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.
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.
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.
wasnt there a XCOM knockoff game that deleted your tire C drive if you uninstalled it?
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.
Somebody clearly doesn’t remember boot disks and configuring your soundblaster hardware interrupt number.
I remember visiting my friend while he was in the middle of installing a game, and it failed on the 10th of 10 disks
