> This was also the case with TV's. Where one family in the street would own a TV and all the neighbourhood kids would come and gather to watch.

I'm old enough to have experienced something similar. When I was young my dad won a color TV in a sales contest. I think it was the first in our neighborhood and was the first in our extended family. Every Sunday evening my grandfather would come over and bring desert and we would gather as a family and watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. As we got older, my siblings and I would beg to be permitted to stay up and watch Bonanza. Good times!

That can still be the case in the developing world.

I passed through a border crossing in West Africa last year. The border guard was struggling a bit copying the English names into his ledger, but after copying my hometown, he realised he knew that word — there's a famous British football team.

He got really excited, and pointed out the TV in the corner, and said how everyone in the area had come to the customs post to watch the big final, since it was the only TV.

(Perhaps it was the only TV that could receive a Satellite broadcast of the foreign match, or maybe it really was the only TV — the border crossing was remote.)

>This was also the case with TV's. Where one family in the street would own a TV and all the neighbourhood kids would come and gather to watch. Well before my time though :)

I am old enough to remember as a child (my grandmother had the only TV in the building, 4 apartments) how every thursday evening all the people from the other apartments came to watch TV (there was a very, very popular quiz show on thursdays in Italy), and after the show we all had some biscuits/cakes (and the adults a glass of wine) together.

My father used to tell me how when he was a kid his father was often asked by the neighbours to put his radio (the only device in several buildings) on the window sill in the evening so that people assembled in the common court could hear the news during the WWII.

Game consoles as well, most kids may get one (not one per generation, mind), so depending on the latest game or console you'd go to one or the other of your friends.

That was my experience back in the 2000's; best friend's house was Halo house and mine was Smash Bros house.

But those were the days of splitscreen local multiplayer games. I expect there's much more pressure for a social group to all have the same console now due to the the prevalence of online multiplayer.

Some of my fondest memories involve sitting around a gameboy with a friend and a sibling, trying to beat Super Mario Land. It had no saves, and in the past we had been thwarted by the daily power outages and the fiddly power connector kept in place with a match (no batteries). We also did this with various NES games, which at least made it easier for everyone else to see the screen.

And then there were the arcades. My friend was a local celebrity and so good that some arcades had banned him, or set his favorite games to 'super difficult'. When he played, a crowd would watch, whether it was Dinosaurs VS Cadillacs, TMNT: Manhattan Project, or Street Fighter. Sometimes some clueless new guy would challenge him in the latter, and a significant portion of the arcade users would notice and come see the beatdown.

Sometimes we'd go to a new part of town because they had fancy new games, or because they hadn't banned him yet. We'd play co-op games, and he'd help me stay alive as long as possible.

I haven't thought about this in a long time, but this kind of social gaming was central to my youth, now that I think about it.

(and that's not even getting into the 90s/00s LAN parties!)

> But those were the days of splitscreen local multiplayer games.

Yup. I have fond memories of multiplayer mario kart or goldeneye, or cooperative games e.g. coop Secret of Mana / Seiken Densetsu 2.

> I expect there's much more pressure for a social group to all have the same console now due to the the prevalence of online multiplayer.

So do I, but Nintendo seems to have kept the flame alive, local multiplayer mario kart works fine on the Switch, and the game is playable with solo joy-cons, so a pair of full-size controllers is enough for 4 players (once you find out how to configure the bloody thing).

> local multiplayer mario kart works fine on the Switch

I got Mario Kart 8 for Switch and we tried playing it on one large shared TV screen.

We immediately ran into the problem that it's incredibly difficult to see the track on the split screen. Seems like local multiplayer only works well when everyone involved has memorized all the tracks.

Ah yes, we play using a projector rather than a TV so it wasn't that much of an issue.

We have a Nintendo Switch in my office. 4 player split-screen Mario Kart is a lot of fun.

In poor areas, this was true for games on top of consoles. I might have gotten a game a year or something like that. So, a friend with a newer game got to show out in front of other friends like I did with mine. Then, there were the rare people who had really different consoles. They got to show us a whole, different experience.

Neighborhood I grew up in was like that. I had an Atari 2600, a friend had an Intellivision (with the speech synth module thing), and another had a ColecoVision. I don't remember why, but getting to play on the ColecoVision was a big deal. Parents didn't like him having people over or something.

When TV's became more popular there was a pretty low number of channels for a long time limited to the three networks in the USA, then even after cable came out - adoption was slower in more rural parts of the country. I can remember wanting to do almost anything else and not wanting to watch much TV because the selection of shows appealing to me and not a repeat was so low.