Besides being a fun way to pass time, video gaming is a surprisingly affordable hobby per unit time. A console or budget PC might only cost a few hundred dollars, and modern games like Hollowknight: Silksong can provide 40-60 hours of experience for only around $20 USD. This value proposition wasn’t really there in the 80s, where arcade cabinets like Gauntlet might have cost an inflation-adjusted $8 per hour in quarters. This paradigm shift is great for gamers, but hasn’t been great for arcade owners. [PrintAndPanic] wanted to bring some of that old coin munching vibe into console gaming, and so added a credit system to Super Mario 64.
The project is a fork of a decompilation of Super Mario 64, which converts the original machine code into a human-friendly format so bugs can be fixed and other modern features added. With the code available, essentially anyone can add features into the game that weren’t there already. In this case, [PrintAndPanic] is using a Raspberry Pi connected to a coin slot, so when coins are put into the game like an old arcade machine, the Raspberry Pi can tell the modified version of Super Mario 64 to add credits. These credits allow the player to run and jump, and when the credits run out Mario becomes extremely limited and barely able to outrun even the slowest Bombombs and Goombas.
With some debugging out of the way and the custom game working, [PrintAndPanic] built a custom enclosure for the game and the coin slot to turn it into a more self-contained arcade-style machine. The modified code for this project is available on the project’s GitHub page for those who want to play a tedious version of a favorite video game that costs more money than it should.
There are plenty of other modifications for this classic as well, most of which involve improving the game instead of adding a modern microtransaction-based system.
Listen, I play video games to avoid real life.
I hate and love this at the same time. Peak interneting.
This is the second article I’ve seen today that mentions “inflation adjusted” numbers. When you guys do that, it’s not an accurate representation of “value”. It’s off-putting. For straight inflation numbers, you may be correct, but money was more available at the time, especially if you look at the minimum wage to cost ratio. We weren’t rich, but money went farther.
I’ll leave you with this example: In 1988, when I would have been playing Gauntlet, candy bars were 25 cents. Adjusting for inflation only, that would be 69 cents today. But, I think most of us know that candy bars are now over 2 dollars. So, “adjusting for inflation” gives us ZERO insight into actual cost. Perhaps calculating the ratio to a minimum wage hour would be more effective.
I think this is more due to the fact that our inflation metrics are inherently (and intentionally) flawed. The “basket of goods” we use to track prices changes over time based on what people buy, and of course burgers are cheaper than steak. Scaling prices to the minimum (or even median) wage is a good alternative though.
Reminds me of some politician’s campaign to “end relative poverty”.
Weeelll… there’s two ways you can do that. One way is to raise the income of the poorest people. The other is to tax the working middle class more until the difference between the two vanishes.
So, in other words, there’s an obvious meaning that makes sense, then another one you would only invent if you were being a picky, tedious weirdo
If you think about how it would actually work, the two meanings become the same.
The state doesn’t create wealth, the people do. If the government gives to one, it must take from the other.
I wonder, with the loss of manufacturing base and shift toward a service economy (assuming that’s true), are more workers actually working for minimum wage than would have been in the US of, say, the 1950’s, 1960’s & 1970’s?
If you look at the population by income distribution on gapminder.org, then the US income distribution in 1980 has a slight negative skew, while in 2024 it’s pretty much normal (no skew).
Negative skew in income distribution means that the mode is above the median. Mode is the “most likely” outcome, i.e. the peak of the population distribution. This means more people were making money just above the median than below it, but also that the poor people were spread out further from the median so while there was slightly less poverty, it tended to be worse poverty.
Yet, the portion of people in absolute poverty (less than $3/day) was 0.5% in 1980 and it has become 0.63% in 2024 so more people are having to make do with practically no money. In absolute numbers, the extremely poor population has doubled to about two million.
My own deeply flawed metric is this:
When I was in high school working a job at above minimum wage, like nearly $10 (I’m awesome!) doing manual labor outdoors at a golf course all summer, a tank of gas was also darn near $10. So in terms of real purchasing power for me, then (tons of caveats) roughly an hour of work equated to about a full tank of gasoline. Similarly, “tightwad two-dollar Tuesday” at the local movie theater was $2!
Today federal minimum wage (a pathetic less than $8/hr) will get you about 1.5 gallons of gas, maybe 2 depending on where you live, no where close to a full tank and honestly you probably burn that getting to and from work anyway. And a movie is probably twice a hour’s work if you are lucky.
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So at least in my own case, the pinch is real. Today, I’m a professional and do just fine I guess, but it still feels like my money really doesn’t go far and a bag of groceries is $100 even without alcohol.
Actually come to think of it booze is still probably the only thing I can say is “cheap enough” still.
The median income during the same time has increased by 55.2% so if we adjust the absolute poverty limit in 2024 to match what $3 dollars was in 1980 then we’d see that 0.85% or nearly 3 million people are now living in what was considered absolute poverty then.
I mean there’s probably an alternate reality somewhere where Nintendo never move to creating home consoles and Mario 64 was an arcade game, though I imagine it’s be the more traditional pay for lives model.