2w ago

How gamers were nickel and dimed in 80s and 90s (besides arcades)

Granted, the "nickel and diming" of hotline numbers (1900, 0900, etc) was nowhere as bad as today's cash shops, but a lot of us simply forgot they were always hungry for all our money

Here's a bunch other hotline ads for you to peruse - https://www.retromags.com/gallery/category/1729-telephone-hotlines/

PS: I never understood these american numbers that used letters, how were you supposed to know what was the actual number?

55 comments

I remember calling the LucasArts one for Day of the Tentacle back in the day. I don't remember what I was stuck on exactly, I just remember hearing, "You're playing with Hoagie in the past." I think that's the only game I ever called a hint line for.
Your phones don't have letters on the buttons?
Long ago, before cell phones blew up how many numbers people used, American seven digit numbers were often referred to as a combination of letters and numbers. Below was a guide I how to translate the first three letters to a single word for numbers in Chicago
- When each letter is in a different number, I can understand, but what about "TIPS", both P and S are on 7, so it'd be 8477?
  That kind of thing was never used in Brazil, though part of that could be explained by telephones being state controlled up until 1990 or so, people could wait years to get a line.
  
  When each letter is in a different number, I can understand, but what about “TIPS”, both P and S are on 7, so it’d be 8477?
  You got it!
  
  Yes, it would be 8477. It wasn't uncommon to see the number only version beside or below the word version. They are mostly there to make it easier to remember the phone number, since having a list of contacts wasn't nearly as common back then, at least as a kid.
  
  Yes, 8477. And back when SMS text messaging was a new feature on cellphones, the earliest way to enter the letters was to hit the number multiple times until the right letter was on screen. So to write “cat” you would hit 222 2 8. This was time consuming, so when features like T9 Predictive Text came along it really helped improve texting in the pre-smartphone era.
  
  Yup. You press the same number as many times as you need. If the whole word is under 5 then the number is all 5s. lol. I’m not originally from the US myself and just learned this a couple of years ago. Never seen it anywhere else but the US.
- Even the latest iOS has letters on the numbers.
  That said I hated when they'd advertise their phone number with the letters vs the numbers. Sure it's easier to remember. But the translation just never came easy to me.
You just press the number that has the letter, regardless of if the letter was in the beginning or the end, you just press the number wherever that letter is.
- Fun fact, it's a carryover from when dial service was first implemented in the United States!
  In the beginning, you'd pick up the phone and hear "Number please?" and then you'd tell the operator the central office name followed by the number, like "Bubbling Brook 3-2468" or "Murray Hill 5-9975"
  Once dial service was implemented, you'd instead hear the dial tone and then dial the first two letters of the office name, followed by the rest of the number (BU32468 or MU59975), using this arrangement of letters.
  Once phone numbers went to all-digits around 1961, the letters on the dial got repurposed for numbers like these. Of course, they got repurposed again for T9 texting and contact search.
  AT&T has an old video about this topic
  
  and the "DRM" of the day was typing in the third word of the second paragraph on page 6 of the printed booklet that came with the game.
- That's a more modern version. Q and Z were originally left off, which lets the numbers 2 through 9 have only three letters each. You wouldn't find mnemonic numbers listed with those letters. Which was fine, because they aren't common letters in English, anyway.
  They got added when cell phone text messaging got big on flip phones. Then you had to have them.
  
  Damn. That’s a great piece of info. I didn’t know about this stuff until I moved to the US. lol. Thank you for the education of course.
  
  If you want to see a monkey, just call 555-123 SOO.
I never once used one of these.
Quite a bit different than in-Game DLC crap. Plus I'm sure you could block 900 numbers on your line.
My parents would have ensured my soul left my body if I had tried to call one of these
- I remember having to beg my folks to be able to call the Nintendo hotline a couple times during childhood when I was completely and utterly stuck in a game on NES. At least the people answering were pretty prompt--I don't think it took more than 5 mins to get the info I needed.
I'll go to the magazine isle of Walmart with a pen and paper like a normal person, thank you very much.
1-900-28-VIRGIN
Never used any of these hotlines.
What I did use were the magazines you could find at most stores at the time. Those would have walkthroughs and guides for most of the games available at the time.
- The difference between games journalism in the past and today isn't that the reviews were more honest and reliable back in the day, it's that the magazines provided more stuff in addition to the reviews (previews, tips, etc) that made them worthwhile.
- I also went with magazines or small "cheats only" booklets, since they cost about 3 minutes of a hotline call, hoping it'd have the cheats for the games I wanted. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't. Then there were the cheats that just didn't work
"get a clue gamer dude" would make a great emoji
- Not as good an edit, but I think the text boxes are important 😁
  
  Thank you i love it!
StarTropics for NES had a "letter from your uncle" in the manual, that you had to soak in water to reveal the submarine's activation code when you reached Chapter 4. I think that was the only time we used the Nintendo tip line, because of a lost manual!
- I meant to keep the note since it said to, but lost the damn thing before I got to the point where you need the code. Luckily, I tried "747" out of desperation, thinking of the airplane. Boy, was that a relief!
- That is psychotic
Wow. 1994 is the date of this.
Our local library had the cheat books by then.
Also, the text guides were online either BBS or Usenet. I remember printing out guides by 1994. I guess that wasn't as common as I thought if people were spending on 1-900 numbers. I wonder how much they made doing this?
- Gotta remember that home computers weren't "popular" back then either (it was easier for a household to have no computer than to have any), so anything on the internet would be the equivalent of browsing freenet, gemini or i2p today
After this, we got the cheat code books.
- Also before this.
Wait, some countries didn't have letters on their dialpads? Maybe this was just a thing in English speaking countries?
- I never heard of anything like that in Europe. I always wondered about why americans dial letters.
- I frankly don't remember whether the dialpads had letters in Brazil, possibly didn't; but I do remember that no number ever advertised like that mix, it was always the whole number
The only time I called a number similar was the one on the bottom of my NES or SNES to ask about a connector and what it was for... The guy said it was like a trailer hitch in case they wanted to make something to connect to it. To my country boy self, that made sense. I don't know if they ever used it.
- That was there for a CD-ROM add-on, which was planned from the start but never actually released. Nintendo was working on it as a collaboration with both Phillips and Sony. After it got canned, both Phillips and Sony still had rights to some of the technology as part of the collaboration. So Phillips decided to release their own gaming system based upon what they had, and that was the (largely forgotten) CD-i system. And of course Sony did the exact same thing, and that became the Playstation. The rest is history.
  
  After reading your comment I had to do more searching and I guess they did actually use it in America... For the bike that I never saw in person, made by Life Fitness.
  Edit to add: Now I wonder if I'll ever find one now that I'm looking
I wouldnt call this nickle and diming.
I would call this a desperate life line in a world before the internet.
I spent a week smashing my head against a problem in a SNES game before giving up and calling the Nintendo Hotline. Which gave me the the solution to my problem, and did it relatively quickly and without much wasted time.. Which I found amazing, and always wondered how they had that information in the era before Gamefaqs.
- The Nintendo Hotline was fantastic for me, because I lived close enough to Nintendo's US offices that the number wasn't long distance... and it wasn't a 900 number, so it never cost more than a regular phone call. I got all the hints I needed for free.
- Which I found amazing, and always wondered how they had that information in the era before Gamefaqs.
  What game was that, by the way? Because I immediately think every hotline worked the same: company makes one or two parts stupidly difficult to get through just so a few will end up calling. Sierra On-line's adventure games were notorious for their pants-on-head logic and hidden shit.
  
  Paladins Quest for the SNES.
  sorry for the delayed reply
These ads were in every gaming magazine I read back in the day. EGM, GamePro, Nintendo Power, etc.
My friends and I never called any of them even once due to fear of parents+phonebill. We all understood that at a very young age, ha.
I even had one rich kid friend, he never called these lines even.
The 90s equivalent to "Pay 5 gems to continue".
This isn’t even the game company doing it here. Man 900 numbers, what a throwback.

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