From reading through posts on this forum it has occured to me that most Talkers are closer to my father’s age than mine. Even so I can’t be the only youngin’ in this kijiji who was ‘Born City’ with no idea what it was like to have only VoK as a channel, or to drink maziwa ya Nyayo in school, or to tremble at the voice of Daniel Arap Moi.
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Back then there was no base ya PS. Gaming was done at home. If you couldn’t afford a console you all went to one kid’s house and played games for hours until their mother told you to get the hell out of her home. We spent countless hours on such classics as GTA, Gran Turismo, Need for Speed, Prince of Persia, God of War, Tekken and Mortal Kombat. PES, FIFA, Quake, Unreal Tournament and Halo. We also had the Gameboy, the OG handheld console before the PSP and Nintendo Switch. When the game cartridge failed to work you’d pull it out, blow on it, slap it on your knee a couple of times and you’re good to go. If it still didn’t work you were screwed. Remember when memory cards were a physical thing you had to carry around to store your data? Nowadays you download a game and the progress is saved digitally. Kids today will never know the struggle of losing a memory card and all your gaming progress with it. Or handling a CD like a pigeon’s egg because the slightest scratch will stop it from playing.
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The Poor Man’s version was the Brick Game
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TV was so good. Back then cable TV was for the rich, but local channels like KTN, NTV, STV and Metro (remember those ones?) actually aired quality content especially for kids. Citizen used to run cartoons up until 7PM. I remember waking up early every Saturday morning to watch reruns and of course Club Kiboko. As for the shows and movies we were spoiled for choice. The mid 80s through to the tail end of 90s were the peak years of true Hollywood macho men like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Van Damme, Cage, Travolta, DeNiro, Pacino, Pesci, Liotta, Eastwood and many more. Tapes of their films were highly coveted. We would rewind our favourite scenes until the damn things stopped working. For some reason we used to believe it works better when you push the button instead of using the remote. TVs were fatscreens not flatscreens.
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Badass female action heroes like Sarah Connor from the Terminator franchise and Ripley from Aliens were done right. There was none of that politically correct forced diversity or pandering to audiences. Nobody rewrote movies with all female casts. If characters were gay or black or female it wasn’t made the central point of their existence. God I miss those days. Nowadays Hollywood hits you over the head with their diversity in the name of representation. Even cartoons aren’t free of the politically correct disease.
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There is only one Charmed. The remake is garbage.
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X-Files. Had a huge crush on Scully.
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This show was just plain weird and horrifying
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Still one of the best spy shows ever to have a female lead. Better than Alias in my opinion.
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Before Prison Break, before Orange is the New Black, there was Oz. Hardest prison show ever. There was no Ezekiel Mutua to tell us it was too dirty or violent for children. I pity kids nowadays. PG rating for everything. Actors can’t even be shown kissing on screen.
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Before Ray Donovan there was Tony Soprano.
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Who can forget Jack Bauer? The baddest superspy in America?
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And the legend himself, Chuck Norris as Walker, the Texas Ranger who took down entire gangs with roundhouse kicks and judo flips. I wanted a cowboy hat and a leather jacket so bad because of this dude.
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So many cartoons to choose from. Not a single bad one. My mother always hated Johhny Bravo. As I got older I understood why.
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Real OGs know what this game was all about. Can’t even imagine how much I played this.
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And this.
Cellphones went from this
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To this
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Everyone wanted one of these. Flip phones were the shit after Kibaki improved telecommunications and made phones more accessible to the common man. Touch screen phones were for corporate types.
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Every girl had a phone that looked like this. Kids today will never know the struggle. Texting was a skill and some people were damn good at it.
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Blackberries were the iPhones of that time. If you had one of these you were either a corporate guy or filthy rich. They only started to become useless around the mid 2000s.
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The music. Who can forget the music? The 90s-2000s was a period where all music from rock to reggae to hip hop to soul to RnB was good. My parents would drive me to school with Justin Timberlake or E-Sir or Nameless playing and they didn’t mind, in fact they sang along. The days of Fareed Kimani and Dusty Rhodes. Rick Dees and the Weekly Top 40. When Capital FM was Capital FM and I didn’t know DJ CK was actually a corrupt billionaire. When Kenyan radio wasn’t gossip and BS hekayas about wives finding their husbands in bed with the pastor. I wonder how many parents today would endure the garbage their kids listen to while giving them a ride to school. I would slap my son if he listened to Lil Pump or Ethic entertainment. The mid to late 2000s marked a strange marriage of pop-rock and new school hip-hop and everything went downhill from there IMO but that’s a discussion for another day.
I know I can’t have covered everything. There’s a lot I’ve missed but these are the things that stood out for me the most when I think of my childhood. What do you remember about being a 90s baby? Or just living in the 90s in general?
