Meme transcription: A table comparing the steps to start a game ‘then’ vs. ‘now’.
Content of the “Then” column:
- Double-click GAME.exe
- Play game
Content of the “Now” column:
- Launch Steam
-
Steam updates
-
Steam opens
- Close Steam’s ad window
- Select Game
-
Game launcher starts
-
Game launcher launches Game launcher updater
- Yes
- Yes
- Yes
- Ok
-
Would you like to sign up for our newsletter?
- No
-
Our EULAs have changed. Please review them before continuing
- Scroll
- Scroll
- Scroll
- Scroll
- Yes
- Yes
- Yes, sell my soul
- Start game
- Skip vendor intro
- Skip vendor intro #2
- Skip vendor intro #3
- Sit through nVidia The way it’s meant to be played
- Skip opening cutscene
-
Main menu opens
-
Would you like to connect your Steam account to account?
- No
- Press play.
- Play game.
Absolute bullshit, lol. Nowadays you can boot your PC, launch Steam and start into your game while 20+ years ago you were still looking for the damn CD.
And don’t get me started with game updates, you had to do them MANUALLY. Go to the developer website, look at a download page, then you get offered updates: 1.0.1a, 1.0.1b, 1.0.2, 1.0.2b, 1.0.3, 1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.2.1abc, …
For smaller updates you had to install them in order, so you download 1.0.1a, install it, then download 1.0.1b, install it, then download… if you are lucky the bigger updates like 1.1.0 or 1.2.0 could be directly installed without any in-between steps.
Oh and installing games? World of Warcraft had 4 CDs and if you bought it with Burning Crusade you had to use 8 CDs in total for installation! And the install took ages too.
And during the installation you had to type in a cd key, which took longer than all your popups you’re describing together.
I’ve been mostly playing on PC for the last 27 years, what we have today, even if some stuff is annoying, is 100 times better than how it was back then.
The fact that the “then” is missing so much of the bullshit we dealt with back then shows whomever made this “meme” never gamed back then.
There’s also the issues with your disks getting corrupted, discs getting scratched, or losing them because they came with so goddamn many.
Same type of kid whom believes every single game worked perfectly on release and didn’t need patches back then.
Sorry bro you only remember the Gems. At least a game isn’t getting released that will delete your OS when you uninstall it.
Ooh, was there a game that did that?
Actually there was a steam script that deleted your Linux root drive… that was a real thing.
I could also totally see a botched install script for win95 totally bricking a win98. Install…
DOS/4GW Professional Protected Mode Run-Time Version 2.01a.
Fatal error (1307) not enough memory. PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE…
Runtime error (1604). PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE…
Error (2504): can’t create swap file “.” DOS/4GW Professional fatal error (1101): initialization error [1] PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE…
Ok, guess I’m just never going to play Wing Commander then…
Not to mention how annoying it was to even buy games - if a popular game was released you might have wait for the store to open to buy it before it went out of stock, and if it was more niche you might have to mail an order form in and wait for them to ship it to you.
Back when you preordered because theyd run out!
I wish I still had options to install updates or not.
Cause sometimes I like to fuck around with silly bugs and exploits in your old solo games, or because some amazing mod only worked on X version and not Y version. which is not something you can do anymore because you are only allowed to have the most recent version or else.
Not true, go to your Steam library, right click the game you want to change, Properties -> Betas -> Select the game version you want.
Not every developer offers this, but there’s plenty where I could go back 10 years in updates.
Most of the time, at least up until a few years ago when I last had to do this for a Bethesda game(thanks tod for releasing Skyrim 7 times) You can also download any released version of the game from the steam database, provided you own it of course.
I needed a specific patch of the original Skyrim release for an overhaul mod I wanted to play, and was able to find the release through the steamDB.
Of course, that’s a game that released 1.0 on steam. Anything released before steam, and you’re probably still going to have to go spelunking through old archives and shady websites to find old versions of games.
FYI GOG lets you decide whether or not to update, and if you update and don’t like the update or it’s buggy you can roll it back. They don’t have as wide a selection as steam, but they have a lot, and they actually have a ton of old games too. I love it for games that I’ve modded and the mods get abandoned, I can play my modded version forever
That was IMO part of the charm :-) especially as they don’t seem to do games like that anymore (again IMO).
I absolutely hated it. If you just wanted to switch between games you had to get up and physically get the other CD. Oh and you better not drop that CD or scratch it, or your game might be lost.
Besides that buying games sucked too. Nowadays I can buy and download a game in an hour tops, smaller games in minutes. Back then you had to go to a store or wait for shipping…
Don’t get me started on DRM, SecuROM doesn’t work nowadays, so all games you bought with it are broken.
There was no charm, it all sucked.
Totally true.
But you waited for Diablo 2, Red Alert, and so on so …
God damn I completely forgot about multi disc installs! That was the pits.
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“Please insert disc into drive D:/”
You alt-tabbed ? Then fuck you and your unsaved progress
Set up soundblaster irq dma bzzz bzz
“NOT ENOUGH CONVENTIONAL MEMORY”
Ok. Time to set and launch a specific autoexec.bat.
X-COM: UFO Defense has joined the chat.
wasnt there a XCOM knockoff game that deleted your tire C drive if you uninstalled it?
Oh my god I both do no don’t want this to be true
Theres been a couple games that had this issue.
I know Myth 2 had it if you installed it into the wrong directory or something.
There was some not-mainstream MMO that had the issue too at one point.
but I cant remember the name of the xcom knockoff that had it.
and I cant find anything about it cause I keep finding 5000 pages of results about recovering uninstalled games.
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One big game installed itself as a boot option
Turn PC on
Want to play or open windows?
O_o
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I’m full l having flashbacks to Fantasy Empires. I don’t know if I ever had the manual. I think I just got a list of words from someone.
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Do people forget that games used to require you to have the CD-ROM in the drive before they would run? Even though most of the time the entire game was installed on your hard drive? It was an anti-piracy measure, but incredibly annoying. Even for games I owned, I would find patched no cd exes to avoid it.
Before I figured that out, if you lost or damaged your CD, you were just screwed. Buy the game again. My dad had a lot of character flaws, but at least when I was a kid he would take the time to call game companies and get a new CD for a few dollars if the disk stopped working.
Using Steam is incredibly more useful than what came before. Almost every game I owned in the era before Steam is just plain lost. There’s only one set of games I still have easy access to – Half Life, because you could register your CD key in Steam. I have a bin full of old game CDs, and I’m sure none of them work. But any game I’ve bought through Steam, in the last 20 years, I can click to download and play right now.
Add on to that that, no, lots of games did not actually work well out of the box, and needed updates to work. And you had to hunt down those updates. And a lot of those update sites do not exist anymore. Any game I install from Steam is the latest version of the game, and will auto-update if there’s a new one.
Do people forget that games used to require you to have the CD-ROM in the drive before they would run?
They weren’t always like that though. Don’t forget piracy didn’t start with the video game industry. It only started once it took off. CDs came later.
Source: person who remembers playing games off 8" floppies.
Edit to add: a game 20 years ago will only run because Windows says it’s ok. If it’s a linux-based game from 20 years ago, then it depends on a lot of other stuff. It’s not Steam that keeps them running. Steam just provides you a copy for the most part. GOG exists and doesn’t have the DRM that Steam allows. Does it have the same library? No. But we shouldn’t support DRM to begin with, so if it’s not on GOG, than I don’t trust the game itself.
I also played games off floppies, sure. And there were anti-piracy measures there too. I remember playing a pirated copy of Leisure Suit Larry as a kid, and you had to answer questions about pop culture kids wouldn’t know, followed by specific questions about wording in the manual. Before CDs, manuals were the anti-piracy measure.
I used to play Faery Tale Adventure on Amiga. The anti-piracy was code phrases around the edge of a paper map.
Hello fellow oldie :-)
All those young kids have never heard of the no-CD crack you think?
Only for noobs who didn’t rip the CD to an ISO and used that with a mounter 😎
Also updates were typically incremental to save bandwith. So not only do you need “the update”, you may need a cascade of updates you need to download and install, in order.
Somebody clearly doesn’t remember boot disks and configuring your soundblaster hardware interrupt number.
Going through .ini-files to find any bugs and manually change to get it to run is something I don’t miss with modern releases.
Or buying a game and realize your specific graphic accelerator isn’t supported in the dark ages before DirectX
I remember visiting my friend while he was in the middle of installing a game, and it failed on the 10th of 10 disks
- Open cracked games folder
- Find game
- Double click .exe
I know what you mean, but who are this “double click” and “exe” guys?
- Press
RUN/STOPandSHIFT. -
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
- Press
PLAYon tape. -
OK
SEARCHING
FOUND Ultimate Game II - Take walk with the dog.
- Play game.
Judging from your username, you must have had very old hardware when you were young.
Or … 99 has a more uncommon meaning for me 🤓
(in reality the hardware in question was brand new hottest stuff when I was young)
And when it’s loaded: ‘> You are standing at a crossroads, there are ways to the North, East, West and South. There is a Dwarf. The Dwarf throws an axe at you, the axe misses ‘>_
‘>Grab the axe
Ok, gramps it’s tile for your nap.
Datasette was so fricking slow…
Thanks for fastloader
Commodore 64?
Yes indeed. It would also work (at least similarly) for the VIC-20 and other Commodore computers 🧑🏫
- Press
Who here remembers inserting disk 4 of 12?
14 of 32… windows 3.11 on floppy was a beast.
That was more Windows 95 or NT but the point still stands. CDs were a massive leap in capacity.
3.11 had a floppy pack bundled with Office, it was freaking huge, something like 60 floppies. And they were those freaky 1.68MB floppies as well.
Fun fact: Those were still the exact same floppies that you would normally have formatted to 1.44MB, but Microsoft formatted the disk differently to allow 1.68MB. Works well for small numbers of large files, but not so great for general purpose storage.
Unreal Tournament 2004 was 7 CDs if I remember correctly. That’s the most I ever dealt with, and I would gladly insert 100 CDs if it meant we got games of that quality again.
Yes!! UT04 was phenomenal
I had it on one DVD The ways I spent modding the maps in the map editor ! Every time I listen to the Offspring again, like I did at that time, it takes me back to DM-Rankin and its creaky stairs
The steam ad window can be disabled in settings.
I leave it on just in case a game I never got to play goes 90% off.
You can wishlist games and they will email you when they go on sale.
Wishlisting all the games
TBH I open steam more often than my email. Probably not a good thing, in hindsight…
*never will play
Collecting is most of the fun
“What’s the seventh word on the fourteenth page of the manual?”
*Has lost the manual*
*Can’t play game ever again*
Had a hand written cheat sheet for X-wing which used 3 symbols per page for its copy protection.
Load game for 12 minutes
Select IRQ for sound: 7
MEEEP
Select IRQ for sound:
Game starts
No controller does absolutely nothing at all, keyboard included.
Helicopter flies over the tutorialish level getting flak
Almost dead starts level “1”
Gets shot down quickly.
Load game for 12 minutes
something changed
Pop up window minimizes game: do you want to allow this program to communicate on private and/or public networks?
The funnest part was when the popup didn’t minimize the game and you were wondering WHY THE FUCK MULTIPLAYER didn’t work until you gave up and saw the firewall window.
press more than one key
DO YOU WANT STICKY KEYS, BRO?!
Gotta add a few hours of fiddling with your AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS to free up memory to the “Gaming Then” column.
Luckily my brother took care of that part. I just had to remember:
d: cd games cd cannon [Space][Space][F3]To play Cannon Fodder.
You could’ve just typed
cd games\cannonto save a step.Note that only a few years earlier I was rebooting the computer whenever I got stuck in King’s Quest, which was a lot, since I didn’t understand english.
I don’t know which King’s Quest.
Install with GOG a single time. Be able to archieve old versions in case gameplay changes.
wine ./bin/x64/Cyberpunk2077.exeDone.
Don’t forget about:
#THIS GAME SUPPORTS AN AUTOSAVE FEATURE DON’T SHUTDOWN YOUR COMPUTER #🆗
I don’t know what time in the past you compare the present to, but my current PC boots quicker into Windows, starts up Steam, and launches a 70 Gigabyte game than a 286 could count its two Megabytes of RAM on POST.
To “double-click an .exe file” one had to manually launch DOSShell or Windows, because else one would have to traverse into the game’s directory (by heart). But launching a game via Windows would often leave the machine with too few resources to run the game.
Did I mention the constant reboots to switch RAM and driver configurations because not every game would just run? The hassle to setup sound cards? Having to have the game disks ready all the time?
And screwing around with irqs because some games were picky and expected your sound card to use a certain one. The were ruined when I had to decide between using a joystick or having sound.
