Playing games without speaking English was an experience on its own
Sometimes me and my wife reminisce about our early memories of playing videogames. We indulge in the nostalgic memories of having only one or two games and playing them all over again, even if they were not perfect.
But there is one fundamental difference in our experiences: my wife's mother tongue is German, which is usually one of the default language settings in mainstream games, while I grew up speaking Hungarian, not really understanding English until I was around 15.
There were some early Hungarian games and some language packs on PC, but I only had a "chipped" PlayStation 1. (There was a guy in a nearby socialist block house running a "PS STORE", he had some legit games on the shelves, but his main business was selling pirated copies from under the counter.)
I remember trying to figure out in the Phantom Menace what I was supposed to do using a trusty old dictionary, but I was mostly just clicking through all the dialogue options and hoping for the best. (It was an action game with some inconsequential dialogue options, so it didn't really matter.)
Other games like Final Fantasy or Metal Gear Solid were an insurmountable obstacle, my early experience with latter was spending 10+ hours in the hangar area killing guards and triggering alarms. (I have played it through a couple of months ago, and it was a blast!)
There are still some English words which I pronounce internally the way when I was 7. For example I had no idea what an "exhaustion" was, but that was the cheapest part you could buy in Gran Turismo. I still read it as "ex - haus - tsee - on" occasionally.
But I usually preferred straightforward games where you could ignore the story entirely (I still have no idea wtf was going on in Ace Combat 3) or where you could rely on third party lore (this was mainly Harry Potter).
After a while I was at least familiar with various menu options and basic UI stuff, such as "Loading" (which I read as "low - ad - ing" -- it approximately means "the horse gives a t-shirt" in Hungarian and it always made me smile as a child), or "Continue" ("Coon - teen - nu - eh").
My future children will grew up being fluent in German, and I cannot wait to tell them how "back in my days" games were fun despite not understanding them. OK BOOMER.