Everyone grows up remembering the decades of their youth as some of the best times of their lives.  Everyone remembers the fun they had when they were younger, as a child or a teen, and the toys, technology, fashion and music of the decades they grew up in.  So in the spirit of having some fun and nostalgia (and feel free to join in with your own decades if you like 😀 ) and so you can find out a bit more about me 😉 I thought I’d share with you 9 reasons why I love the fact I grew up in the 1990s!  Why 9 reasons?  Well, apart from the fact that 9 appears in the ’90s’ but it’s also a lucky personal number for me…so why not? 😉 😀

The 90s were a brilliant time for me, most of my school life took place in the 90s and it was a time I really discovered who I am and felt myself grow up.  A lot happened throughout the 90s and I definitely have some great memories of those years and looking back on them I can’t help but be nostalgic about some of the things that others might have cringed at.  So here’s my reasons for loving this decade!  And if you feel like doing this fun post yourself then feel free 😀

9 Reasons I’m Glad I Grew Up in the 90s!

1. Dark denim

Yes, I know denim really became big in the 80s with baggy and very pale washed out styles of denim clothing, but the 90s is where dark denim became all the rage and what’s more, I really did look good in everything I bought 🙂  The denim clothes I wore were mainly jeans and jackets but they fitted perfectly, they were literally fitted styles of jeans and the jackets were short, but you can never really go wrong with denim and I think I’ll always gravitate towards denim clothing, especially dark denim clothing no matter how old I get! 😉

2. CDs

Although CDs first came into existence in the 80s, it wasn’t until the 90s that you really saw everyone owning a CD player and buying them instead of casettes.  The quality of CD music compared to cassette was undeniably better and I was in awe the first time I heard a CD of B*Witched (the first CD album I owned and got for my birthday!).  I was a late adopter to CDs though, this probably due to the fact my family just weren’t that rich back then and we owned both a record player and I had my own cassette player and recorder which I used to both listen to music and record my own tapes 🙂  But we had no ability to buy up a CD player until far later (I’m still not sure if CDs can really outdo records though!)

3. Point books

Ah yes!  Does anyone remember those teen/YA books all published by Scholastic and all with the word Point on them.  Point books were like a marker of a decent YA/teen book when I was growing up and I loved reading the Point Horror range more than any others.  They all followed a similar formula with someone usually hurt or dead and spooky things happening.  I didn’t read the whole Point Horror range, but I remember spending literally hours in the teen section of bookshops, trying to decide between the latest Point Horror books on the shelf.  I bought quite a few of them (I would have bought them all if I could have afforded to back then!) and ended up borrowing a whole lot from my local library too, although I do regret never trying any Point Horror Unleashed as I think I would have liked the extra freak out!

Point books weren’t just horror though, and I’ve read and still own a few Point Crime, Point Romance and even just plain Point books, the latter being the contemporary genre.  I’m not sure these books would stand up to todays young adult fiction which has come a long way, but I can’t wait to unearth my pile of books that’s currently stored in boxes since I moved…I might just re-read the whole lot and review them here one day too! 😀

4. Videogames lacking bugs/errors

Videogames back in the 90s were very different from today.  Todays games are so stagnant, many of the big games developers and publishers are only keen on making the same game in various updated forms (like The Sims) and they don’t really care about creating new and different games.  Innovation tends to come from indie developers these days, but back in the 90s, there were so many different types of video games it was amazing what you could find.  You could also install all games without needing the internet which was cool as you pysically owned a copy of each game on disc/cartridge and could install multiple times if it was a PC game (modern young gamers don’t know how good this was!)

Apart from that, videogames also had very few bugs and errors.  Of course there were games that had their issues, but on console I rarely encountered this (in fact I’m not sure I did encounter any errors at all!) and coming across a bug or error was a big deal, as it just didn’t happen often.  You could play games for literally hours and not ever come across any problems.  I still look at my Sega Mega Drive (Genesis) with such fondness today 🙂

5. Sega Mega Drive & Sonic the Hedgehog

Speaking of videogames, one of the best and most iconic videogame characters and videogame consoles was created in the 90s and that was Sonic the Hedgehog for the Sega Megadrive (or Genesis in the US).  Sonic is the first videogame character I ever saw on screen and it made me desperately want a Mega Drive.  I got the console for my birthday after a long time of waiting for it (I was a patient and grateful child 🙂 ) and I only owned one videogame for over a year once I got the console: Sonic the Hegehog 2 (again because we lacked the money to buy more), but wow did I play this game to death!  It solidified Sonic as a favourite character of mine and I still play Sonic games to this day. 🙂  They’ve since developed into games with stronger storylines, new characters have been included and they’ve gone 3D but it’s still Sonic at its core and the games have helped cheer me up during bad times in my life.

6. Tamagotchi

I had a pet back in the 1990s, a beautiful tuxedo cat who lived beyond the 90s and who I still miss very much now she’s gone. 😢  But back in the 90s, real life pets weren’t the only ones you could have.  The virtual pet became very popular indeed, with Tamagotchi taking off and lots of other manufacturers imitating it.

I had an original tamagotchi and just loved it!  Carrying around the little egg shaped keyring device with a small screen on the front and buttons to feed, play and clean up after your little pet was surprisingly addictive.  A lot of the girls at my school had some form of virtual pet but a lot of them were not exactly discreet in class and had them confiscated by the teachers.  Mine though was put on silent and sat neatly in my pocket or pencil case and never was discovered by any teachers.  Tamagotchis were so fun, they were little cute alien creatures that did not die, but rather went back to their home planet – although the screen showed them as an angel which was a little disturnbing to my young mind!  I was so addicted to Tamagotchi that a few years later, i was given a PC version as a gift for Christmas – best gift that year! 😀 😀 😀

7.  Sunset Beach

This is daft but I loved an American soap called Sunset Beach which began in the 90s on what was a new channel 5 at the time.  One school day I spent the day at home after feeling sick and ended up seeing the last few minutes of a show called Sunset Beach.  It was a really silly, over the top show where the characters spent way too long staring off into space after making a statement, and there were such silly storylines which were done in such over-dramatic fashion.  But the show made an impact on me and made me laugh for how silly it was.  And so I decided to start watching it a few weeks later.  Sunset Beach developed a bit of a cult viewing a year later, and only went on for about two years in total before being axed in its home country (and therefore here), but I loved watching it and was glad to have discovered it before most people.  It made my day every evening when I’d watch through a recording of it I’d made on video tape.  It made all the horrible stuff I’d gone through at school a little easier as it cheered me up so much!

8. Dial-up internet

Okay, hear me out before judging this, lol 🙂  Dial-up internet was the only kind of internet that existed back in the 90s and you could basically only access the internet via your landline (or household telephone line).  It wasn’t possible to get the internet on a mobile network, mobile phones back then only had text messaging and that was a pretty new thing too!  So, accessing the internet was a case of connecting your existing telephone line into the PC and ‘phoning up’ the service provider to access the internet.  Can anyone remember that annoying sound that accompanied dialing up to the internet this way? 😛  I actually loved that sound, it never bothered me, lol!

Of course I don’t miss the slow connection of dial-up and how it blocked your home phone line, but in a sense this is also why I miss it.  You see, the internet back in the 90s (for me at least) was something you took time out to go on.  I remember spending a good amount of hours on the internet in the early noughties, but the internet back in the 90s wasn’t that necessary and people didn’t rely on it for everything.  You could live and feel good living disconnected and as someone who gets dizzy spells sometimes from mobile internet dongles and routers and other wireless technology, I really enjoyed the fact that the internet wasn’t needed for everything.

There’s also one more reason I loved the internet back them.  Although no web page was ever perfect, the number of ‘fake news’ pages back then wasn’t big (at least not in my experience), people just didn’t seem to care to write up fake news stories, if they were there you could easily spot them as fake, and you could access web pages from around the world without todays restrictions because of GDRP and other similar laws, and you’d also not get stuck with search engines always giving you the same results – honestly, today I feel like whenever I search for something I’m directed to the same few websites no matter how many times I click ‘next page’!

9. Music

So, music

Okay, okay, for those that never liked the Spice Girls don’t get annoyed, but they were the first pop group I actually got into and began my love of music in the 90s.  The Spice Girls songs were really catchy and despite criticisms they got, you can’t deny they were a very popular group and popularised the idea of girl power, which ultimately made any girl at the time feel like they could achieve anything.  Maybe that’s another reason I liked them so much, that or the fact that their voice range was perfect for me to sing along too!

I also loved the beat of 90s music.  It was a little different to the 80s which also had a good beat to it, and there were a variety of tunes and styles, but I do feel like it had a better beat than most pop music of today, where I just don’t hear a decent tune that often.

 

So these are my top 9 reasons for loving the 1990s!  Where you around in the 90s – I find it incredibly weird still to think there are grown up people who were born beyond the 90s – my brain’s still stuck in 2006, lol!  If you were around in the 90s (as a child, teen or adult) what do you remember liking about this decade?  If you’d like to do this fun post/tag for yourself then please go ahead and you can even use the header image I have, just please remember to put a link to this post in yours that way I get a pingback and can find out what your favourite things about the 90s are 🙂  I might do another tag about other decades in future too, let me know if you’re interested in reading those too 🙂

What did you like about the 90s, where you even born then?  What did you like about the decade(s) you grew up in?  Let me know what you think in the comments below 🙂

 

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