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[L Thammy]

The popularity of PC gaming seems to have exploded over the past few years. A lot of gamers may not be well aware with history of the platform beyond the major titles. The purpose of this thread is to discuss how PC gaming has changed over time. Feel free to post anecdotes, freeware games or whatever may be relevant.


To start us off, look at this bad boy. This is the shareware era experience right here.

These things were everywhere. Take special notice of the mediocre console style games that they're advertising on the cover. Those were everywhere too. Made Epic and Apogee's greats seem all the more impressive after playing a few of these.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

To start us off, look at this bad boy. This is the shareware era experience right here.

wat

The shareware era experience was trading stuff on floppy disk!

 

[iosef]

The shareware era experience was downloading at 14.4kbps

 

[Snacks the sober sea lion]

I got a Doom total conversion where you shoot booger monsters from a cereal box.

 

[Kezen]

I don't miss the pre-Steam PC gaming at all.

 

[DragonSworne]

I remember my older brother buying a PC controller that came with 40 games. It included those dos strip poker games.

 

[lazygecko]

Pre-Steam indie gaming to me was finding a lot of cool obscurities in the shareware folder on the monthly PC Gamer CDs in the 90's. Found a lot of cool games that way like Dink Smallwood.

 

[Starwolf_UK]

The shareware era experience was downloading at 14.4kbps

That, buying shareware discs or buying magazines for cover discs.

 

[Garrett Hawke]

Does anyone remember those PC games that were published by not the origina lpublishers that always came in weird boxes, with the boxart in the center and massive borders?

 

[Amagon]

Ahh, the good old days browsing around fileplanet and PC Gamer cds.

 

[L Thammy]

I got a Doom total conversion where you shoot booger monsters from a cereal box.

I remember playing a bunch of Wolfenstein mods like that. I had one that turned the soldiers into Pac Man. And there was a Street Fighter themed one, I think they replaced the double chaingun boss with E. Honda.

 

[Zaku]

...was pretty terrible.

Dongles and manual references and having to order games over the phone, bleaugh.

I remember having to download Duke Nukem 3D maps off BBSs.

 

[crimzonflame]

Friends sharing 1 Starcraft CD key

 

[epmode]

Downloading the Doom demo on a 14.4 modem, knowing nothing about it besides the fact that it was from the Wolfenstein guys, was legit mind blowing.

Downside: Actually getting pre-Doom games to run properly was AWFUL. People bitch about modern PC gaming being too complicated and I just laugh. Try editing DOS config files, using expanded memory managers and worrying about IRQ conflicts.

 

[nubbe]

PC gaming started with Doom, anything else is a lie

 

[Jarrod38]

Apogee Software/3D Realms games were some of most played games for me back in the day.

 

[Wiktor]

I liked it more in 90s than now. It actually owned the games back then, the boxes were so much more awesome too.

I mean...look at this beauty:

THey don't make them like this anymore

Still, today is a great time to be a pc gamer. Maybe not 90s-like level of great, but still wesome. Steam, for all it's DRM, helped a lot to restore pc gaming after the dark ages of 2001-2004. It's not the only thing that did, but it played a huge part and loosing some of the old stuff was a worthy trade off

 

[Nabs]

Jumping from shady site to shady site to get patch 1.01 > 1.02-1.07 > 1.08 > 1.09 just to play some multiplayer with friends.

 

[Jazzkokehead]

Not pre-Steam at all, but this thread convinced me to reinstall Battlefront II... it's on 4 CDs. I'm so used to downloading games these days instead of installing from physical media that I forgot what a multi-disk install was like.

 

[Astro Racer]

Those giant cardboard boxes that had a few floppy discs inside always puzzled me. Such a waste.

 

[Maintenance]

I remember getting a demo for Live for Speed and spending weeks playing only that. Also, playing 4x4 Evo and 4x4 Evo 2 with mods was glorious, but I still hate being allowed to download 2 cars/tracks per day on the site that I used to get mods.

Another one that I remember is playing Ski or Die on DOS, alongside with Chess. I had to get a sheet to start Ski or Die, since I was young and couldn't remember it well.

Spoiler

Yeah, my examples are not that old, unfortunately.

 

[Mister Wilhelm]

Remember these pieces of shit?

 

[Gentleman Jack]

My pre-steam PC gaming experience involved fiddling with things like this

Just to launch the game. I don't miss it.

 

[Sparrowhawk]

One of my earliest memories is going to some kind of PC convention with my dad when I was really young and playing a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Doom wad. It was so fun.

 

[Sparrowhawk]

My pre-steam PC gaming experience involved fiddling with things like this

Just to launch the game. I don't miss it.

Oh my God, I have this at my mom's house in a box full of old stuff. Wow.

 

[epmode]

Still, today is a great time to be a pc gamer. Maybe not 90s-like level of great, but still wesome.

Modern PC gaming is really close to the golden age, AKA late 90s/early 00s. I never thought we'd see something like that again. And with VR on the horizon, things are looking pretty good to me.

 

[Teknopathetic]

"PC gaming started with Doom, anything else is a lie"

Doom wasn't even the best game iD had made up that point.

 

[Wiktor]

Modern PC gaming is really close to the golden age, AKA late 90s/early 00s. I never thought we'd see something like that again. And with VR on the horizon, things are looking pretty good to me.

Welll....to me early 00s were pure crap though I like pc gaming nowadays because it's close to "golen age" of late 80s/early 90s

But I guess this shows how versalite modern pcgaming is, since it has something for everybody.

 

[Jarrod38]

Remember these pieces of shit?

Never had that one but I had something like that for Duke Nukem 3D.

 

[L Thammy]

I don't miss the pre-Steam PC gaming at all.

...was pretty terrible.

Dongles and manual references and having to order games over the phone, bleaugh.

I remember having to download Duke Nukem 3D maps off BBSs.

My pre-steam PC gaming experience involved fiddling with things like this

Just to launch the game. I don't miss it.

Kind of why I posted the thread. There was a thread about a month ago for the worst PC ports, and I was really surprised by how many people were saying Dark Souls. I think the worst thing posted was Street Fighter II for DOS, modern ports aren't even close.

That said, PC and console used to be more differentiated with less genre cross-over. I think it's kind of a shame that that's changed.

What is that?

A code wheel. Sometime during the game (not necessarily during start-up) it'll give you a coded message. You have to decode it or you don't get to continue.
It's for piracy protection.

 

[-duskdoll-]

My pre-steam PC gaming experience involved fiddling with things like this

Just to launch the game. I don't miss it.

What is that?

 

[Forkball]

So you bought a PC game.
Will it run on your computer?
Who the fuck knows?

 

[Wiktor]

What is that?

Physical anti-piracy device The game asked you some questions before playing and those were needed to answer it. Others had questions like "type the third word from page 10 of manual"

 

[Zaku]

Remember these pieces of shit?

This one was actually pretty good. Or maybe I was just a dumb teenager.

 

[TheRagnCajun]

I remember it taking an hour to get everyone setup at lan parties.

 

[XiaNaphryz]

So you bought a PC game.
Will it run on your computer?
Who the fuck knows?

Depends on how well you can rewrite autoexec.bat and config.sys.

 

[Wyndstryker]

Pre-steam PC gaming was horrid without the internet. And with a 56k modem you learn quickly how to really dig in the internet just to save time.

Although I started playing f2p MMO's back on a 56k modem so yeah my experience on pre-steam gaming is more skewered to how it was in Asia.

 

[epmode]

So you bought a PC game.
Will it run on your computer?
Who the fuck knows?

In my experience, everything would run provided you had decent hardware. ...but getting it to run could take a LONG time. The internet would have helped a lot!

Depends on how well you can rewrite autoexec.bat and config.sys.

I still have nightmares about EMM386.

 

[orava]

Aren't these collection CDs relatively new thing? Most of these were just dumps of some ftp servers. At that point i remember just downloading stuff from Internet.

 

[kick51]

"What is resolution...might as well turn it all the way up......Dang it, this game doesn't seem to run well on my Packard Bell." --12 year old me

 

[Gentleman Jack]

What is that?

At launch the game prompted you to align two of the runes at the edge and type in the phrase corresponding to a specific dot/dash pattern before you could get to the main menu. Lucasarts had one called Dial-A-Pirate

Lots of games used schemes like this, from 'gimme word 5 of paragraph 3 on page 150 of the manual.'

Quarantine had codes arranged in a big table and you had to give it the code from a specific coordinate to launch the game. They printed the codes on a dark crimson bit of card stock so it wouldn't photocopy. The bad news was that creases in the cardstock could render codes illegible. Fun game though.

 

[Chinbo37]

I would go to my local PC store and dig through huge boxes of floppies looking for shareware to try

 

[Nabs]

Remember Heat.net, Zone.com (MSN Gaming Zone), Mplayer.com/Gamespy?

 

[XiaNaphryz]

Pre-steam PC gaming was horrid without the internet.

Eh, I wouldn't go that far. Some of my best all-time experiences were in that time period. Wing Commander, TIE Fighter, the "golden age" of adventure games...sure, you needed to be able to figure out how to configure stuff, but it wasn't all that bad in hindsight.

I still have nightmares about EMM386.

My dad actually shelled out for a memory manager program, so I used QEMM to help manage all that stuff.

 

[KainXVIII]

Pre-Steam gaming in Russia, one disc will give you several years of gaming, good times!

 

[Beren the Empty-Handed]

I miss all of those Adventure games that flourished on the PC. After Myst, those started to die off, at least in the US.

But what I remember was EXPANSION PACKS.

(I'm a big Heroess III fan, too)

The glory of Expansion Packs was that they had to sell enough for it to be financially viable, and to do that, they had to attract a lot of customers. Which meant they couldn't skimp on the content. A lot of expansion packs offered nearly as much content as the original game, if not as much! Nowadays they don't have to do that, since DLC doesn't require shipping boxes or competing for shelf space. It always felt like a very consumer-friendly practice to me.

 

[Erevador]

Remember Heat.net, Zone.com (MSN Gaming Zone), Mplayer.com/Gamespy?

So much time spent on MSN Gaming Zone playing Age of Empires.

I remember getting the first Age of Empires demo with Windows 98 on a disk of demos that came with the O.S. It absolutely blew my mind open.

 

[BibiMaghoo]

When people say this early PC. Do they mean Windows / DOS?

Does Workbench count?

 

[Zaku]

Kind of why I posted the thread. There was a thread about a month ago for the worst PC ports, and I was really surprised by how many people were saying Dark Souls. I think the worst thing posted was Street Fighter II for DOS, modern ports aren't even close.

That said, PC and console used to be more differentiated with less genre cross-over. I think it's kind of a shame that that's changed.

Pfft, I saw that thread and every time someone posted something modern I giggled a bit. PC gamers of yore had to commit Satanic rituals to get games running compared to the smooth sailing we've got these days.

Then, naturally, there's the Myth II uninstall fiasco:

Whoops, you deleted my entire damned hard drive? Goody.

 

[Facism]

i don't miss having the wait for fileplanet whenever a new patch for a game was out.