I tried using examples of my own youthful adventures and communities -- still not easy.
redisman, could you tell more about this?
Keep in mind when these games were released there was no rating system for video games. The ESRB came about because of these hearings.
Now we’re talking. Doom was a massive deal because of the violence (as you mentioned), but also because it moved entertainment revenue away from MSM and onto PC’s and the internet.
Doom was not some watershed moment in entertainment. It was a trend setter, or at least a meme, in the industry but it didn't somehow change the trajectory of the game industry.
The PlayStation was vastly more influential on the industry on the whole than Doom. It was less expensive than PCs yet had a good selection of the sort of "mature" titles (or even ports) typically found on the PC. The PlayStation was not a platform that moved money from the "MSM" since it Sony which was the very definition of mainstream.
Doom was cool but it didn't even come close to doing what you suggest. It didn't even have Internet multiplayer until Kali (originally iDOOM) came up with their IPX/SPX bridging years after its release.
While id was certainly an Internet aware company in 1993 most consumers were not.
Keep in mind in 1993 a minority of households even had computers. A minority of those users even had modems. Even when they did have computers with modems connecting to a "local" BBS could still be a local toll call.
A copy of that month's PC Gamer was much cheaper than a modem and got you not just Doom but hundreds of megabytes of other crap. Cover discs were still a big deal even towards the end of the decade where home Internet access was more common.
As for the PlayStation, it was released in the Japan in 1994 and the US in 1995. Doom was released at the end of 1993 so it's contemporaneous with the PlayStation. The PSX had Doom-quality 3D games (including Doom itself) for a fraction of what a good Doom running PC cost.
Right, so you agree? This thread is about counter culture, and your talking about generic internet usage facts and % of playstation sales when it went mainstream. I played Wolf and Doom as shareware in Australia when they were released, including Kali.
1. Doom's distribution was (to consumers) largely CD-ROMs.
2. Doom didn't even support Internet multiplayer, only modem-modem or LAN (IPX/SPX).
3. The game industry was a multi billion dollar industry by the time of Doom's release. Doom didn't somehow accelerate growth of the industry.
4. Instead of being a shareware-only title like Doom, it's sequel was sold in big boxes like all other games.
5. Doom didn't influence people getting online (BBSes or Internet) as there was no sudden uptick in modem sales, account signups, or BBS growth associated with the game.
Doom was a fun game and got media attention for being popular and violent. It was not however some major inflection point in the game industry or Internet.
No, someone mentioned that mortal kombat and doom were examples of counter culture, and as someone living in rural Australia in the early 90s, I agreed.
Kpop is deliberately manufactured culture. The personalities and music are meticulously curated by corporations. "Underground Kpop" is practically an oxymoron like a "married bachelor" would be.
And that's not to insult or knock it.
Abstractly maybe, but in actuality an enormous amount of money and effort is spent to market K-Pop in the US by some of the largest media companies in the world.
That's a distinction that should be noted because you can see it everywhere. For example: the MCU, Star Wars, and Star Trek are all corporate products produced for a mass audience. But the fandom is independent of that control. The number of good jokes, fan theories, and fan art I've seen for WandaVision has been immense. And the impact of the Star Wars & Star Trek fandoms is also enormous on the culture at large. That's something Disney or Paramount can possibly influence but never hope to control.
E-Boys/Girls, VSCO Girls, and cottagecore are some examples.
Any successful culture, be it sub- or counter-, will eventually be swallowed by the mainstream. That’s because a culture is such only if it gets transmitted from person to person. Denying transmission is not counter-cultural, it is anti-cultural: it denies its own validity. Which is why I laugh at the elitism and pretentiousness of articles like these, who want to be purer than pure then take their clues from the likes of MTV Unplugged. The search for purity in culture is a fool’s errand, one might as well burn every page one writes. In reality, culture has to be transmitted, and the purists are just another bunch of competitors desperately trying to elbow everybody else with what little leverage they have.
The modern lack of visible “alternative” cultures is simply due to the fragmentation and recombination that new media have allowed. Guthenberg has invented his press a few years ago, Luther just started writing his thesis, and we are all here wondering why amanuensis culture is not as vibrant as it was.
I was one of those hardcore punks and I think you greatly overestimate both the level of parental involvement we had in our lives as well as our parents' musical tastes.
Hardcore as a youth movement didn't get swallowed by the mainstream, it just ceased to exist.