This doesn't strike me as a useful definition of mainstream.
I live in Vietnam and I guarantee you that no one here could tell you a single thing about baseball, The Beatles, or Elvis.
Hell, just go to Australia/UK and no one will be able to explain baseball to you. Just like you can go to the US and no one understands cricket even though nearly 1 billion people (albeit primarily in the ex-British Commonwealth) do.
In any case, your claims about the video game market 15 years ago (in 2003) aren't accurate. In 2003 videogames in the US sold 240 million units. 54% of American households bought a new videogame -- that's far from "mostly something upper-middle-class children owned".
15 years ago 32% of households were already playing video games on a mobile device (phone, PDA, handheld game system). 35% of parents said they played video games. 69% of households said they played computer & video games.
15 years ago 2/3rd of Americans played video games. It was already mainstream. Sure, it has gotten MORE popular since then. But that doesn't mean it wasn't mainstream.
For a preview of what video games being "mainstream" looks like: South Korea. It's not unthinkable we could get there in the west.
as reference, according to wiktionary, mainstream is Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of a population or market. I think that definition can encompass 40,000,000 households owning consoles.
Wii Sports (12 years old) sold 80 million copies. That's more than any album ever.
Individual videogames regularly sell more than MUSIC and have done so for well over a decade.
I don't know what definition of mainstream there is where something sells 80 million copies and still isn't mainstream.
Super Mario Bros sold over 40 million copies.
Both of those games are 30 years old. Wii Sports was not even close to being one of the first mainstream games.
The original Pokemon games sold over 30 million copies, inspired a massive worldwide TV show, and that was over 20 years ago.
It wasnt mainstream in the 90’ies which is where i predicted that one say you would be able to score girls by being a famous gamer.
I'm pretty sure this was different in the 80s.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/12/15/who-plays-video-games-...
(contemporary example: Taylor Swift is decidedly mainstream. Does everyone listen to Taylor Swift? No. At best half of teens and twenty-somethings and drops off going through olders. Does everyone know someone who listens to Taylor Swift? Pretty much.)
No. Unless you're talking about a country other than the US, this is absolutely incorrect.
Original Playstation sold more than 40,000,000 units in the U.S., and in the same console generation N64 sold another 20,000,000. On the portable front, the original Gameboy & Color version, beginning in 1989, sold more than 40,000,000 units. Keep in mind, there were only about 80,000,000 households.
There are not 40,000,000 upper-middle class households in the US. For reference, the original gameboy cost $90, roughly $180 in today's money. This is not out of reach for even poorer households. In today's dollars, even if you draw the "upper middle" line relatively low at about $100k for a family of 3, there's only about 30 million households at that level, and 16 million of them don't even have kids.
I'm not debating that video games have become even more popular in recent years, but they were mainstream long before that. "Mainstream" doesn't mean "everyone". The simple wiktionary definition is simply "Used or accepted broadly rather than by small portions of a population or market." I'd be hard pressed to say that millions upon millions of console owners isn't "used broadly".
My point with that statement was more about the image than the reality. Go back to 2002, and ask a legislator—or any childless 40-year-old—"who plays video games." That's the answer they'd give. Yuppies. Children of yuppies. (Then the XBOX hit and it became "college-student yuppies and urban youth." No market shift happened in reality; it was just advertising causing a change in perceived image of gaming as a hobby.)
> households
I really think "households" is a bad way to measure anything about gaming, because the particular way that gaming wasn't mainstream in the 1970s-2000s (besides older people just never having experienced it) was that it was incredibly male-coded.
In 2003, a girl sitting around playing GBA games was still considered to be doing something "tomboyish." It wasn't until the release of the Nintendo DS in 2004 that there was any large-scale availability of games specifically targeted at female demographics. All the home consoles were advertised at boys, and mostly had games for boys (that being the explicit localization strategy of the American branches of Nintendo and Sega through the 90s; it began changing by the early 2000s partly due to the influence of Sony, partly the diminishment of Sega, and partly the reining-in of NoA by Nintendo Japan.)
PC games were more gender-neutral (because PCs weren't advertised at kids to begin with, but in homes as a side-effect of parental usage), but AAA releases targeted at girls were still few and far between. There was... The Sims? That's all I can think of. When I ask the women I know about the games they played in that era—of their own volition, rather than because someone handed them a controller—the only other one they tend to name is Myst. Oh, and DDR, but DDR seemingly wasn't really "a video game" in their minds, in the sense that made them think of themselves as "the type of person who plays video games."
And maybe girls around you didn't play videogames, but they certainly did where I was, about as much, but maybe a little less. you're assumptions here are simply wrong.
No it's not. "Pop culture" (or "mainstream"-ness) must reach even "a member of the elite class", to be pop culture. The point at which something becomes "pop culture", is precisely the point at which it becomes equally likely that you've heard of it, no matter which demographics you're a part of. If there's even one demographic (like busy rich old white men) that can still be completely isolated from a thing's "reach", then that thing is not pop culture yet.
If all 20-year-olds know about something, but all 40-year-olds do not know about that thing, then that thing is not "pop culture" (or "mainstream", either-or.)
On the other hand, if 10% of ten-year-old boys and eighty-year-old women and plumbers and astrophysicists and farmers and investment bankers have all heard of the thing, then it is "pop culture."
Try that criterion out. It really does work:
• Beanie Babies? Pop culture.
• Pogs? Not really pop culture. They were a fad, but they died out before they reached universal intelligibility.
• The movie Titanic? Pop culture.
• The movie The Matrix? Not quite pop culture. My grandma hasn't seen it. Yours probably hasn't either.
• Pokemon in general? Not pop culture.
• Pikachu in particular? Pop culture. (Thus the recent movie.)
• Snoopy? Pop culture. Americana, even. ("Americana" being a word meaning "pop culture, but pretty much only in America, so we've latched onto it as a thing that reminds us of America.")
• Hello Kitty? Pop culture elsewhere, but not-so-much in America, despite what certain stylists like to think.
It is by this same criteria that I claim that "video games up to 2003" were not—as an abstract gestalt—part of pop culture, and that "video games starting in 2004"—as an abstract gestalt—were part of pop culture. They went from being "Hello Kitty" to being "Snoopy"; from being "The Matrix" to being "Titanic"; from being "Pogs" to being "Beanie Babies."
And I hate to be insulting but I can’t imagine you being an adult. I’m fairly certain every adult here knew who sonic and Mario were and none of us would be so ignorant as to say gaming only went mainstream in the last fifteen years.
Your "insult" literally corroborates what I'm saying. Until within the last 15 years, we weren't adults. The "adults" of then very likely did not know who sonic and Mario were, even if their kids did. Now that we're adults, adults know who sonic and mario are. And so do our kids. And maybe some of our parents. That's the point.
Please don't start of comments on HN calling people "son", then claim to "hate to be insulting", then proceed to insult people. None of that was necessary to make your points.
As recently as 15 years ago, a "game console" (home or portable) was mostly something upper-middle-class children owned. 10 years ago, we all got smartphones, and those smartphones got app stores, and suddenly everyone owned a game console (whether they wanted to or not), with a constant stream of games—often free games—coming out for it.
Mario got a movie in the 80s. Pokemon got Thanksgiving day floats in the 90s. But in neither of those cases was everyone playing; everyone was just aware of the brand (mostly because their kids were playing.)
Meanwhile, if you union the sets of people who have played just Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Fortnite at this point, it's probably something like half the global population. Gaming really did "blow up" in the last decade.