What was gaming actually like in the late 90s - early 2000s, before Steam, launchers, automatic updates etc?
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What was gaming actually like in the late 90s - early 2000s, before Steam, launchers, automatic updates etc?
You bought a game at the game store and you'd install it. Oftentimes you didn't have the Internet so the game was either already finished with basically no bugs or you'd just go frick yourself with the buggy mess that was the game because you couldn't download a patch.
I'm from 1996 but I enjoyed old-school offline gaming until about 2007 when we first had the Internet. I'd ask my dad but he passed away in 2002. Pretty sure my old man never used the Internet in his life, but he was an avid gamer.
That's for PC.
For consoles it's the same as today, except with shittier graphics and more split-screen multiplayer, and of course no online until the 6th generation.
It wasn't better or worse before, it was just different, it was as enjoyable as it is now. Especially in the 90s.
>For consoles it's the same as today
Was the Gamecube the last console you used? After that they had the same downsides as PCs. You couldn't just expect to boot it up and play a game.
>couldn't download a patch
In most cases you could contact the company for a mail-in updater. I know that Maxis distributed v1.1 patches this way.
>first reply is someone who was four years old and thinks it was the golden era in 2007 because he had no internet
Why do I even come here.
you're still a kid. I was 10 years old when you were born, and you missed out on the wild west internet
>you're still a kid.
I know this may come as a shock to you, but we’re almost 30
I'm 37. I had snes dbz gifs eating up processing on my desktop.
>that one Windows that allowed me to run .gifs on my desktop
Wait, can you even do that nowadays?
idk. I posted that gif because I forgot the file names for the original. there has to be a way. idk what website even stores the old Dragon Ball Z: Super Butōden gifs anymore.
I had this one back then
me too.
I was looking for ssj2 goku kamahamaha. I set it up so it was just the gif as him, and no background.
I had so many power beems going across my screen that it was almost impossible to play any game without disabling them. I made a program to cut them off when I stated a game. too bad it work across profiles.
>didn't
hate to butt in late but that was called Active Desktop, a feature that died with windows XP due to being not only unpopular but nothing but exploitable. it was basically the same as setting your desktop to a webpage. typically abused by malware to put fake warnings and scares onto boomers desktops. clicking on something fricked up and having to set the desktop back to normal was such a common occurrence.
I think Wallpaper Engine can do it, Windows itself can't any more since Vista
>It wasn't better or worse before, it was just different, it was as enjoyable as it is now.
Unrelated but this point should be emphasised, I see a lot of people who think of how it must have been so boring back then without online multiplayer, modern features, Discord, netflix, instant access to everything when the truth is if you brought someone from 1997 to 2023 they would be just as bored as you would be in '97.
>the game was either already finished with basically no bugs
This never happened. Even games on the NES got updates and bug patches, and they would re-print a stack of new carts with the updated rom on it and stop selling the old one.
>computers can't count beyond 2000 dude Y2K is gonna kill us all aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
Why were boomers so moronic?
this particular zoomer bit is so funny to me because it's a case of people actually doing the work to stop something from happening and then 20 years later a bunch of 19 year olds claim it was superstitious nonsense.
it was superstitious nonsense. the worst thing that would have happened was your system date would be wrong.
A lot of software even today throws a shitfit when the time and date is wrong in an enterprise environment and will get out of sync with other systems. And enterprise software is also way more complicated and temperamental in general.
>enterprise software is also way more complicated and temperamental in general.
A durgasoft graduate I see.
The average programmer just sucks and most managers suck just as bad. I've only ever worked with native coworkers, so I can't chalk it up to pajeets. And beyond poor fundamentals, time is hard, "falsehoods programmers believe about time" is a meme for a reason
I don't know what the frick durgasoft is but I support a system running an ERP that my company uses and it's the most annoying shit I have ever worked with and has dozens of quirks because it's old and pervasive SQL is fricking trash. I've worked with EHR/EHS software briefly too with small clinics and they're also kind of strange but I imagine hospital sysadmins don't like that shit either. If you've never worked with this kind of shit beyond being a help desk lackey you should kindly shut the frick up and go back to building gaming PCs.
Way too many words just to say you're underqualified for your own job, Anon.
Try again when you get a real IT job buddy
My boss today was one of the guys who was literally flying around the country, manually updating old code on-site that was custom made for various industrial/commercial uses. People just don't understand what computing was like back then, or in the 80's (when a lot of that software was made).
>if you actively prevent a disaster from happening it was never a problem
Why are zoomers so moronic?
The average person knew even less about computers than they do now. Also, the Y2K problem was real. Lots of software, particularly financial stuff, had been written to store a year or do a comparison using a two-digit date because it saved space or because that's all the registers had room for at the time it was written. Nothing bad happened because people realized this was a problem ahead of time, had very well-defined deadline by which they knew it had to be fixed, and companies spent millions of dollars paying engineers to rewrite code and upgrade machines. So of course, "nothing happened". But the news stations love a good doomsday story, so it was also hammed up a ton.
>had been written to store a year or do a comparison using a two-digit date
only a boomer with zero computer knowledge would believe this
>Mayans can't count past 2012 we're all gonna die aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
Why were zoomies so moronic?
2012 is when normal world completely ended and clown world started full force
9/11 was the start of clown world
The world did end right there and then anon, we're just corpses now
Zoomies were literal children in 2012 moron
Because IT WAS a real problem you absolute Black person.
You know if you look around you can still find and download OS's and software from the 90's that shit itself when the year rolls over from 99 to 00.
Maybe you should do a little bit more research before you post. You look like an idiot
>THE WORLD'S GOING TO END BECAUSE ALL THE DATES ON THE COMPUTER ARE GOING TO READ "00"
>YOU BETTER GET TO A nuclear bunker AND SHORE UP YOUR TOILET PAPER, DRY FOOD AND FRESH WATER SUPPLIES
Man, Y2K really was the Covid-19 of its time.
>never had an OS that only used 2 digits for the year.
Up until like a few months ago my workplace was still using a piece of software so old it wasnt Y2K compliant and required another piece of software that basically gaslit it into thinking it was still the 90s to run.
People really underestimate the amount of frickery that was done to make things work.
>gaslit
I don't think that word means what you think it means, anonymous.
The one program is literally presenting the other program an altered version of reality and the second program believes it because it trusts the first program. That seems spot fricking on. Do you think gaslit means when a politician you would never in a thousand years trust to tell you the truth lies in a speech directed to the public in general and not you in particular?
why do zoomers love the term gaslighting?
Those buttholes absolutely love replacing perfectly fine words with other words that don't even mean what they're trying to say. I don't fricking get it and I don't think I ever will.
Kotaku-brain
Why have boomers been gaslit into thinking gaslighting is a zoomer term? It's not.
>it was in an article from 2001 once!
No one used the word, they used real words, troony
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslight_(1944_film)
Fricking child.
moron
Nobody used the phrase before 2012, that makes it a zoomer term.
why couldn't you have typed "tricking"? why do you have to use moronic zoomer twitter lingo?
Anon that's literally what gaslighting is. It doesn't mean lying. It means confusing someone who trusts you about what's real or not. I can trick you without you trusting me, I can't gaslight you without that.
stop using broccoli hair tiktok newterms when words that mean what you want to convey already exist, thanks
so whats the word that conveys that?
Manipulated mostly but sometimes it takes more than one word to describe a given situation.
>newterms
>The term "gaslighting" was coined from the 1938 British play called Gas Light, in which a husband manipulates a wife into thinking she is crazy by slyly changing the intensity of the gas lights in their home when she is left alone.
>>The term "gaslighting"
Means trying to convince other that someone has lost their grip on reality so you can have them declared insane and committed while you enjoy everything they had.
It has nothing to do with revisionism as your generation claims, you fricking tiktok ADHD zoomer.
Yes, but no one ever made that reference until twitter trannies. If I say someone is "Laststarfightering" it doesn't mean the term's been around since 1984.
Shut the frick up you Black person. Use trick, lie, fool, spoof, etc.
The computer apparently affectionately trusts someone now.
Gaslight is perfect for what anon was describing, tardo. Just because children abuse something doesn't mean people can't use it correctly.
Shut the frick up Black person
>totally not lingo derived from a 60s movie for which the term is named
>required another piece of software that basically gaslit it into thinking it was still the 90s to run.
Why were boomers so fricking incompetent they couldn't make programs that worked when the year turned?
And then you have the gall to mock pajeet's coding skills.
Why do you need 4 digits for years when global thermonuclear annihilation is coming before 2000?
I dont know if you're a disingenuous moron or an actually proudly ignorant gay but i'll humor you, there was a time where removing those two digits meant saving a couple of bits per registry, which multiplied across a database with thousands of registries would mean a non neglegible ammount of storage being saved
>there was a time where removing those two digits meant saving a couple of bits per registry
I didn't ask you for 4-digit years.
I'll repeat the question for your boomer brain: why couldn't you make your programs work if the year was set to 00?
My bad, i thought i was having an argument with someone who had basic knowledge on the subject, carry on.
>he makes software that breaks when you set the date to the beginning
ok baljeet.
enjoy your shitware that breaks when the date is set to january 1, 1970
we need to use that software on zoomers
It did kill us anon, this is just your brain replaying what life might have been like if you didn't die. Time to wake up and pass on 🙂
people also considered when 1999 ended the world would also end
so yes fearmongering isn't a new thing from covid or whatever war its going on now
WE'RE WHALERS ON THE MOON
WE CARRY A HARPOON
BUT THERE AIN'T NO WHALES
SO WE TELL TALL TALES
AND SING A WHALING TUNE
Twenty years from now when your homosexual little children give me any sass, I'm pulling out of picture their mother's old OF account and showing them their mom's breasts
>not a recording of you fricking their mom
They'll have your sister's OF pictures by then. Or better yet - your daughter as if lol
Smarmy little millenial homosexual.
>my sister has an OF
let me tell you that this is pure nightmare fuel. Everytime me and my buddies have a disagreement, he just pulls out his smartphone with videos of my sister doing all kinds of nude poses while saying "Yeah, and your sister is a prostitute."
No I will not advertise my sisters onlyfans, dont (You) me for that you wont get it
im gussing your dad is a liberal or you had a single mom.
i would disown my sister if she had an OF.
imagine being one of those kids whose mom has one and then all the other kids at school find out.
that's like an instant life ruiner right there. she'd have to move you to a school a state away and then you'd have to pray no one would find out there. no amount of feminist "men and boys need to be more accepting of women being sex workers" is going to stop the savagery that would come from something like that.
>raised on the Internet
>has all the info on his fingertips
>the average zoomer can't be bothered to look up shit
is it over for the human race?
We're you, but better in everyway
better goycattle, which is quite the achievement, looking at how boomers fell for every israeli meme despite having everything in life
to be fair, quality of Google searches has taken an absolute nosedive in the last 10-15 years
I have a very close relative who worked at a really high-profile bank at that time as a programmer.
I originally thought the Y2K was overblown until he clued me on what a fricking shitshow it could have been. He had to stay in the office during the almost all december to preemptively fix problems. The entire banking system was about to be crippled with absolutely no return because all the stocks and investments would "age", making them all useless. No one could have taken money out of the bank because the automatic inflation calculator would balloon the money of everyone in the bank beyond repair and those with debts would get their bank accounts killed automatically. The bank genuinely would have gone bankrupt (which seems like a win-win situation now honestly).
Sure we wouldn't have died, and some rumors were memes like PCs exploding and stuff, but what I DO KNOW, is that the entire banking system (in my country atleast) would have been completely and irrepearably dead for sure.
It is genuinely the closest thing we got to a real life apocalypse in our lifetimes we see in movies where the streets (could have) erupted into anarchy.
>mfw we get to do it all over again in 2038, except with 100x more devices in the wild
What happens in 2038?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
The datetime rolls over from 2038 to 1901 for devices using 32-bit datetimes
>The year 2038 problem (also known as Y2038, Y2K38, Y2K38 superbug or the Epochalypse) is a time formatting bug in computer systems with representing times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
QRD is that the fix we implemented will "expire", to put it VERY simply. However I doubt that it will be a real problem because you can now roll out changes through the network really easily. The Y2K was about to be a really big problem because the vast majority of machines had to be upgrades manually.
>However I doubt that it will be a real problem because you can now roll out changes through the network really easily.
Sure, but only for software that's actually supported.
>all that IoTshit outside its support period
>all the non-networked devices
Blame COBOL.
>party member betrays you
We know the sun is gonna blow us up in a billion years and we still haven't killed his ass yet makes no fricking sense to me
all of the stuff in this clip was trash that instantly snapped out of existence the moment better alternatives came up thanks to technology.
It's just nostalgia goggles. We still have literally all of that but much better, btw
i dont know anything better than mtv still
I liked the color everything was back then. I miss the color.
this I agree, I still love fluo orange and fluo pink for example, but today bright colors are forbidden by law or something
what about literally accessing ANY piece of video entertainment at any time on demand and for free? I remember that when I was a kid I was thinking I'd ask a genie to be able to access any cartoon/movie/videogame with my imagination at any moment. Now you can literally do it with a phone always in your pocket.
Including every show ever made by mtv, btw
I miss the spoon-opened NesQuik. Trying the banana flavor at my uncle's house many Christmases ago was one of the peaks of childhood.
Seeing actual photographs and videos from the 90's fills me with such a warm and nostalgic feeling. Seeing modern-camera videos of 90's shit the person holding said camera had to personally go out and collect/pay for, just for clout since they're putting it on camera, fills me with genuine sickness.
That's 80s shit you pleb.
The reason why there's no OS called Windows 9 is literally because of 90's Windows moron. It actual created real compatiblity issues because some programs wouldn't get the difference between Windows 9 and Windows 9X.
Yes computers run on fricking spaghetti code and are stupid
if only there was an another windows version starting with 9 that programs would have to differentiate between
The difference as far as compatibility was concerned between all versions of Windows 95 and 98 was so small for that some developers just checked for "Windows 9" in the version string to distinguish between the 9x kernel and 3.x. This caused a lot compatibility issues with Windows Me, despite the fact that it was essentially Windows 98 with extra bloatware and a few backported features from the NT kernel as a marketing driven stopgap measure until XP was released.
>the difference between windows 95 (another front-end of DOS just like 3.x) and 98 (an entirely new OS written from the kernel up)
>was so small
98 was still heavily reliant on underlying MS-DOS structure, they were just restructured in the new kernel for more efficient interoperation. DOS software still runs natively on Windows 98 and Me, some of the optimizations made introduced relatively small incompatibilities.
In short, Windows 95 was a program running on DOS. Windows 98 and Me were integrated with DOS. It was done to organize what already existed into a better package that had fewer
end user confounding problems. That's a big contributor to why the reception between both versions was like night and day.
Both Windows 2000 and Me were released as products to bring features from the upcoming Windows XP to systems which were still popular but it wasn't going to support.
A lot of software home consumers were using at the time just wasn't prepared for the shift to the NT kernel, so Windows Me was released to fill that gap until the market caught up.
Windows 2000 was meant to be an upgrade for business workstations that were still based on instruction sets besides x86, x64 and Itanium. A lot of enterprise customers were still using a relatively wide slate of RISC hardware. Even to this day, you'll find some businesses using Windows 2000 for legacy purposes. I personally have. In a hospital of all places.
I was just at the dentists office. Honestly I hope to inironically be able to work in a place like that someday forgotten by time, cheap RCA and Sylvania monitors, windows 10/7/8, shit that's 20 years old. Microsoft dropping support for 10 is going to donkey kick a lot of rural white collar environments in the fricking balls, and people are either going to be moving to Linux or Server 2022 en masse.
I dunno man, when I saw win98 at my best friend's house for the first time as a kid it sure felt a hell of a lot different from our 95 machine at home.
I never understood why they released WinME instead of Win2000 as a consumer product. 2000 was lightyears ahead of 98.
There was a problem but obviously it was blown out of proportion by journos.
Journos blew shit out of proportion back then too??
yeah, they've been doing that for a long time now
some 80 years ago a couple of guys suffocated in a gas leak at a resort and they turned it into a whole thing
I remember that: turns out they made the whole thing up.
all the time, like 6 million and such
I was home alone getting underage drunk on my step dad's booze watching Tom green show on new years eve 1999
I shouldn't be jealous of this, but I am
it was the count down to the end of the world
incredibly based
it was pretty good. it was live too on mtv
Lies. MTV always had a new years show.
I vaguely remember kid rock DJing an an awful cover of that prince song.
My first exposure to Kid Rock was either a spring or summer break thing on MTV and he gets on the stage and the first thing that comes out of his mouth was
>yo my name is kid rock, I'm a capricorn
and that prevented me from ever taking him seriously in any way whatsoever.
kek, he would actually fit right in here with the hair
I could live with and ignore his existence otherwise, but the fact that All Summer Long has ruined Werewolves of London for me is unforgivable. I get a real visceral feeling in my stomach that I can't resist when I hear it now.
funny enough the same thing will happen again on 2038 if people keep using 32 bit systems
>millions of dollars and hours of manpower are put in to successfully prevent a potentially catastrophic event
>idiots 20 years later acting like it was overblown and nothing would’ve happened without intervention
No fricking wonder people nowadays freak out over covid vaccines and come up with a billion conspiracies besides the obvious, you idiots don’t understand cause and effect.
More people died after the clot shot than before it. It didn't even slow the disease down.
hell yeah I also learned all my info from le hecking wholesome Internet Historian!
Im so glad I dont have to think for myself and can believe anything a snappy edited video with a smug voiceover tells me to believe 😀
As a 30 yo boomer this taught me, along with the "end of the world" warning 5 times that news is bullshit.
I never got vaxxd because i was like "they were wrong about Y2K, climate change ending the world in 2000, global warming ending the world in 2012, the ozone layer going away by 1998, saddam had WMDs," etc.
Ozone layer was fixed the same way Y2k was fixed. They banned the chemicals causing it and it healed.
I don't know why you're bringing up Saddam had WMDs when that was clear right wing hysteria and every liberal knew it was a bunch of horseshit excuses to go to war to keep Saddam from switching oil sales from the dollar to the euro.
>They banned the chemicals causing it and it healed.
*laughs in chinese*
Goddamn fricking zoomers will take over the world and this is the greatest mind they can produce
in the 1900s analogue dynasties still had overall power over western hegemony & media. the dot com bubble was just a bunch of old homosexuals realizing that internet shopping wasnt an immediate boon like it was in parts of northern africa. this crash would signal the eventual downfall of ghaddaffi.
now we see western media in a harsh split: the dying boomers attempting to inflate everything tangentially related to all the land they own (constitutionally protected) vs all the millenials/zoomers/alphoomers. some funky shit is about to go down next year, mark my words. not sure which market will fall first but the simple facts that congress literally and actively wanted to ban tiktok (insane when you think about it) and imprison a former president all while BRICS is sandwiching israel after we tried to sandwich turkey/iran uh YEAH im thinking 2024 gonna be a year to remember, baby.
i bet the mobile market crashes first but it could be something else if, say, theres a draft to protect israel or some shit.
My job for 10 years was changing code for Y2K
It was the best time of my life
Based post
Boomers in shambles
Imagine being so ashamed of falling for israeli tricks, that 24 years later you still cope by pretending that some accountants working extra in January, 2000 would amount to the end of the world.
Y2K wasn't the israeli trick, it was the planes flying into towers shortly after
I distinctly remember being a kid and the media hyping that up. I was scared about it, and then my dad pulled me aside to the computer, set the date and time on it to 12/31/1999 23:59, let it run to the next minute, and was like "see? it's fine. stop worrying".
>ignorant youth insults people who did work he can barely comprehend
Many such cases.
Nobody said that the y2k bug wouldn't have been a """problem""" for some sectors full of moronic programmers like finances or banking and what not. (It would have been more like a little hiccup in their operations but they're israelites so they'd be crying and demanding reparations until the next century if it happened)
People are just mocking boomers who turned off their personal computers like the pic in OP suggests you did.
In some ways good, in some ways bad.
People like to b***h about how modern games are packed with micro transactions but most seem to forget back in the 90s some devs, especially point n click adventure game devs, made their games super hard to solve on purpose to force you to buy their manuals with instruction on how to beat levels.
Comfy
It was a lot more fun, I'll tell you that much
First game I bought was Quake III arena at best buy as like a 13 year old. The employee asked me if I had ever played multiplayer PC games before. I lied and said yes because I thought he wouldn't sell it to me if I said no. I probably bought it just based on the imagery on the PC box. I became addicted to multiplayer and was surprised he sold it to me afterwards because of how gory it was. I remember my username was Bloodshed as well, kek.
Yeah up until like my early teens, every game I bought or received as a gift was from having an awesome cover and this never steered me wrong.
>my username was Bloodshed as well
The employees at Best Buy always ask the dumbest fricking questions when it comes to tech. They always do it. I swear the only time I didn't get a chatty one he looked like he was about to die of AIDS. Last time I got a Gankerirgin because he was asking me why I needed a 240hz monitor when I was buying it. Because, frick-head, they don't make decent 144hz monitors anymore.
>go to store
>buy big boxed game
>install game
>get fun shit inside box
>sometimes game runs without the disc
>sometimes you lose music, sometimes nothing
>return game for full refund
>free game
Later on they chanced the return policy of vidya tho. In the netherlands we had 14 days return window, no questions asked, so you could buy a game, beat it and get another
I had a vidya rental store that had PC games for rent, was fricking amazing.
PC magazines came with game demos and free software.
console mags also came with demo disc's
Back when every game was in a cheap israeliteel case and cost less than $5
my brother used to buy us bootleg PS1 and PS2 cds for $5. most of the time the actual game in the CD was completely different from the one shown in the case. we bought Warcraft 3 and it was actually Roller Coaster Tycoon or some shit kek
You had a sense of every video game having legitimacy. Like back then I felt like there was a chance I could find the greatest game ever, hidden on the bottom row of a random shelf in Best Buy. Nowadays that’s gone. You assume a game is shit and might play it if there is a compelling reason and it has 5 star reviews or a friend you trust recommends it etc.
know exactly what you mean. I was a PS2 gay but yeah at the time I had no idea what the shit I was buying was. would look at the cover art and the pictures on the back and buy based on how cool it looked. made for some amazing memories going into these games I'd never heard of and loving them, even better when you accidentally discover a full series of games that way. I remember getting tenchu wrath of heaven and become a tenchu gay through it. frickin take me back to those days man.
>NOO EVERY NUKE IN THE WORLD WILL GO OFF IN 2000 EVERY EMP AND NUKE AND EVERY WAR WILL START THE WORLD WILL LITERALLY END IT WILL BE A CATACLYSMIC EVENT IF STEPHANIES REGISTER CANT COUNT PAST 2000 NOOOOOOOOOO
boomoids need to toughen the frick up
lol nobody was that concerned. I don’t remember anyone actually being terrified of the “y2k virus”.
It caused a number of problems, but it had nothing to do with nukes. But I am sure some wackos clung onto that idea.
>proceeds to go out into the streets to literally kiss the feet of black people lined up
>boomers having a melty
ZoomGODS win again
Games were good, early copy protection was not. I've been on PC since 1996. I got all my games from a used book store. Every game I played was at least years to months out of date. At first things were cool, but around 2003 it started getting heavy with security keys. Sometimes I would buy games from the store that didn't have correct codes or the security features prevented me from establishing a connection with servers due to previous registration. In 2004 Valve released steam. Everything changed in the moment. I remember buying Neverwinter Nights from Funcoland on release and that was the last time I went into a physical retail location.
Late 90s specifically were cool because there were so many titles coming out so fast that game prices would drop like a rock after a few months. You'd go to Target or Software Etc. in June and a game from January would be ten bucks. LAN parties were also big in my group because no one had better than a normal modem, so LAN was the only way to play most games without crap lag. Certain games were the exception and got popular solely because they worked with bad internet. Subspace for example.
Another weird thing is that in 1996 after Origin announced the beta test for Ultima Online there was so much hype that everyone was announcing beta tests for their games (90% of which never saw the light of day.)
That isn't early copy protection. Early copy protection is games coming with a massive decoder wheel you need to input the code from, or a full color picture on the back of the manual and you had to tell the game what color a paint splotch was, or find the 5th word in the 8th sentence of the second paragraph on page 37. It briefly went away with CD-ROMs since FMVs bloated the games to sizes much larger than the typical hard drive, but then cd-keys and cd-rom checks came out when hard drives got bigger. I remember Half-life being annoying to play at LAN parties because it would throw a hissy fit if two people on the same server used the same cdkey.
PC Gamer magazine sold primarily because its "demo disk" always had all the latest patches for popular games on the CD-rom. By 98 or so everyone I knew was using Walnut Creek (cdrom.com) to download patches.
Soulful
Quality games
Free demos
Going to store to look at boxes
Going to store and play console demos
Install had disk 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. for install (it made installs very exciting, kinda like when you cook and can't wait to try the end product)
You could borrow pc games from friends in school
You could rip disks and just use the same cd-key
Multiplayer was good as hell, only skill and no microtransactions
No youtubers/streamers to scam people into buying shit games
No billion early-access games that dilutes the player bases, which meant plenty of populated servers in every games
Times were good. I think gaming died after about 2006 or perhaps Orange Box and TF2 going F2P with microtransactions.
>Quality games
There are quality games now
>Free demos
There are more demos now than back then
>Going to store to look at boxes
Looking at game media is better now.
>Going to store and play console demos
Why are you so obsessed with demos
>Install had disk 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. for install (it made installs very exciting, kinda like when you cook and can't wait to try the end product)
This wasn't a good thing
>You could borrow pc games from friends in school
CD keys have always existed
>You could rip disks and just use the same cd-key
Two players could not share the same cd-key in multiplayer.
>Multiplayer was good as hell, only skill and no microtransactions
Multiplayer is the best its ever beem
>No youtubers/streamers to scam people into buying shit games
You having no restraint isn't my problem.
>No billion early-access games that dilutes the player bases, which meant plenty of populated servers in every games
Nobody played shit games, even back then
>There are more demos now than back then
that's absolutely not true
I'm surprised how many demos you can play on steam. nothing beats getting demo disks in your subscription magazines though. my dad surprised me with Playstation underground when I was a kid too. I didn't even ask for it
tbh I don't know what the demo situation looks like on pc but on console it's abysmal.
There are more demos than ever before, you're just not seeing demos for games you care about because the research shows it reduces sales and established devs usually follow this. If you go browse the Steam demo section, there are more demos than there were back in Fileplanet, but there's a lot of indie shovelware.
I was talking about console and that's my point also, almost every demo is for indie crap, big publishers avoid them. only noteworthy demos I've seen on xbox one is doom and the resident evil series, and those are usually timed.
>broke
>can't buy every game we want
>go to blockbuster/one of the video stores nearby
>rent mario party trilogy or mario 64
>probably end up paying more over time than just buying it outright but who cares I'm 6
I like how everyone just forgets that you couldn't even use your computer until it had been on for like 5 minutes.
Its almost like things have gotten better over time and only nostalgiagays think it was better back then.
>turn on computer
>go take a leak and something to eat or clean whatever
what kind of moron are you? waiting on the pc while it starts?
My point was that you don't need to wait any more you fricking moron.
you do have to wait for 5-15s if you're a normie goy who turns off his PC, but given that it means you also probably have updates as well, meaning you cant instantly use your PC anyway so there is no difference as before, you'll do something else for a little bit before going on the PC
Life was unironically a lot less moronic before cell phones and normalgays on the internet. The 90s were amazing, you could just leave town and that was pretty much that. Now no one wants any privacy anyway.
You can change that, but you choose not to.
I do just ignore my phone as much as possible but the expectation now is that you will essentially be available 24/7 to friends and close family. Since I actually have people who depend on me I have to conform to it somewhat. It wasn’t a societal expectation in the 80s and 90s, we’ve slowly adapted to having zero privacy as a society and it’s difficult to just opt out without opting out of other things too.
in the 90s if someone tried to use the phone you'd get kicked off of battle net because it was a phone line, and you had to call your mom a stupid b***h because talking to her friend wasn't as important as keeping my pristine wc2 win loss ratio
>expectation now is that you will essentially be available 24/7
set boundaries.
To the anons who keep giving responses like "just don't do that", it seems a lot like the same kind of bullshit as "hurrdurr just don't buy it,t he market will fix it". These are not things that somehow just happened as a condition of technology's progress - several iterations of Internet users from the 80s "actually have to put the phone on the modem" era up through the early 2000s operated under a society where "The Internet" was inherently different place and unconnected to meatspace, that privacy was important and "don't tell anyone on the Internet your real name or address. " and introduction of real world info or meeting people was done very carefully in rare circumstances.
Things went to shit because of data mining, advertising, and social media normalizing all the issues we have now. Simply not interacting with all of this doesn't protect you - we're also literally 20 years too late in our privacy laws too. There was a push circa 2000 to have privacy laws put into place to establish that it was no longer "you need to drive three towns over, go down into a dusty basement at city hall, and look for a 'public' document" situation, but of course a combination of think-of-the-children bullshit and othernonsense from the data miners and advertisers meant we never got real protections we should have and a fundamental change in privacy foradigital society. Simply trying to "opt out" by not going on Facebook isn't going to help the same way that just not buying $18 cosmetic item mall exclusive shit and gacha monetization hasn't stopped it from invading even games you'd otherwise want to play.
Sums it up well.
I do my best, thanks anon
If anyone is cucked,its the one who thinks that not only is that a solution (which its not for all the words you clearly were unable to read) , but that is it a reasonable request - that you should need to change and give up the benefits of modern technology ,not the spying, data mining profiteers and those who enable them
It shouldn't take living in a survivalist cabin with either no running water or conversely a billionare bunker in a converted missile silo to get away from the problems (which creating or worsening many others). Rather, its a actually a lot simpler - you just need to get behind policies that restore the privacy of individual natural (as opposed to corporate) persons, and are hostile to profiteering corporate scumbags who want to control, exploit, and expropriate everyone and everything else. Its entirely possible to advocate for privacy laws, online and otherwise, that enable this but of course the billionaires who benefit from shit as itis now fight back both directly an indirectly with all of that ill-gotten wealth We just need to push for changes despite this and not be fricked over by the first time one of them makes yet another "if you don't leave it in our custody you either hate LE JOB CREATOR I R SMART or you're a pedo , terrorist, groomer or whatever term I can whip these idiots into a frenzy to believe " lie.
>a billionare bunker in a converted missile silo
Have to make a deal with the government, so your privacy has already been exposed. I've had my social security with full credentials leaked due to the incompetence of my government, and I am not the only victim of this as they made a public statement about it.
> get behind policies that restore the privacy of individual natural
Way too late for this. Richest and most powerful people got there in recent times due to exploitation of information trading. You would have better chances advocating for term limits on politicians who control the outcome of that vote.
That's a lot of words to say you're too cucked to give up having a smartphone.
>Simply not interacting with all of this doesn't protect you
pretty much, it's physically impossible to get off the grid unless you move into a remote area in a country that has a non-existent government, and even then have to doubly make sure that there is no globohomosexual shit meddling around
>forgets
homie my toaster does that right now
>mfw figuring out emulation and playing pokemon blue when I was in the 3rd grade
Yeah, NO$GB and Red and Blue were how I was introduced to emulation too, but it was ironic because I was used to just owning or renting stuff already at that point. The cool shit was finding out about and trying stuff like Green.
Around 96 or 97 a friend brought over NESticle and a 3.5" floppy with dozens of NES roms. Was awesome.
>Figured out
now kids cant figure out a keyboard.
no fricking joke, weve gone backward.
I learned to download and burn things on my own, when i show my nephews things they try and touch the fricking screen
I spent 5 minutes unable to open the disk drive on a mac once. How the frick was I supposed to know the button to open it was on the keyboard? Who the frick puts the thing to open something not directly on it? Do the doors in Apples engineering section of their HQ have their knobs on the opposite walls?
me and my bro played every single game & watch gallery remake for gbc this way since there was no way we could get them regularly. shit i remember puttin in an order at OnCue for SimCity3000 for Mac and it never came cause they didnt think i couldnt convince my dad to come pick it up but guess what game we bought the moment we got a windows machine (sony vaio) shit was PURPLE haha thats right simcity3000 and i got to the year 3000 made a city with Twin Towers that were the only two assets to ever get destroyed every time there was a natural emergency but it was ok cuz it wasnt 2002 yet and all u had to do was bulldoze and replace them.
it was great.
My family got an apple 2GS in the 80s. I was a moronic kid and bought IBM versions of games a couple times thinking that shit would work. It was pretty simple, you bought the game, stuck the first floppy in and the installer was there. A family friend gave me a 3 and 1/2 disk with some games on it, DRM existed as shit included in the box where you had to plug in a word from the manual where it existed at all. In the early to mid 90s my cousin's family had an IBM PC and I played the shit out of Air Warrior through AoL, till they got the phone bill. Mostly the late 90s/early 2000s were about consoles. Everyone had playstations in their dorms or apartments, you'd have the dudes who brought their old 16 bit consoles with them. We all played fighting games passing the controller on a loss or sports games. Played the shit out of that tennis game on the super nintendo and golf on my roommate's genesis. It was all about multiplayer shit, playing Tekken 2 and Twisted Metal or taking turns with Doom on the PS while drinking 40s, smoking blunts and listening to Wu Tang. The only experiences I had with PC then was one dude who still lived in the dorms after his freshman year had either quake or unreal he'd play with the other guys in that dorm and there was this ascii online roguelike game on the schools intranet or some shit my roommate showed me.
I had a c64.
Knew a talented programmer that would try porting atari games to it.
Imagine that.
I'm still tech moronic so me buying an incompatible game was as you'd expect it to be.
PC magazines were cool, you even got free games inside them on a cd
even shitty cereal crosspromos held some genuinely fun games
games I played generally had more substance and I could complete them instead of getting bored by shit like UBISOFT open world design half way through
owning a console was a good thing, you could go to friend's place and whoop his ass there
exchanging cds was also fairly common
it was better time and far more sociable hobby
We hanged out on MPLAYER talking mad shit and getting our scrim on. hop on netscape navigator and jump on planetquake for the latest patches and install them to our folders. Then later, Gamespy changed the game and then Steam came out. Now everything is p2p matchmaking trash.
Used this in the uk which was like a proto-launcher, and gaming forums a whole lot more.
There was a titty video card arms race
demos, man. demos were the shit. nowadays you can pirate full releases in less than 10 minutes, but 5 year old me would have absolutely keeled over at such a thought. yet somehow i got more mileage out of Max Payne and Doom95 than whatever else is out these days...
You installed a game and it worked
It was putting the Lego Island disc in and getting pic related on your family computer for some reason, then turning off the computer and hiding under the sheets for like 20 minutes scared to frick wondering if the cops will come. It was also excitedly coming home with a copy of Cubix: Robots for Everyone Racin' Robots from the back of a ROSS only to be met with the news that your system didn't meet the requirements lol.
The things I really miss are moreso symptoms of how our world works now versus how it worked then: the console immediately playing a game once the disc got put in, and the sense of discovery that came with wandering into a game store with virtually no knowledge of what's come out in the last 6 months.
Hell yes.
Having friends over to play split-screen multiplayer.
Showing ppl Knights of the Round summon.
Getting your friend's dad to answer the questions to play Leisure Suit Larry.
LAN parties.
>plug in disc
>open installer, read manual and check out the goodies while it installs to pass the time
>type in cd key (if any)
>run executable
>?????
>PROFIT!
Fun to look back on but it was shit
>waiting outside in the cold weather with a bunch of nerfs for midnight releases
Was cool a few times but glad im never doing that again
>Emachine computer
Played Everquest on it, zoning took 20minutes, accidentally hit the back arrow after zone for another 20minute load, then zone again to where I wanted to go for another 20minute load.
>nerfs
Back in the day, you didn't buy older acclaimed titles through Steam sales; you bought them when specialized publishers bought the licence to sell them through their own range of discount games with their own theme; such as Sold Out Software. Yes, back in the day, PC gamers used to have physical game collections.
Here's a thread about it:
https://desuarchive.org/vr/thread/8055771
In some ways better, in some ways worse. On one have micro transactions and other stupid shit didn't exist. On the other hand software was just... Worse. Like, you could buy a game and there was no guarantee it would actually fricking run on your computer. I know that can happen nowadays but the problem was in a completely different scale from now. Installing games off disc took as long as downloading them from steam takes nowadays, and sometimes way fricking longer if the installer was shit. I remember waiting all morning through midday for a flight simulator to install once. AND THEN IT DIDN'T RUN.
I'm sure there are solutions to the whole "game no work" problem too, I was younger and more moronic than I am now, but legitimately the amount of friction involved in getting to just play game is way lower.
Overall I think the people were better though. Because of the barrier to entry you got... Well, grognards and weirdos, but DEDICATED grognards and weirdos. And everyone wasn't on fricking discord and nobody had a second monitor so people actually talked in online games. It was novel to be able to interact with someone in a virtual space, rather than just coming across as a shit chat client like ingame chat does now.
Idk if I'd go back. Nostalgia is tempting but it's sorta easy to forget just how comparatively ass PCs were.
you don't miss the old backward days.
you miss it when the average computer user wasn't dumber than a mouth-breathing moron who thought the CD tray was a coffee cup holder
there weren't many games coming out and the ones that did were aimed at the people who played them, the political messaging wouldn't be the main aspect of a game, every game felt special and new and developers were trying hard to push the limitations of the technology they had, every year there would be many new games series coming out instead of "New Game 7: The Renewgamening", even sequels were highly expected because they would normally retain the magic of the first game.
The fact that there were less games meant you had more time to play and replay the ones you had before trying out something else which made you connect with the games more.
current gaming is mostly a tool for politics and virtue signaling, every game is a sequel or a reboot to capture past glory as a way to fool fans into thinking the new games aren't a political agenda filled cesspool.
I'm just happy as frick to have lived during the golden age of gaming the 90's and i genuinely feel bad for zoomers who were born into this soulless grindfest of politics and hipocrisy.
every friday my parents would take my brother and I to blockbuster so that we could each rent a game for the weekend. It was the most comfy time of the week and I always looked forward to it.
Friendly reminder that israelites invented y2k so they could get rich from the hysteria
Just like covid
My problem with the use of gaslit is that it's symptomatic of everyone thinking they're a fricking psychologist now and the rhetoric is that people have always been out to get each other outside of a handful of saints, you should drop your friends the moment they say anything wrong or disagree with you, and anything that makes you uncomfortable is toxic because the only thing that matters is looking out for #1 (you) all of the time. And these people wonder why they feel isolated
We played games to escape crazy reality, now ultra crazy reality keeps bruteforcing itself into games.
>disc swapping
>1 hour installs
>buy second hand game, 3rd disc not readable
>mom is using the phone line again and disconnected the 56k modem
>sister is downloading shitty music on napster and making the connection lag
>9 3rd world "people" in the wow raid team disconnect at the same time and cause a wipe again
>"i crashed, just logging back in see you in 10 minutes guys"
yeah it was the same just like today
rose goggles itt
>redditfrog
>buying secondhand like a moron
why are the lot of you always fricking moronic
people claiming they got games for $5-$10 are second hand purchases
diablo2 cost $60 at launch
i did however buy ff7 second hand for £7 at a store and played the frick out of it for months on my shitty ps1
that was the best value for money in my life imo
i never got anything secondhand because that same reason that was said there , shit not working or in bad condition
also everytime i checked the difference was too small to give a frick about buying it second hand
>sister is downloading shitty music on napster and making the connection lag
Holy shit that c**t filled the whole PC with shitty songs that she downloaded, I didn't have space for anything other than NFS2 and Fifa98
>Install game
>Sister downloads a malware filled version of limewire
>Computer is fricked
>Blames me
>" I saw anon installing a game!"
>:(
>1996
>go to the newspaper stand
>buy a games magazine with a CD filled with demos and random goodies
>spend hours navigating the poorly drawn but soulful as frick menu and trying out every demo and program
>go to the shitter and read the magazine until the legs got numb
never again
it was absolute shit, it was just the norm to accept that sometimes game would just not fricking work, not to mention activation codes
trying to relive the past but it just ain't the same
i take it back, it's just the same, lmao
>you've been bombed
sucker
>dos box
you can literally do that now.
As a kid thinking deleting the icon meant deleting the game. Granted I was 5/6.
it was awesome. words can't describe how everything was free
Used to get PC games from circuit city and best buy when my dad shopped there, I have really vague memories of it but there's one that's really vivid when I picked up Fallout 2. My dad looked at the back of the box, read it, laughed and shrugged and bought it for me. I was 10 years old at the time.
I also remember Y2K pretty well, having a party with the neighbors and me and all the neighborhood kids playing DDR on PS1. Looking at wikipedia makes me feel like I'm going crazy because I know for a fact we were playing DDR that night, 1999, yet we lived in NA and supposedly it hadn't been released then. Weird.
the first pc game that was actually mine (not the first I've played) was starcraft battle chest from bust buy. shit was tight.
Easy explanation: it was an import console with an imported game, or a chipped console.
>find interesting looking game on physical game magazine (which already came with a shitload of free demos)
>get burned cd copy from local dealer with attached cd-key written with pen and paper
>install that shit
>no patches and or bullshit
>game would often require the cd to be in the tray to start
>gain access to 56k modem
>BZZZZTTT..KFFFSSSSSTTTTzzzappkkkKKKRRRRR PSSSSSSSSSTTT BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRR
>waste hours playing multiplayer trial versions on sites like Zone.com
>connection would fall every time a phonecall came in
>oh and also Windows would take 3 business days to booth up
You buy a game, you put that shit in, hit play, and you play a game.
Crazy, i know.
Games were legitimately mind blowing every couple months. Like a new game pushed some new boundary or mechanic that changed the industry and there were LOTS of them.
We would get series installments regularly every 2 years and they would be amazing when they came out.
I miss late 90s/early 00s gaming dearly.
I think op was talking about PC gaming, but console gaming was pretty sweet too back then
console gaming was better back then
>insert thing
>play it
now you have patches installs and other crap because consoles turned into pc hybrids
it was for an while in the early 90s. I'd say it even rivaled pc mid 90s.
the only thing that consoles did better , they removed it, its fricking stupid
what did they remove?
games in the case of sony, lmao
I'm not sure I follow you.
He just instantly thinks of snoy and seethes whenever anyone mentions consoles. Ignore and move on.
>insert game
>play game
now you have a bunch of other shit to worry about it which makes the superior aspect consoles used to have over pc, gone
>no internet? problems
>accounts crap
>installs
>patches
you can't do that for both pc and computer. unless it's a online game on pc, and there were always key generators for disks if you lost the manual.
i know you can't on pc . you could never do it , but on console it was the better thing they could do till xbox and ps3 started ruining consoles
I meant can. that was a typo
It was all ruined by the 4 horsemen of modern game dev
>focus testing
>sales projections and ~~*KPIs*~~
>~~*appealing wider demographics*~~
>decisions handed down from above
>mind blowing
true
Now we get mindblowing new features and people are like "but what about the gameplay" "this is stupid" "they're just wanting you to consoooooooououououououme product" "I have no money and therefore everything is bad"
the worst part is every "best" version of a game is old.
The best RTS is from 10-20 years ago
The best shooters
the best driving games
the best wrestling games
the best NHL game
etc.
The have better technology now and things look better, but games arent made the same way so they can never reach the same level of unironic SOUL and PASSION as before.
>Play RTS
>oh this is like starcraft or Dawn of war 1... but worse.
>Play WWE 2Kwhatever
>oh this is like No Mercy... but worse
>Play GranTursimo 9000
>oh this is like GT 5... but worse
>Play Mass Sneedfect 3/Halo 9/Saints row 19
>oh this is like 2... but worse
*SOVL
RDR2 has it in spades.
graphics aren't features
>modern devs cant into reflections unless it takes 64 GB of vram to process
>graphics aren't features
Confirmed zoomoid that wasn't actually around back in the day. Some of the biggest features back then were entirely graphics. Mirrors. Lighting. 2.5D. Full 3D. From sprites to models.
>2.5D
only zoomer devs use this term
It's shorthand for a game which is played in a 2D context while using 3D environments and models.
Do you have a better term that's just as succinct and unambiguous?
>which is played in a 2D context
what's confusing about 2D and 3D graphics meshing together? lot of games in the 90's used this a lot but never referred themselves as "2.5D"
If I say "3D Platformer" most people are going to interpret that as a game in the vein of Mario 64.
If I say "2D Platformer" they would expect a game which uses 2D art.
The term 2.5D works to imply that it is designed as a 2D game with 3D models and possibly mechanics taking advantage of that. I believe it was originally used to describe LittleBigPlanet, which operated as a 2D game with 3 parallel depth tracks.
>If I say "3D Platformer" most people are going to interpret that
>If I say "2D Platformer" they would expect
so zoomers have to come up with new terms because thinking is hard
Nobody cared about any of this when they played SimCity 3000 or Total Annihilation.
I remember the developers of first-person adventure game Normality specifically describing its realtime graphics as "2.5D" when differentiating from the prerendered CG cutscenes
2.5D is how games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom functioned, because they were not true 3D and did not have basic functionality needed to be 3D like room-over-room. You are underage fricking mongoloids speaking authoritatively on things you know nothing about.
They were advertised as 3D games you tryhard zoomzoom. It's there in the name: Wolfenstein THREE DEE
Projecting shitposter, get the frick out.
>2.5D is how games like Wolfenstein 3D
>3D
you outplayed yourself now suck my dick
>Mirrors
dropped
>Lighting
dropped
>2.5D
zoomer meme
>Full 3D
3D effects are eye cancer, nobody even used the 3D on the 3DS with the exception of some Mario and Zelda games
Outside of the usual shit I just remember buying a few of those 99 in 1 CDs where only a handful of games ever worked
My brother got his pc and got like a 30in1 game box with it.
Thinking back it at it was crazy which games where in there. I remember Command&Conquer 1, Lands of Lore, Drakan, RCT 1, but a bunch of other good games too.
this was the shit running on my kickass Pentium 133 with 16MB ram and a 1MB S3 Trio on that sweet ass big 15" Samtron 56E screen
Best PC in class, all the other kids were jelly as frick
original windows 98 kicks ass. our family computer was a gateway 2000. you sure do like your dos box though
i'm running windows 98 for compatibility with some old newer games, when i had that demo CD i was running on Windows 95 with the PLUS! pack, the themes were fricking great.
yeah I loved both 95 and 98. remember NT? that shit was fricked
best windows theme
zoomers will never know the feeling of nostalgia. they were born into the age of corporate shit. I feel sorry for them
Technology was kind of hell in 90s. Hardware aged insanely fast, stuff like getting sounds to work often required effort, and with no widespread internet it was utter hell to try to find help when you needed it.
That being said, I was still a kid so everything felt exciting, and the truth is that games dared to be a lot ”weirder” back then when the budgets weren’t so hyper big and there was less focus group -minded development. Obviously anyone saying that every game was good or innovative is lying out of their ass, there were troves of bad Command and Conquer clones etc. derivative shit that basically nobody even remembers today, but still, things on average were more experimental.
Having lived through the era, it was way, way worse than things are today.
Fricking inane copy protection systems, the actual malware like Starforce that followed, SEQUENTIAL PATCHING, weird bugs that resulted in shit like your entire drive being wiped when you uninstall the game, sound card selection and compatibility, 3DFX, software mode, GAME PORT, there was so much bullshit involved even if you were knowledgeable about computers.
Today you can go online and download whatever you want, play using any controller you wish and copy protection requires no input from you and other than Denuvo it's probably not going to give you any headaches.
Kids, don't think for a second that you're having a rough time. Make the best of what you have, gaming has never been better.
sorry but most of what you wrote just screams of you being fricking horrible at computers
Nah he's right, cope zoomlet
no, he's right, you're shit at computers
I have a high-paying dev job, and it's clear you're not as old as you're claiming to be
no, he's right, you are shit at computers, stop pretending to be something you're not
Yawn
PC gaming was always easy unless you are drooling moron
This is a funny statement because there's no easier way to declare that you're literally too young to have lived through the things being discussed.
Yea I had to actually read books to troubleshoot my first computer. There was no internet.
depends on which operating system they're talking about. it was pretty easy to navigate win98.
that doesn't mean shit
>high paying
just above minimum wage? developers don't make shit unless you actually own the company
>Europoors
figured
Just let me rewrite this entire game myself to fix all these problems oh wait
You're clearly not older than 20.
You don't know the pain of patching a game to the latest version when you want to play and the official website downloads are no longer up.
Then go to a third party website and start downloading patches. You download all 8 patches because you need to install them sequentially but find out that the sixth one has the wrong file packed in, so you look for that particular file elsewhere but the only one you find only functions for a specific language version guy the game and you don't know until you install it and the next patch in line fails to install. So you uninstall the whole game, reinstall the patches again up to that point, send an email to the admin running the website, wait until the patch file is finally replaced and THEN you can install the rest and play the game.
And the drive wipe bug is real, it was in Myth 2. You're not going to check the code for the fricking uninstaller before you click on it you cretin.
that's never happened to me even as a 10 year old kid back then.
For me, there’s 2 clear eras of technological suffering in PC gaming
>the early days when there were relatively little standards for anything and all kinds of tweaks were regularly needed to get stuff perfectly working
>the era of horrible, horrible PC ports in late 00’s
Not to say that we haven’t got our fair share of bad ports lately, but the average is still frickton better than it was.
>the era of horrible, horrible PC ports in late 00’s
Through to the early 2010s. It was insane how little developers and publishers gave a frick. Games would release without any kind of graphical settings or even customisable controls, and often had GFWL slapped on.
The worst thing about the era of shit ports is how its legacy still lingers on and some games still lack acceptable PC versions. At least the classics of nineties get source ports etc., but games like Saints Row 2, GTA IV etc. still are forever hampered by their garbage ports.
it's like you pulling the ethnernet cable out and playing singleplayer games by yourself and sometimes with friends(no coop so we took turns)
the only coop game i played was mortal kombat but friends didn't like it so i could only play it with my brother whenever he was home(never)
>put CD in
>install
>play
>install
lol lmao
you don't need the disks to play for most older pc games. you install the roms
PC was great but PS1/2 is where shit got real as far as I’m concerned. Stuff like MGS, Silent Hill and Wipeout were just in a whole new universe than anything I had ever played.
Ah yes, the company that brought loading screens to the console market. Such innovation.
>the company that brought loading screens to the console market.
That was the Sega CD
Nobody had one of those. And I'm guessing the Sony loading screens lasted three times as long.
>And I'm guessing
You guessed wrong. Atari Jaguar, CDI and Saturn also came out before the PS1 and has worse loading times.
The one edge was 2d arcade ports on saturn loaded faster than PS1 but everything else ran worse.
PC also had loading before PS1 came out.
tl:dr you are moronic.
Fricking Commodore 64 had loading screens. The snoyschizo homosexuals are all moronic zoomies.
There was a N64 game that had loading screens, I forgot which one. Maybe Resident Evil.
Quake
Ah, you're right. Wasn't too bad with the loading times. Had a great multiplayer too. A lot more fast paced than Goldeneye.
Starcraft
>twin famicom
I'm so jelly I'm about to freeze solid.
>Install DirectX 7
One of my favorite games was Battlezone it was a FPS on foreign planets while you were in mainly in a tank and you built out your space base like an RTS game.
It was great but I never heard of many gems because they weren't popular where I lived, nobody played jrps other than Pokemon. Everyone played HOMM3, Warcraft 3, Stronghold, Half Life, Red Faction, CoD 1 and 2, Medal of Honor, Pandemonium, Crash games, Spyro, MGS etc.
I remember a PC in 1996 costs like 5 month of my dad salary lol
yeah, now it's just the GPU
Ads from the mid 90s
FYI that $2500 one after inflation was basically $5100 worth.
As a high schooler in the mid 90s, my family picked up old computers from the Boeing surplus and then swapped in a new motherboard and AMD 486 clones for about 200 bucks. RAM was typically the most expensive part of the computer.
I remember getting a Canopus Pure3d for $300 and all my friends thinking I was crazy spending that much on a videocard that didn't do 2d.
>CD key generator blip-blop-blop music
hell yeah
You're like a little baby
grandfather, i kneel
Doing IT in the 90's was infernal but at teh same time was satisfying.
Shit required actual effort, hardware was expensive and went out of date/support quickly, deppending were you live/worked you had no or very limited internet avail for help.
Y2K was more a stressfull period of time than actual fear, mongrels in journalism that inflated it so much.
I had pic related in the office I worked for were I used to storage shit I got from internet back them. My boss gave to me years lader but I had no internet home so I let there and keep making backups of anything that interest me. Still working at this very day.
I miss it, everything it's so easy now.
Warez CDs
I had hundreds of pirated games on floppies downloaded off of computers you had to directly dial with your modem, all of which had cool ass intros with chiptunes made by the scene guys that released them with cheat menus. Also had stacks upon stacks of demo disks from magazines. Always had something new and interesting to play.
like this
and this
booth babes kicked ass. feminists shut down an industry with good paying jobs for woman who liked doing it.
>feminists shut down an industry with good paying jobs for woman who liked doing it.
This is a good thing, women shouldn't have jobs. Feminists are, as they say, epic and based for this.
you're just trying to make me mad. yeah I'm sure want Sam maggs to remake knights of the old republic as well.
She shouldn't be allowed in an office building unless it's to deliver lunch to her husband.
>husband
In this alternate reality, Sam Maggs has a husband because she got married at 17 to her highschool sweetheart before he went to college and got a degree in neuroscientific business lawgineering.
no dude she divorced him. she's full "lesbian" now.
if there was one behind the scenes movie based on Sam maggs howling and b***hing like a c**t, Phoebe Mary Waller-Bridge would totally play her in the movie.
reminder, booth babes kept women from being strippers, and now onlyfans prostitutes.
Is there any big game out there that isn't a sequel?
I was thinking Starfield but that's just skyrim in space
yes here is a list of them
>Getting your friend's dad to answer the questions to play Leisure Suit Larry.
I completely forgot about this, good times
>Leisure Suit Larry.
Did the Casino one ever have the online portion enabled?
Couldn't tell ya, I never got actual internet until mid 2000s. The joys of living in the middle of the woods.
>No women in the workplace
>No HR team to stop you from having fun or sleeping in the office
>No DEI or ESG to ruin your game
>mainstream didnt think there was money in vidya so for a while all teams were small and had total freedom
>>No DEI or ESG to ruin your game
>No women in the workplace
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberta_Williams
WOWIE! THAT ONE PERSON WORKED AT ID SOFTWARE, BLIZZARD ENTERTAINMENT, AND 3D REALMS?
THAT 1 PERSON WHO GOT A JOB BECAUSE HER HUSBAND RAN THE STUDIO!?! WOWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!
SHES ONLY 0.000001% OF THE INDUSTRY SO IMMA USE THIS AS A GOTCHA
you are a moron.
>women exist
>incel gets mad
>women exist
not in gaming
Would
>everyone in the NBA is tall
>HERE IS 1 GUY THAT IS 5'6 OUT OF THE ENTIRE LEAGUE
here is 1 studio.
post this many women in the gaming industry in the 90s.
go ahead.
troony propaganda must be working on zoomies if they desperately want to be surrounded by wieners 24/7
a room of nerdy dudes makes a good game.
Nobody is going "yeah sally, lets go with your stupid shit lame idea. you're so smart" (will you sleep with me yet)
cope and sneed
she made doom?
she made super mario?
are the only games zoomies know before their time is doom and mario?
is top left John Carmack?
yes
I new it. doom kicks ass
that's a doom image
>cables just put through the ceiling
>nobody cares because it fricking works and they have more important shit to do
i hate normalgays and their hysteria if they ever see le hecking wire so much
normalgays are a blight and should not be allowed near computers
>today
>EXCUSE ME
>THAT IS A HEALTH AND SAFETY VIOLATION
>WERE SHUTTING THE STUDIO DOWN UNTIL THIS IS FIXED
>REPORT TO HR FOR DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION TRAINING
Oughts of Knoughledge
>90s and 00s
>scary spice was the scary one because she was black
TAKE ME BACK
How would turning it off have helped anything if it still needed to register the new date when turned back on?
Were programmers back then too moronic to understand that the turn of the millennium was just around the corner?
The programmers who made the first computers weren't going to live to see the millennium, they left the next generation to fix their problem.
You had a SEGA Genesis sitting on the floor in front of the TV, and life was good.
-directx and direct 3d video render was ugly as shit, the picture was dark and you had a smear effect on the screen with direct 3d
-opengl and 3dfx glidewas amazing
-most of the time games were finished no much bugs
-
Golden age of online multiplayer before 7th generation turned it into a snowball of shit
?si=JW4Zt4JQt-oPB7xg
You'd get FPSes in a box of cereal.
Someone said I would unlock Baby Vegeta by beating that Dragonball game with every character 20 times. There was no internet and somehow that rumor spread around the globe.
about the same, really, just with less games and it was more annoying to keep physical shit around
>long install times from CD to slow hard drive
>nobody throwing a tantrum because they didn't have steam to hide all their installers and launchers in
>nobody throwing a tantrum because they had to upgrade their computers to play new games or suffer with bad framerates and low settings
>slightly more competition in the cpu and gpu markets until cyrix and 3dfx died
>people actually bought sound cards instead of becoming lazy complacent morons that think onboard mobo audio is ok or lazy rich morons thinking you should use a USB audio interface/DAC instead
>no online forum of people who don't play games calling every game shit unless it's a fetishy pseudo-porn indie title, nintendo, or fromshovelware
>lose internet connection when someone calls your mom
>beholden to what's in stores, no storefront to generate cult-like worship status among cattle and offer you endless options to buy shovelware
It was awesome, but semi inconvienent even for the time. Multi disc games were a pain and running out of hard drive space was the norm.
Still a very fun time. Everything felt new and more exciting than the last thing. Chilling with friends during lan parties, swapping out and upgrading parts you found cheap, it was just great.
Women ruined games, table top games, movies, Magic, Starwars, Marvel and everything else good.
Reminder to always gatekeep your hobbies.
people are fine. when you start making everything about you is when it fails.
and that's what they do.
How many self inserts do you see?
and the lego study on how women play with toys versus men.
I love lego
>lego study on how women play with toys versus men
What did they do, make hearts and houses and babies' cradles and things?
boys want to be the thing.
girls want the thing to be them. thats why women self insert.
There was also the part where when given animal lego toys, the boys made them fight, or be in danger and needed to be rescued or die.
The girls made the animals play and cook meals together, and then go to sleep after a long day of fun and play
I had a younger sister and we took turns trying to make giant killer robots
TAKE
ME
BACK
>let me shove mah breasts into the kids face
the 90s were magical
>dad taking the photo
>GET IN THERE SON
>YOU CAN SHOW ALL YOUR FRIENDS AT SCHOOL TOMORROW
i miss when literally nobody was gay
What are these women doing in my safe space for men???
>zoomer doesnt know what a convention is
kek
>use it to sexualize themselves for attention
>while posting booth babes
>'23 post
>phoneposter
>calling anyone a zoomie
This is just the zoomer version of that Mario Bros image about women
remember when fun was allowed
I remember WoW being a pain in the ass to install because it was 4 CDs and then patching. You basically spent 3-4 hours just to be able to launch the game if you ever uninstalled it. For games that didn't have their own launcher, you would have to go to some random site or fileplanet and get updates.
that's gay
shadow Bane is better than wow
this is another why I hate unishit. they take their IPs and rape them, and through them in the trash
remember wow was super hyped because it came from warcraft 2 & 3 right off of battle net.
I definitely remember WoW as being one of the first games to make everyone scream "they want me to download HOW MUCH off the internet to keep playing?"
It honestly wouldn't have been a bad idea for blizzard to just fricking mail people patch CDs, but that was prime blizzard with a fully calcified hubris, they knew they could get away with it.
they're the first one's to also make you pay for expansions
>they're the first one's to also make you pay for expansions
moron
Black person Everquest had like 12 expansions before Blizzard ever even announced Wow's first expansion lmao.
>blizzard in general
I remember buying guild wars 2, and I still think I have everything that's been added
>but that was prime blizzard with a fully calcified hubris, they knew they could get away with it.
and it didn't take them long for them to run into money problems and had to close Blizzard North, but instead of doing the right and smart decisions, they doubled down on their moronation every time until they had to be bought out by Activision.
https://www.project1999.com/
>Zoomers will never know a time when Metal and rock was the biggest music in the world and not Black rap
>Zoomers will never know buying a complete, finished game with no DLC
>Zoomers will never have a virgin GF or a GF with less than 40 dicks inside her by the time she is 22
>Zoomers will never have their friends over to play 4 player N64 on 1 tv
>Zoomers will never eat food without GMOs in it
>Zoomers will never be unvaxx'd and be spike protein free
>Zoomers will never be Hulkamaniacs
RIP in pepperoni zoomies
Pirated discs were serigraphed and some even came with manuals, there was some craft behind piracy.
Had so much fun with this one. We need a sequel.
well you have a few ones?
TDR2000 is a good game and i wish people would stop shitting on it
PC Gaming - painful.
Console gaming? pretty comfy.
nvidia singlehandedly saved PC gaming, but they're greedy fricks and kept shitting out awful cards until AMD bought radeon and finally brought them some competition. to be fair they made some terrible engineering frickups, mostly dragging their feet over programmable shaders and 32 bit precision.
Ooh an oldgay thread, sweet. Okay, what do you want to know? Some other anons have covered a few things but ask your questions. For reference, had a NES in the late 80s and my first gaming computer (as opposed to a PC or word processor predominantly used by father for work stuff) was a 486 DX2 66 (aka 66mhz, which was a $3000+ monstrosity big dick computer of its era before the Pentium line arrived etc).
>be 11
>be sittan onna family win95 machine
>can finally sign into AOL for more than 5 minutes since our house got call forwarding and our family got a cell phone
>lookan up cheat codes on happypuppy
>see ad
>CLICK HERE FOR YOUR FREE CUPHOLDER
>frick it
>click
>CD tray opens
>mfw
>be 10 or 11
>finally figured out how to connect age of empires 2 to internet to play online
>family figured out they could DC me by picking up the phone and spamming random numbers.
>they still laugh about hearing me sperg out in my room audible through multiple walls
that's actually pretty hilarious
my buddy did that to his older brother when he was in the middle of a DAoC raid one time and he came in and started punching the shit out of him
You bought a CD and then put it into the optical drive, and then you installed and played the game.
>zoomies: WTF WHERE ARE THE BATTLEPASSES AND SKINS, WHERE CAN I BUY SMURFBERRIES!?!?
we had those though
they were just in larger chunks, cost more money, and were called expansion packs.
xpacs were nothing like microtransactions
How the frick is an expansion like battlepasses and skins, moron? Expansions were like entirely new games built upon the foundations of the previous games.
You're being disingenuous here. Expansions were basically going from Ocarina of Time to Majora's Mask.
FACT:
Unless you got an impulse buy off the box art, to sell games before they had to be GOOD and your friends told you about them at school. So you were rewarded by making good games.
NOW:
Company pays streamer to play gaem. Sell 1000000 copies and DLC. The marketing matters, not the game.
We can never go back, and never will.
>Company pays streamer to play gaem.
Back then it was company backed magazines like Nintendo Power that says every game they make or publish is 10/10
but nobody went off those reviews. We rented the games before we bought them, or tried the arcade version like ninja turtles.
someone would tell you about the game or if it was on gameboy they'd bring it to school and you'd see if it was actually good.
>tried the arcade version like ninja turtles.
almost all arcade ports were trash until 16bit landed
yes but thats all we had. some were good. Street fighter II on SNES was close enough
>company backed magazines like Nintendo Power that says every game they make or publish is 10/10
Sure. However, with magazines, the financial ties were evident. With eceleb shills, corporations hand them wads of cash under the table and tell them to pretend they actually like the game.
It's not the same
>corporations hand them wads of cash under the table and tell them to pretend they actually like the game.
Extended Play.
Meanwhile, in reality, you can just look at AVGN alone to see hundreds of NES games that were, in fact, complete shit and still sold plenty. There was never at any point a time where it was "required" to make a game good before selling it.
On pc you’d occasionally have to spend 6 hours trying to configure shit to get the game to launch but other than that it was superior.
Pc + console games came in cool cases/boxes with in depth manuals full of art and background info
Updating games was really annoying because you had to download the partches and install them in order. Final standalone parches were very rare.
>meanwhile total war warhammer 3 still needs to redownload whole 100 Gb worth of game files to update
2023 btw
All I did was pirate back then, I remember that legit PC games got DRM so bad that it literally installed malware on your computer and had online activation to obscure, random servers ran by frick knows who and they attempted to limit the number of installs you were allowed to have and their systems were shit and sometimes didn't register when you uninstalled the game and as such you could end up with your physical plastic crap being completely worthless because the online DRM it used anyway was malfunctioning.
If you were a child your parents would possibly accuse your games, such as Civilization III, of having installed a virus onto the computer
unironically
>YOUR GAMES ARE SLOWING THE COMPUTER DOWN GET RID OF THEM
>look at browser with 20 different search bars and addons
kek yup
while they downloaded untold amounts of .exe and .zip files from their friends of stupid little boomer humor animations, unironically clicked on 1990s-era internet ads, and forwarded every chain email. but no, it was those damned video games giving the computer viruses!
I actually did break the computer one time installing Cabela's Big Game Hunter, no clue why it happened to this day, but they used it as ammo against me until I finally got my own PC as a teenager.
And if it wasn't that, they'd scream at you and beat you for "losing" a printer ink cartridge that they never had or bought in the first place.
oh damn I didn't know that was a thing but it used to happen to me a lot. they would swear up and down that they had another printer cartridge and ask what I did with it, as though I had any reason to steal or hide it.
It's weird having parents who know just enough about computers to not have that happen, but not know enough that I still have to help them.
My Dad got on board with computers through my uncle. He knows how to put one together and do most stuff, but stuff like taking a screenshot or understanding that posting a public comment on someone's Facebook page isn't the same as sending a direct message. He won't use his debit card online, but will buy from "Canadian Pharmacy" and get frustrated when they won't stop calling. He's been telling people "My brain's like an old 386, it'll get there eventually, but it takes a minute" for at least 25 years.
My Mom knows nothing about computers and can only barely use Word and open Yahoo for her E-mail and news. She still manages to completely kill the installation despite that and the extremely constrained practices I told her to follow. I even installed an adblocker for her, which was getting hard to do because she was still running XP because she's a minor hoarder.
She doesn't keep every scrap of everything, but she has Rubbermaid bins full of every document she's ever needed and every single piece of schoolwork I ever brought home.
PC magazines came with demons in a CD. Sometimes it's just one game demo. Sometimes it's three or two.
You have to shut down the PC from Windows and the power button doesn't have a shut down protocol. If you're on DOS (not DOS opened from Windows), you just turn it off like a light switch
Multiple CDs for one game
CDs may have bonus content beyond manuals and readme.txt
No updates past launch version. Fixes and updates can only come when an expansion for the game is released
Way WAY more variety in genres and gimmicks. Most are hit or miss. The ones that excel are the ones we remember until today
Reading game boxes after buying it from the store while going home. Having nothing in your brain but that game you just bought while walking around the mall.
Installing DirectX 6.0
Needing to buy a sound card along with a video card
>PC magazines came with demons in a CD.
Metal.
video games were a primary reason to have a CD-ROM drive. disc drives were $1000 when they were new. downloading video games at 4kb/s absolutely destroyed your internet viewing experience, and there was no auto resume. if the download failed you started over from the beginning. pirating an entire video game was an almost unfathomable chore as you typically wouldn't maintain a dialup connection for that long. tying up the phone line meant nobody could call you and you couldn't make calls.
space was also a luxury. just imagine there was a time where 16MB was the biggest hard drive on the market. for the majority of time when i was growing up 40GB was the biggest HD i had ever seen.
as such the piracy scene heavily relied on portables, repacks, crack only's, and splitting packs into 15MB zip chunks with parity files [maximum file size usenet servers allowed] i didn't know GTA2 had radio stations until later in life because it was always common practice to remove the biggest chunks of data that weren't necessary to beat the game.
also CD burners were a huge luxury. if you had one as a kid in the 90s you basically became drug dealer to all your friends except with pirated media.
they were still very unaffordable into the early 00s and writeable CD media tech kind of sucked and was costly. if you didn't set the burn speed to 2x and left it alone overnight it would exponentially raise the odds you'd burn a coaster that wouldn't read.
the early discs were heavily prone to rotting and chances are close to 100% a CD burned in the year 1997 wouldn't read at all today, or would have otherwise bubbled and fell apart. i remember slamming my coasters onto the basement floor and the data layers exploded into a fine, glittery dust, leaving nothing but a transparent disc.
>CD burners were a huge luxury. if you had one as a kid in the 90s you basically became drug dealer to all your friends except with pirated media.
Kek, very true
When I first played Fallout all the NPCs were black screens because they removed the NPC dialogue videos to get it down to 100mb.
any landers?
i recall getting my mom to buy me a game disc that claimed to have over 100 games on it, finding out that most of them wouldn't load and thinking that i was doing something wrong because i didn't know much about computers as a kid. the real story is that the majority of those games were actually broken and weren't going to run no matter what.
it was objectively worse since you can play all those games now easily + more
People played on console back then. You know how Linux is just now becoming suitable for gaming? Windows was the same way back then. That's not even getting into th fact about high specs being a lot more exclusive and expensive, as well as internet and the web being entirely different now.
The whole reason PC master race is even a meme now and consoles are dying is because PC gaming is becoming accessible to the masses. If you could go back in time to 2008 and show someone a Razor Blade '18 laptop, they'd think you were a fricking alien that shit was so unthinkable back then.
That's not really the case. While finding a "both thin and reasonably powerful" laptop was a niche issue until the mid 2010s , gaming on PCs in general was commonplace long, long prior to 2008. If you want that to be close to the issue, you need to go back to before the unification of Windows 9x and Windows NT kernels (ie with XP) , when you had to do things like manually deal with IRQ assignments. It was definitely a different time , but the timeframe you describe is really off and 2008 wasn't massively different from what we have now, the way you're mentioning anyway.
Yes and no.
PC gaming obviously existed at the time, but PC games and consoles games were still two different worlds at the time. It's why back then, ports like crysis 360 or half Life PS2 were so interesting, games were built for pc or console from the ground up, not both. It's the reason we still don't have a proper Red Dead port and why Bethesda games ran better on Xbox.
A lot of PC games got ported to consoles in the 80s and 90s. Not so much the other way.
a shit fight, you would go to the store look at a box hope it was good based on that, try to install it hope it installed without failing, then hope the game launched and hope it ran properly, the manuals troubleshooting stuff was basically useless
or you'd get demo discs or read magazines for game suggestions probably not realizing they were paid shills, or you'd get copied games off people which was good
maybe it was just me being a kid and not really knowing how computers worked but it was a shit fight compared to now where almost everything works and the only time people complain is if they lose 3 frames or the game stutters for half a second
plus you can buy anything online an return it in seconds now if you don't like it so that helps, going to the store was a whole process, I guess that's why people gravitated towards consoles because everything worked even if it was a shitty experience plus you could rent games from the video store which was fun
>another year gone by
You buy a CD, place it in your CDROM on your W98SE PC... you run setup.exe, you install it, install directx if needed, run. Medium settings. 1024x768, 16bit, sound on.
Also you have bunch of cool gaming and PC magazines with demo and software discs...
forgot dial up, i had per hour pricing, so I had to download FAST a crapton of pages in my firefox or opera and read it while disconnected
gamecopyworld.com
fricking hell I forgot about this site. I clicked on a random crack link and it took me to its sister site that's so old, ublock origin doesn't even block the porno banner ads
I wish that I had kept my old Windows 98 PC. It was just a crappy Dell, but still. I have been tempted to get a new Pentium III PC for Windows 98/DOS gaming, but trying to figure out all of the right parts and what would actually be good for my purposes is a bit beyond me. I really just want to play some Mech Warrior 3/4 with a Force Feedback Pro joystick. Those fricking things don't work on modern systems because nothing from XP onward supported the Game Port, and on top of that it made non-standard use of the Game Port so USB adapters don't work with it either.
i've got a sidewinder 2. usb. best most durable joystick ever made! the designers even signed their name in the plastic mold on the inside cover.
still works. and it's a pure b***h to get working on win10.
A lot of the same issues existed back then, it's just it did not feel as bad because social media and constantly having access to whatever you want has destroyed our sense of wonder.
Deus Ex.
Unreal Tournament
Medieval Total War
Did anything bad happen to anyone ever because of Y2K bug?
I miss it, bros.
hotseat playing deluxe ski jump, liero, Workms on Amiga and Heroes 3. Good times
>schools start letting out in the US
>catalog gets flooded with inane threads about ecelebs and politics, more unofficial generals for the same handful of fetish-based indie games
>existing threads that aren't slid off right away get attacked by underage shitbrains who think the term "2.5D" is some modern zoomer invention because it deflects from their own lack of age and knowledge, or show a total lack of understanding of why the dreaded Y2K bug was a concern
>underage shitbrains who think the term "2.5D" is some modern zoomer invention
games are either 2D or 3D zoomie
>dreaded Y2K bug
oh no! Some programmers had to work extra hard in December so bankers wouldn't have to work extra in January!
THE END OF THE WORLD!
>2.5D
>dreaded Y2K bug
How to tell someone is an eceleb cum drinker
>t. underage zoomers who did not actually experience pre-2000 life
>zoomers think the hysteria was being concerned over nerd shit
DUDE PLANES WILL FALL AND NUKES WILL GO OFF
frick off poser
>being nostalgic when you are 30-40yo
i share your feeling anons sometimes but dudes we need to move on already or we can just buy a coffin and lay in it cuz stuff will never get this good for a long ass time.
There is something truly wonderful installing Sims 2 and it's 8 expansion packs and 10 stuff packs from disc. All and all the whole thing requires 24 discs to install.
I grew up in a military household. Every jarhead under the sun that had regular access to a computer had a copied floppy of Doom. Not just the shareware versions but the whole horse.