It could be a small surge but something where you noticed a sudden influx of people. Maybe a game you were playing that got quite popular after it was streamed or there was free weekend on Steam.
For example during the quarantine and around the time when the used console market got prohibitively expensive handheld emulators like the RG350 and much later the Miyoo Mini got quite popular. This was partially due to more people at home wanting to play their favorite classics but also them being promoted as “fake” GameBoys and PSPs on TikTok.
World of Warcraft released. Before that only nerds and losers played PC games, according to some.
Does “hosting a lemmy instance” count as a niche hobby or interest? If it does, then reddit is the cause of the sudden popularity
Stardew Valley.
One man made his (and a lot of other people’s) dream game, by himself, in four years. Now there’s loads more people making the games they want to play, or trying to. And I love it.
I played factorio on either the original version or the one after, and thought wow this game is really cool I’m glad something like this finally exists. I see a couple small youtube channels talking about it and making videos, and I’m like cool maybe in a couple years this turns into a polished game. ~3 months later and the game is one of the most downloaded on steam and is getting huge updates every few weeks. Totally shocked me that it was that ridiculously popular.
Tbh gaming as a whole. I’m 34, and I’ve played video games basically my whole life. When I was young, it was a niche interest. It grew rapidly, but I remember when we were a fairly small number. Now gaming is so assumed that individual games are hobbies. Gaming language is embedded in our culture. I remember it being a rare novelty that few people understood and fewer took seriously.
Stranger Things.
I played TTRPGs a lot growing up, but moved on when I went to university. One pandemic and a lot of nostalgic synthwave later, I’m rolling dice again.
Built my own quad-copter and flew it around. Had to flash plane ESC’s with custom firmware, wire it all up manually to a controller and muck around with the values to tune it, then you could hand fly it (very carefully). It was amazing! - an RC plane that could hover.
Nowadays, if I go somewhere and some normie’s “flying” a DJ, I’m annoyed with them. It’s really breathtaking how good these got so quickly.
Graham Hancock got a lot of people talking about pre-historical human civilizations. Explaining a lot of evidence all over the planet that Western historians just ignored.
Sure wasn’t the Greeks or Romans or Egyptians that built/made/buried all of that stuff in China, SE Asia, India, South America. They were just as smart everywhere. But it didn’t sell as many books.
Never heard of the guy, when did he start publishing this stuff? David Graeber talked about the advanced civilization that existed in China and the Islamic world during the European Middle Ages, and Kim Stanley Robinson alluded to the same point in The Years of Rice and Salt.
It hasn’t yet. I wish one of them has but none have gotten there yet. I do talk about them often in the hopes that one does (albeit for the secondary reason that some of them are difficult to explain since people think of it and think of something wholly different than me).
