Won't lie, I'm glad the era is over.
- Upgrade cycles were ridiculous
- No online store, local shops overpriced
- Orchid Voodoo 1 had incorrect memory timing
- MIDI music was meow meow meow
- Only select games support your chosen hardware
- Somehow PS1 ate our 3D lunch
I understand this mindset but to be fair, a lot of this was pretty much done with by the late 90's early/2000's. 80's to mid 90's, PC was the Wild West. So many competing standards and operating systems. If you check out some of the big box games from the late 80's into the early 90's, they had to be released on multiple SKUs. Amiga, C64, Apple II, IBM/Tandy and later on the Mac. And on top of that, you had to deal with EGA and VGA versions. And that's not even counting the fact that a good chunk of the industry was still using 5.25 inch floppies in the 90's. I have games in boxes from that era that had both 3.5 inch and 5.25 inch floppies. Then you had the various sound card standards.
When we FINALLY transitioned to Windows-era gaming, the 3D wars slowed down a bit and AMD broke the Intel monopoly - I still maintain that that AMD 1.4 ghz Thunderbird is the most important CPU of the last 20 years, it was really coming together. That was just around the same time that motherboards started incorporating onboard sound that was comparable to dedicated soundcards as well. By then, it was smooth sailing IMO.
There is a very brief but great period of PC gaming that took place in the late 90's and lasted probably until around 2004 and had a decline ending in 2007 with the release of Crysis where everything was coming together. I think that period gets a bad rap because all the console-centric magazines were calling for the death of PC gaming and saying it was all going to be MMO's in the future but there were some great games released during that period. A lot of modern gaming does not exist without late 90's PC developers experimenting with stuff.
1997-2000 alone:
- Fallout series
- Baldur's Gate II - Saga
- Diablo 2
- Falcon 4.0
- Freespace
- Curse of Monkey Island
- Blade Runner
- Counter-Strike
- Half Life
- Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament - remember the endless debate on forums and USEnet back then about which was the superior game?
- Tribes
- Planescape Torment
etc.
That was also the last time in PC gaming where simulators - space, racing, flight, "mech", military etc. were really a driving force in PC gaming. They still exist today but they are on a weird niche of the gaming industry. Nobody in the mainstream gaming press covers them really - except maybe as a joke, but there are still forums and peripherals that are dedicated to keeping the sim genre alive. I think it's definitely one of the most significant losses for PC gaming that the simulation subgenre just sort of went away when all the companies decided to start chasing that console money.
PC mods in the 90's as well were top notch. Like Counter-Strike layed the groundwork for a lot of modern FPS' when you think about it: Limited weapon selection, round based multiplayer, an RPG-ish system of progression (money).
That 80's and early 90's era of PC gaming was great but it came with a lot of baggage IMO. Once you hit the late 90's - I honestly don't think any one console or era of computer gaming rivals the output of late 90's to mid 2000's PC gaming.
