The Avengers has made a billion dollars. The Dark Knight Rises is well on its way to making a billion dollars. Gaming is becoming a crucial aspect of mobile computing. Game of Thrones is one of the biggest shows on television. Everywhere you look, nerd culture is supposedly going mainstream.
And it’s really annoying some nerds. The latest to be annoyed is Cracked’s own John Cheese, who seems to be under the impression that it was the 1950s right up until The Dark Knight came out.
Honestly, I’ve seen a lot of these rants, and have for years. They’re just usually on /b/ and contain the word “newf**s” in a much higher percentage. But this is really, really, REALLY late to the party. It’s pretty safe to argue that by 1990, being a nerd was fairly mainstream.
The problem is that really being a nerd is defined not by interests but by extremes. All the people turning out for superhero movies are no more nerds now than they were then. This is just the natural culmination of a process that started in the ’80s and had made nerd culture thoroughly mainstream by the mid ’90s. And if you don’t believe me, here are four arguments for my case.
Nintendo Changed What Gaming Was
People tend to forget that the entire reason gaming and being a nerd are so closely tied together is because until 1985, the only way to play games was to own some form of primitive computer. Well, primitive to us. Back then it was a new and rare beast.
Nintendo was a different beast. You weren’t supposed to code your own programs. It simplified the process of playing games to insert tab A into slot B, press down, and press the power button. And it sold 62 million consoles.
When there’s a game console in every home, you’re already mainstream. This isn’t even considering the Game Boy, whose sales dwarf the NES. In other words, millions of kids literally grew up gaming and never stopped. Hipsters didn’t suddenly decide Mario T-shirts were awesome: They grew up playing Mario just like us.
1989′s Batman
It’s easy to forget that this was one of the single most disruptive movies to ever hit Hollywood after Star Wars. But at the time Warner Brothers was widely considered to be insane to be making this movie.
At the time, Batman was a pop culture joke. He was defined by the ’60s TV series to most people. Everybody liked Batman but most people thought of superhero movies as defined by the increasingly campy and awful Superman film series. So why the hell was a respected studio making a serious movie starring some comedian and directed by auteur Tim Burton? The very idea was ridiculous.
Then it grossed about $700,000,000 worldwide and everybody got to work ripping it off.
If you weren’t around for it, or weren’t a kid at the time, it’s hard to overstate just how crazy everyone went for Batman. They turned out Batmerch as fast as they could crank it. Every kid in my grade had Batman or Joker shoes. And for better and for worse, Batman would inform every blockbuster and would-be blockbuster after.
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If you know anything about John Cheese, like I and ZODIAC MOTHERFUCKER do, you know hes a steaming pile of ass. No surprises here.
I was about to attack the fuck out of you for badmouthing John Cleese.
Well argued, Sir.
I’d say Superman (the Salkind production) and Star Wars were gateway drugs. Once you admitted to liking those it made it easier to like a few of the knock-offs that came rolling down the pike.
Before you know it you’re mainlining Dr. Who while your girlfriend does it Triffid-style with a Centurion.
Um, there’s no way that Nintendo gets credit for changing what gaming was … me and every other gamer my age had either an Atari 2600 or Colecovision. Seriously.
Dude, the 2600 and 5200 sold less, combined, WORLDWIDE than the NES did in the US alone.
Don’t forget the Crash. Atari never recovered from that and Nintendo capitalized to say the least.
That said, the Atari 2600 was the OG of games. Maybe we can compromise and say anyone who’s ever rolled over Asteroids’ score to zero gets some sort of old-timer badge?
But, and here’s where I think I have a leg to stand on, you weren’t under threat of atomic wedgies if you owned an Atari/Colecovision, like you were if made it known you played D&D or read comic books … it was absolutely nerd culture, and yet the non-nerds were just as likely to own it.
Seriously? Nintendo doesn’t get credit for making the videogame market “mainstream” as this article suggests? I’m 27, so colecovision is before my time, but I know there are many people my age who don’t know what the hell it is. Yet if you asked most people my age who played videogames to say the first old system they experienced come to mind, they’d say “atari” or more likely “nintendo”. The bottom line is the sales tell you Nintendo took gaming and the way they market it to the next level, and “got the ball rolling” for the massive market it is today. I’m not talking tech specs, I’m talking nearly every kid had an NES in their household. I grew up with SNES but my brother who’s 7 years older had NES and I still remember everyone owning NES even years after it’s debut. Video game rental started popping up massively and you could rent NES games. (not really an argument I’m making, just remembering how awesome that was) but to say Nintendo didn’t change the way people looked at gaming is pretty insane. Again this is about the numbers, you can look at the sales and like me, a LOT of us can just remember every fucking kid we knew had an NES.
Also, you’ve totally overlooked the impact of Blade Runner and The Terminator. Both well before Batman. Both made gobs and gobs of money. Both have stronger nerd cred that Batman. For someone getting huffy about people overlooking nerd culture in the late 80′s, you seem pretty damn unaware of the early 80′s …
Mostly I’m aiming for the highlights, the massive massive hits. Not that Terminator wasn’t a big hit, but in terms of influence on broader pop culture, you can make a compelling argument “Batman” has been more important over the last twenty years.
Fair enough. I don’t agree, but there’s no denying Batman was huge.
I’d argue nerd culture still had a stigma up until the late 90s. The seeds were planted in the 80s, but it’s when those kids HAD kids, yet themselves forgot to grow up. The 90s (Generation X) had the first LARGE population of parents who were just as likely to want a toy, comic book, or video game for their birthday as their children.
Star Wars Special Edition, Matrix, the PS2…and finally, when Return of the King won Best Picture, the Nerd Knights had risen.
I know that pushed into the 2000s, but those are my 4 primary benchmarks.
I agree. It’s been a slow transition from anything “nerdy” to where we are now. Hell we had movies showing computers as magic in the mid 90s!
“Nerd culture” didn’t fully get accepted in pop culture until fairly recently. People making the argument against the recent acceptance are looking at the impact nerd culture interests made but what “normal” people thought of them. In society’s view, the acceptance is only fairly recent
The difference is the internet. If you liked D&D in the 80s you probably had 3 friends that liked D&D and they were your only friends. Today if you love D&D you have 200 people following you on tumblr.
Yes, and yet the internet ITSELF is part of the equation too.
Spock wore a blue shirt.
*hits inhaler, jumps out window*
Well, yeah, dude. That’s why they don’t go with the gold shirt. GOD.
Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns came out in 1986, not 87. I would bet almost anything by reading this article you are >30, because you have no idea what you are talking about when referring to events in the 80s. Geek has only become mainstream/cool in about the past decade or so and even with all the mainstream success of geek culture there is still a stigma. I point you to SDCC of ten years ago as opposed to SDCC today as a good example of this.
I’m thirty-one, actually. I just think the whole “NERD CULTURE HAS TOTALLY MUSHROOMED!” argument is more fallacy than fact.