Summer in the 90s hit different when your backpack had the essentials: a Tamagotchi beeping for attention (Bandai dropped it in the U.S. in 1997), a portable CD player skipping every time you ran because anti-skip tech didn’t really land until the late 90s, and a stack of Tiger LCD games that chewed through AA batteries like candy. If you were ahead of the curve, you clipped on some HitClips in 1999—because nothing said “music on the go” like 60 seconds of *NSYNC on repeat. And of course, you’d end the day on AOL Instant Messenger, launched in 1997, picking the perfect away message and firing off “brb” like it was a lifestyle. This was peak 90s summer—low-tech, high-vibe, and zero notifications.