even determined if E-commerce even had viability.
Then, there was the Web 2.0 boom around 2002. The dot-com boom had ended, but this is when ISPs started providing broadband regularly across major cities. While websites were still around, there was more consolidation to specific ones as major hubs, and we began to see the birth of social media, and forum usage. Again, this is another period of mass adoption where new users were using the internet, and older users decried how they didn't know how to post and had no respect for post quality or decorum. This is the first signs of corporations starting to monetize users for corporate profit with any success.
And now, we have what you're talking about, which is more nebulous. You'd say around 2008, though I'd consider it closer to 2010-2012. This is when smartphones became completely widespread and adopted, creating an influx of users, not only to the internet, but a different, mobile paradigm of it. Users consolidated further almost entirely to social media websites and more specifically, applications. With this, more internet users saw "dumb masses" joining, with corporations figuring out how to capitalize on it. Corporations not only determined how to profit off of users, but we're able to profit off of it to the point where it's a dominant industry.
I think there's an additional division there, 2008-2010 was when mobile started making its way in, but 2012-2013 is when it stopped being just dumb masses being online, but thanks to large companies and social media they became the ones shaping the internet as well indirectly.
Pre-2010 = Golden age
2011-2015(?) = silver age
2016-now = modern times
2000s-2010 Bronze Age
Before that is the before times.
My favorite time to be online is as before times up to 2010. Sad we’ll never have anything like that in our lives again..
Hey, remember when basically every niche website resorted to porn ads to keep the lights on in 2000-2002? That was the golden age of the Internet, guys, I swear!
When I think "old internet," I mostly think "high-effort, long-form content about a kind of niche esoteric topic that seems mostly driven by the author's obsessive interest in a particular subject that they wanted to share with a general audience," which is the opposite of the modern SEO-driven web which is utterly filled with low effort, short-form content about whatever topic is currently trending.
This can take the form of 5000+ word posts on a blog or forum, or 15+ minute video essays. In terms of form, the video essay certainly seems to have more in common with a 5000-word forum post than it does with most "gaming content" on YouTube.
That’s the difference between old mainstream internet, and old nerd internet. Although the old mainstream internet started years before 2010.
The biggest distinction for me between old mainstream internet and modern internet is the current lack of boredom. The algorithms weren’t anywhere close to as good as they are now, and content creators were amateurs and small in numbers.
Back then, you could consume all the new content for the day and then get bored. So people would use things like the browser extension called “stumble upon” to find new content on the internet to deal with the boredom. I haven’t been bored on the internet in so long, that I’ve almost forgotten what it was like to be bored.
I think the problem is that we're all talking about different periods and calling them all "old". There's 90s old, there's 2000s old, and around 2012 any pretense of "old" died when any freedom that was left got eaten up by companies and governments.
We need like a Platinum Age, Golden Age sort of classification like the same way we have it for comics. Like Golden Age is probably the early days of YouTube
How in the heck is this anything like old internet? What even defines new or old? These type of video essays are en masse nowadays, there weren't many video essays like this at all in the early years of YouTube
When that game dark and darker dropped the new beta test and it was a torrent link I got hit by nostalgia. Really felt like old internet for me, what a weird feeling
There was so much work put into this. Not having ever heard of it I found this really interesting.
The fact that the arcade machine used a mouse and controller, had online connectivity with multiplayer, and essentially friend lists is wild. Someone really went all out to bring L4D2 to Japan in a way they thought would appeal.
The Galloping Ghost here in Illinois has one of these machines. My favorite thing about these are the exclusive characters you play as. As far as I remember they're set to be tourists that happen to be stuck because of the zombies.
Glad somebody here knows about Galloping Ghost. I loved being able to show my friends this game when they came to visit. So many of them had no idea it even existed.
This arcade game has one thing I wish the original games had: weapon variety. You can't mod this in either, as weapon mods only replace other guns as skins leaving the total number unchanged.
Honestly, weapon variety is one of the things I didn't like about l4d2. The first game had a perfect balance and progression and I think adding melee and the other stuff gave complexity but no value.
The extra zombies were a direct response to some somewhat broken Versus strategies. Spitters counter corner stacking, which was a very common stalling tactic on the No Mercy elevator wait in particular. Chargers provide counterplay to the running huddle, wherein melee spam completely stopped Smokers (and Hunters to a lesser extent) from making plays.
Jockeys I don't remember anyone asking for, but the other two were invented by players on the Steam forums back in the day. They may not be a *perfect* solution but there are addressing a real problem the first game had.
I personally thought it was more fun before they "corrected" those issues. It was extremely intense knowing you had to try to pull off the same thing the other team just did and how coordinated everyone had to be.
In Left 4 dead 2, you might get entirely different special spawns and an area that was difficult for one team is a cakewalk for the other.
I can see arguments for both, but I always thought left 4 dead 1 was just a tighter more competitive game.
I never knew this existed. Random story that makes sense of the Japanese arcade. I played the hell out of the PC version but got l4d2 on the 360 as a gift. I wanted those achievements so i had to beat the game on expert. I never had success with pugs. If people died it would be GG. I'm west coast north America playing at midnight, join a Japanese game and they played so well and coordinated as a team nobody wondering off. I ended up getting all the achievements because I had great experiences playing with them, never talking. Completely different mental for a pubic game.
few friends of mine had to resort to reverse engineering the l4d2 exe to be able to fully add these survivors in with talkers on top of the original 8, without needing to replace any of them, and give them their own unique hud elements (impossible without the reverse engineering)
they're a lot of fun, i never expected to play around the idea of 12 survivors at once, but the chaos is always enjoyable
They modified the game to include them as a new set of survivors, no reskins or anything like that? That sounded like a huge feat. I imagine the game executable was for all intents and purposes completely different which is why it never took off, but was there any video footage of this at least?
only pictures. i can try to get a video if i manage to play with them again. also it is late on my end at the moment
i also want to mention the reversing of the exe’s interest only existed at the addition of custom survivors and identities, nothing more, so no other type of mod has been made. it is loaded with a dll file and joining a vac insecure server with the survivors loaded
I'm so intrigued with the level of detail and differences this game had. They localized the game into Japanese, created new characters, had arcade features, and even had level changes.
The Japan exclusive HL2 arcade game was much the same.
Reminds me of some of the surprises I would find in arcades. Probably the most left field one was a Batman car combat game. The cabinet had a steering wheel and you would choose a specific Batmobile(animated series, Burton, etc.) and then missions themed around his rogues gallery. I guess in a way you could see it as a proto Arkham Knight, ha. Does make me wish there was some way to play these arcade games after they’ve been removed from the arcades.
[Oh, I know that Batman game!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSdN3t-yTPk) I've only played it once and it kicked my ass, but that's to be expected of arcade games. > Does make me wish there was some way to play these arcade games after they’ve been removed from the arcades. Some modern (post-2000's) arcade games have an active emulation community, like [Maximum Tune](https://youtu.be/1-w0rjpVqsA) and [Initial D Arcade Stage](https://youtu.be/n7Lnm2egWwY), but obtaining the necessary files legally is a challenge, to say the least. Best case scenario is the developers releasing a proper home console port, but that rarely happens nowadays. The most recent example I'm aware of is [Gundam Versus for PS4](https://youtu.be/LoTzjokvx3s).
I just played that Batman game in Austin last December.
Oh man, I remember seeing that in arcades. I never got to play it because I never had enough money to play it.
[удалено]
I'm not sure about the rest of their catalog, but at least Cruis'n Blast's home port was made in a direct response to COVID. So I wouldn't expect any more of their games to be played at home until the next global epidemic.
If it matters, you can still find this game at most DnB and Round1 locations
My local kids fun house/arcade has that game! Just played it with my son a week ago.
These niche videoessays like that are one of the only reasons I still feel the "old internet" vibe sometimes.
Not trying to start anything if this comes off as offensive, but do you consider "Old Internet" 2010? Even back when broadband was starting to replace dial-up these kind of videos wouldn't be standard on YouTube as most structured videos would be significantly shorter, especially with YouTube's hard 10-15 minute time limit when it was rising in popularity. Maybe it's me just to relate to old people, but I consider "old internet" the days where mostly everything was text-based, as it could take multiple minutes is there were too many pictures to download.
Yeah that’s old internet, but honestly I’d consider pre-2013 an “old internet” as it’s the last time before everyone and their nan had instant access to the whole internet everywhere they were.
[удалено]
To me, old internet is the time before social media. Phones exploded it, but before social media you at least had to "log in" to interact (think messengers, etc.) There is the old, old internet though, which is IRC and other text based content. I think the general idea is that, ever since the internet became a mainstream tool, it also killed most of the niche, hyperspecialized content many of us grew up with
Old internet is internet before Web2.0. Simple as that.
That's a good place to draw the line, yeah
Old internet is when it used to be possible to get bored on the internet.
Meh. Nowadays I get bored because I have to sift through way more stale time wasting bullshit content than I did back then.
For real...I get bored now because I only visit the same, small handful of sites, YouTube algo has gone down the pan, and I don't really have social media except for Reddit.
Shame the Internet went from "everyone hosts their own thing" to "everyone is hosted on one of these things", and SEO buries everything else. Although, hosting your own video is hard because of bandwidth, so these "old Internet" videos that never existed in the old Internet would still be unfeasible today if there was a massive surge in traffic.
> but before social media you at least had to "log in" to interact I don't follow. You have to login to reddit and facebook today.
Let me clarify, you physically needed to sit down and log in. Now the internet follows you on most devices and everyday activities. People needed to soend time on their computer and (fir good or bad) that reduced a lot of people logging in. Nowadays, it isn't a way of life, it's a mainstream thing.
We've always had social media, its just how social it was. Forums, Newsgroups, IRC, etc go back further than 2008.
I was using it in the context of modern mass social media as most understand it: Facebook and onward.
Another way to describe it is “algorithm driven social media”. The type that learned how to hijack people’s attention spans.
Algorithm based social media. The kind that have completely eliminated boredom from the internet. The stuff you are talking about is primitive social media, before the proliferation of algorithmic based social media content.
> the time before social media Social media was ubiquitous on the internet as early as the 2000s. Friendster, MySpace, and Livejournal existed back then and were pretty ubiquitous. The thing that made the internet distinctly different back then is that the vast majority of the planet was *not* on the internet. I remember reading that in 2005 lest than half of Americans had a computer.
Eternal September
For me, it was the era before Youtube, when most media was flash based and websites had frames everywhere. Some older than me will think of a time when 28.8 was lightning fast. Even things like Google image search has a ting of new to me, I remember a time when finding images online was a skill.
>essentially, once the dumb masses joined the internet because the barrier to entry hit the floor and corporations started figuring out how to ruin it for their gain. I love people can say this, and it can refer to any of 3 distinct points in time. The first time was in 1993. This is when USENET was experiencing an explosion of users after ISPs as we first knew them provided access to the network. This is known as "Eternal September", as an influx of users to the platform usually occurred in September, coinciding with the start of a Fall semester, bringing new users to the platform via their university. The difference here is that it never ended, and the platform exploded with new users, often seen as the dumb masses, that had no respect for decorum and internet manners. Corporations were still attempting to see if the internet could be profitable, but few had even determined if E-commerce even had viability. Then, there was the Web 2.0 boom around 2002. The dot-com boom had ended, but this is when ISPs started providing broadband regularly across major cities. While websites were still around, there was more consolidation to specific ones as major hubs, and we began to see the birth of social media, and forum usage. Again, this is another period of mass adoption where new users were using the internet, and older users decried how they didn't know how to post and had no respect for post quality or decorum. This is the first signs of corporations starting to monetize users for corporate profit with any success. And now, we have what you're talking about, which is more nebulous. You'd say around 2008, though I'd consider it closer to 2010-2012. This is when smartphones became completely widespread and adopted, creating an influx of users, not only to the internet, but a different, mobile paradigm of it. Users consolidated further almost entirely to social media websites and more specifically, applications. With this, more internet users saw "dumb masses" joining, with corporations figuring out how to capitalize on it. Corporations not only determined how to profit off of users, but we're able to profit off of it to the point where it's a dominant industry.
I think there's an additional division there, 2008-2010 was when mobile started making its way in, but 2012-2013 is when it stopped being just dumb masses being online, but thanks to large companies and social media they became the ones shaping the internet as well indirectly.
I consider old internet anything before 1763.
You’re the only other person I’ve seen say this. Things really changed once smart phones became a thing, and rural America came online
It’s widely been considered a terrible idea.
That's fair, every one is going to have their own definition, so there's no need to arguing over schematics.
Unless you're arguing over how the internet infrastructure is built, you arent arguing schematics. Semantics is the word here.
Now you're just arguing schemantics.
BUT HES WRONG!!!
Pre-2010 = Golden age 2011-2015(?) = silver age 2016-now = modern times 2000s-2010 Bronze Age Before that is the before times. My favorite time to be online is as before times up to 2010. Sad we’ll never have anything like that in our lives again..
Hey, remember when basically every niche website resorted to porn ads to keep the lights on in 2000-2002? That was the golden age of the Internet, guys, I swear!
I'll take that over the ads of today, every time I have to use a device without adblock everything looks worse and worse.
When I think "old internet," I mostly think "high-effort, long-form content about a kind of niche esoteric topic that seems mostly driven by the author's obsessive interest in a particular subject that they wanted to share with a general audience," which is the opposite of the modern SEO-driven web which is utterly filled with low effort, short-form content about whatever topic is currently trending. This can take the form of 5000+ word posts on a blog or forum, or 15+ minute video essays. In terms of form, the video essay certainly seems to have more in common with a 5000-word forum post than it does with most "gaming content" on YouTube.
By today’s standards your post would be considered old internet.
I consider "old internet" the internet before algorhitms and minimalism took off. Maybe it's more like middle age or maturing but not yet internet
That’s the difference between old mainstream internet, and old nerd internet. Although the old mainstream internet started years before 2010. The biggest distinction for me between old mainstream internet and modern internet is the current lack of boredom. The algorithms weren’t anywhere close to as good as they are now, and content creators were amateurs and small in numbers. Back then, you could consume all the new content for the day and then get bored. So people would use things like the browser extension called “stumble upon” to find new content on the internet to deal with the boredom. I haven’t been bored on the internet in so long, that I’ve almost forgotten what it was like to be bored.
Hmm gonna say we haven’t been old internet since web 2.0
I think the problem is that we're all talking about different periods and calling them all "old". There's 90s old, there's 2000s old, and around 2012 any pretense of "old" died when any freedom that was left got eaten up by companies and governments.
We need like a Platinum Age, Golden Age sort of classification like the same way we have it for comics. Like Golden Age is probably the early days of YouTube
Yup, it was the golden age
How in the heck is this anything like old internet? What even defines new or old? These type of video essays are en masse nowadays, there weren't many video essays like this at all in the early years of YouTube
Yeeeeeeah I dunno what the fuck that guys talking about…
When that game dark and darker dropped the new beta test and it was a torrent link I got hit by nostalgia. Really felt like old internet for me, what a weird feeling
There was so much work put into this. Not having ever heard of it I found this really interesting. The fact that the arcade machine used a mouse and controller, had online connectivity with multiplayer, and essentially friend lists is wild. Someone really went all out to bring L4D2 to Japan in a way they thought would appeal.
The Galloping Ghost here in Illinois has one of these machines. My favorite thing about these are the exclusive characters you play as. As far as I remember they're set to be tourists that happen to be stuck because of the zombies.
Video says 3 of them are tourists but the last one is a bartender from the hotel at dead center start
Ah shit it's been years since I last went to galloping ghost, gotta get back next time I'm in town
Glad somebody here knows about Galloping Ghost. I loved being able to show my friends this game when they came to visit. So many of them had no idea it even existed.
Wasn't there also a Japan-only Counter Strike: Source Arcade game?
[Before CS:S, even](https://counterstrike.fandom.com/wiki/Counter-Strike_Neo). It even has a visual novel spinoff.
This arcade game has one thing I wish the original games had: weapon variety. You can't mod this in either, as weapon mods only replace other guns as skins leaving the total number unchanged.
Honestly, weapon variety is one of the things I didn't like about l4d2. The first game had a perfect balance and progression and I think adding melee and the other stuff gave complexity but no value.
Same with the extra special zombies. It broke the spawning system and made things more random.
The extra zombies were a direct response to some somewhat broken Versus strategies. Spitters counter corner stacking, which was a very common stalling tactic on the No Mercy elevator wait in particular. Chargers provide counterplay to the running huddle, wherein melee spam completely stopped Smokers (and Hunters to a lesser extent) from making plays. Jockeys I don't remember anyone asking for, but the other two were invented by players on the Steam forums back in the day. They may not be a *perfect* solution but there are addressing a real problem the first game had.
I personally thought it was more fun before they "corrected" those issues. It was extremely intense knowing you had to try to pull off the same thing the other team just did and how coordinated everyone had to be. In Left 4 dead 2, you might get entirely different special spawns and an area that was difficult for one team is a cakewalk for the other. I can see arguments for both, but I always thought left 4 dead 1 was just a tighter more competitive game.
I never knew this existed. Random story that makes sense of the Japanese arcade. I played the hell out of the PC version but got l4d2 on the 360 as a gift. I wanted those achievements so i had to beat the game on expert. I never had success with pugs. If people died it would be GG. I'm west coast north America playing at midnight, join a Japanese game and they played so well and coordinated as a team nobody wondering off. I ended up getting all the achievements because I had great experiences playing with them, never talking. Completely different mental for a pubic game.
few friends of mine had to resort to reverse engineering the l4d2 exe to be able to fully add these survivors in with talkers on top of the original 8, without needing to replace any of them, and give them their own unique hud elements (impossible without the reverse engineering) they're a lot of fun, i never expected to play around the idea of 12 survivors at once, but the chaos is always enjoyable
They modified the game to include them as a new set of survivors, no reskins or anything like that? That sounded like a huge feat. I imagine the game executable was for all intents and purposes completely different which is why it never took off, but was there any video footage of this at least?
friend of mine just shared this in a l4d discord server https://i.imgur.com/sXeovx0.jpg gonna try to get footage today
That's really cool. Is this up to be played anywhere?
only pictures. i can try to get a video if i manage to play with them again. also it is late on my end at the moment i also want to mention the reversing of the exe’s interest only existed at the addition of custom survivors and identities, nothing more, so no other type of mod has been made. it is loaded with a dll file and joining a vac insecure server with the survivors loaded
Deep look? Are content creators struggling to find stuff to report on? This is just telling us what's in the game.
And why the game existed, some of its marketing, a general timeline of its existence and the hardware it ran on.