Golden age of PC gaming...I was 18 in 1993

jarablue

[H]ard|Gawd
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I think the reason I don't like any recent PC game may just be the fact that I played really good games from back in the 90s....or I am just old but I don't think that's it...or maybe.

Sierra adventure games, in my youth, were really fun. Wonder and magic was in me back then. I don't think that exists anymore in society and the industry like it did in the early, mid 90s. I mean even tinkering with pcs in the 90s was awesome. I remember when cd-rom drives came out and were ridiculously expensive. I also remember when I heard sound for the first time on a pc. Roland midi synths and shit. It really was a golden age of gaming and the industry. I guess that can be said about any evolution of something.

But really, does anyone remember the magic of games back like before 2005? 24 in 1999 I played the shit out of UT on dialup. Even back in 1993 I had a 2400 baud modem and I would download porn from BBS sites. I went with my friend to actually buy the hacker handbook on cd back then for the pc. One big text file. In those days they had store explicitly for pc software and games. Oh man, getting teary eyed.
 
I was 14 at that time in 1993. I also did a lot of BBS but had friends hard in the warez scene. I would go spend the night and bring tons of 3.5 disks. They had a 100MB tape drive and games that were not even out yet some by as far as 6 months or so. I would spend all night ripping the disks off that tape drive and go home with several new games each time.
 
3D games slowed down creativity and wrecked the the flow for developers. 3D games died in like 2011. Once devs started adding textures to cover stuff up you could see the 3D modeling that made that made the game intresting in the first place. You have all these low poly games coming out but they all look amature because the craft to make the game looks visually weak. Ashen with no faces comes to mind still a solid game but its loosely defined. Everyone is trying to be the next Fortnite.

You gotta keep in mind games=kids so my 45 year old opinion doesn't really matter. The industry feeds off of youth and the next PS5 XBOX.
 
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I do think this forum has quite a high population of older gamers, especially the "back in my day, i blindly hate everything new" type. Hell I was 7 in 93. Though, the earliest game I can remember playing was Star Wars: Dark Forces on our family Mac.
 
I remember being pretty indifferent to PC games back in the late 80's and 90's. They were much better at adventure titles (and later CD-Rom "multimedia" titles), but everything felt pretty janky and unpolished compared to what was on the consoles at the time. The games felt like a hobbyist's weekend project instead of a "real" game with Nintendo or Sega's logo on the box. That didn't really change much until the Doom era IMO. That's when I really got interested in PC gaming (high school in my case). Still, there was a lot of jank back then, too. At the same time, I'll never forget my first time seeing GLQuake.
 
Quake Slipgate was the best because it was Raw. One of the 1st Frag games.
 
westwoodstudios.png

RIP
 
The countless hours I spent playing Duke Nukem 3D in the 90's, followed by UT99. Oh those were the days. Not to mention, am I the only one who fondly remembers overclocking with DIP switches and jumpers? Also, I remember in 93? when we upgraded from out 286 AT clone to a Canon InnovaMedia 486 DX4 100 Mhz with a SoundBlaster 16, 16 MB of RAM, and a 4x CD-Rom. My 9 year old mind was blown. I also remember going to my friends houses, playing Goldeneye, and thinking this sucks compared to Quake and D3D.
 
The countless hours I spent playing Duke Nukem 3D in the 90's, followed by UT99. Oh those were the days. Not to mention, am I the only one who fondly remembers overclocking with DIP switches and jumpers? Also, I remember in 93? when we upgraded from out 286 AT clone to a Canon InnovaMedia 486 DX4 100 Mhz with a SoundBlaster 16, 16 MB of RAM, and a 4x CD-Rom. My 9 year old mind was blown. I also remember going to my friends houses, playing Goldeneye, and thinking this sucks compared to Quake and D3D.
I remember getting my first card for Half Life. I legit played it off the MoBo until my buddy recommended I get a card. VooDoo something or other. I was blown away. I was no longer playing frame by frame. XD
 
Sierra adventure games, in my youth, were really fun. Wonder and magic was in me back then. I don't think that exists anymore in society and the industry like it did in the early, mid 90s. I mean even tinkering with pcs in the 90s was awesome. I remember when cd-rom drives came out and were ridiculously expensive. I also remember when I heard sound for the first time on a pc. Roland midi synths and shit. It really was a golden age of gaming and the industry. I guess that can be said about any evolution of something.

There is a sense of wonder that can be hard to replicate, the first sound I heard coming out of a sound blaster 16 was the big gong song followed by Fight in mortal kombat I think:
https://www.pond5.com/sound-effects/item/43967862-huge-gong-hit-sustain

Or the first time you heard voice or the background in the first doom that looked like pictures, the first time you saw 3d graphic at high resolution with a voodoo video card.

But I think the first time you do VR today has easily that wonder moment.

I think the reason I don't like any recent PC game may just be the fact that I played really good games from back in the 90s....or I am just old but I don't think that's it...or maybe.
One way to try is to get gog installed and try old games that you didn't had a chance to play when you were young, I suspect there will be a quick; hum I do not enjoy them more than new game either, could be wrong but that would be my guess. Some got remaster edition like Full Throttle, Day of the tentacle, try a similar click and point with magic game but a recent one like The wolf among us and I think you will prefer that one to the older one.

And in a very different way than rewatching Casablanca/Gone with the wind/sunset boulevard, where I would be way more confident on the chance of someone preferring them to new movies by someone telling a similar story but about movies.
 
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I do think this forum has quite a high population of older gamers, especially the "back in my day, i blindly hate everything new" type. Hell I was 7 in 93. Though, the earliest game I can remember playing was Star Wars: Dark Forces on our family Mac.
I agree most of us are of that crowd. I was in my teens in 93. And I have the same memories as OP. And I always want to relate again and enjoy this stuff like I used to. I still keep up on hardware and still come here mostly because I like the hater and the same ol names posting.
 
Games are fine nowadays. There is something for every one out there.
This, has the bigger game budget exploded maybe there is an argument about getting safer (not sure how true it really is, has once you get a name for yourself game not pre-sales impressive amount even before anyone played them, opening door to taking immense risk if you want), game were already sequel heavy in the Sierra adventure days, with the police quest 3/larry suit 6/heroes quest 3/King Quest 5 and really genre bound.

It must be quite having been compensated by the explosion of the indie genre and even the solo made game like Banished, we have a game offer that goes from the Paper Please to Cyberpunk.

Historically technology drove what game looked like, first game were reading text and typing command heavy, on console they were scroller heavy. Than with, mouse getting popular and image getting better point and click became popular (breaking PC gaming and making everything brainless and easy according to many back in the days and maybe they were right), CD-Rom made you are the hero book but with video game popular, everything got 3D (even when 2D was better for that genre) with the apparition of 3d card and Nintendo 64, we are finally close to a day for the decision to be more artistic/imagination/creativity driven than what does the machine are made for in mind driven, almost totally free of the technical limitation.
 
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Lot of people here seem to stick to the big budget releases, and yes those have stagnated.

Indie games have absolutely not, yes there is a lot of chaff, but there is absolutely multiple
things for most genres to scratch any itch
 
I was 12 in 93. First PC game I ever played was X-Wing & Carmen Sandiego. My neighbor's dad let us play on his computer. X-Wing blew my mind. I guess it was around 93-94. It wasn't until around 5 years later, after I had gotten my first job that I got my own PC an AMD K62 300mhz. Built it myself and played the hell out of Unreal Tournament, Quake and of course X-Wing.
 
In '93 we had a weak 386 DOS system that was just about good enough for lucasarts games. In '95/96 my family got an Pentium MMX / S3 Virge system and I got Mechwarrior 2. First full 3d game I owned and such a night and day difference compared to anything else I had experienced to that point - ruined me for game consoles for years.
 
The countless hours I spent playing Duke Nukem 3D in the 90's, followed by UT99. Oh those were the days. Not to mention, am I the only one who fondly remembers overclocking with DIP switches and jumpers? Also, I remember in 93? when we upgraded from out 286 AT clone to a Canon InnovaMedia 486 DX4 100 Mhz with a SoundBlaster 16, 16 MB of RAM, and a 4x CD-Rom. My 9 year old mind was blown. I also remember going to my friends houses, playing Goldeneye, and thinking this sucks compared to Quake and D3D.

Duke 3d plus kali in dos, plus cases ladder. My early high school years.
 
Interesting point about Goldeneye. I was also super underwhelmed by it after years of playing PC FPS games. I get that it was way more convenient, but as a game I always felt it was pretty weak. Plus, like most competitive N64 titles it required a shitload of "house rules" to stay fun.
 
I was 36 in 93, played everything before and after. For me the golden age of pc gaming is now. I can fire up several games and co-opt with my 88 year old father. He is the geritol version of Moxsy with all his builds in Borderlands.
 
Interesting point about Goldeneye. I was also super underwhelmed by it after years of playing PC FPS games. I get that it was way more convenient, but as a game I always felt it was pretty weak. Plus, like most competitive N64 titles it required a shitload of "house rules" to stay fun.

Goldeneye's charm is entirely the couch multiplayer.
 
Thief, Dues Ex, System Shock 2, Independence War 2, Freespace 2, Janes F/A-18, and Red Alert 2 were the first computer games I played, back in 2000. Those set a very high bar indeed and were still to this day the most fun I have had gaming. Disco Elysium is the most memorable recent game I have played in ages, more for the intelligence and creativity of it than the actual gameplayk, and Subnautica for how fantastic the exploration is.
 
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I was 10 in 1993.

First games played on PC (not counting educational games played on school Apple II's): Wolf3D, DooM, D&D Dark Sun - variety of shareware games picked up at my local retail stores. I remember my grandfather taking me to a computer expo and being blown away by CD-Rom visuals/audio (though it would've all been FMV crap at the time).
 
You people are just a bunch of bitter old farts. Games are fine nowadays.
Nah, more than half of the big new titles are sequels, prequels, remakes, and spin-offs of the great games from, say, 1985 through 2005. They were crude from gameplay perspectives, graphics, all that, but they took risks that no publisher has the stones (not to mention, financial liabilities) to really follow through with better at-core games made today.

You could literally not make Mortal Kombat today if not for the fact that it already exists. That's true for Super Mario, Final Fantasy, Counter-Strike, Civilization, Grand Theft Auto, and so many others. Oregon Trail, even.

These games were all risky passion projects.
 
I'd argue that while the classics from the 90's are great, games peaked somewhere around 2011 in my opinion. That was the point where the visuals were good enough to be convincing, story telling was phenomenal, game mechanics reached a point where a lot of the old annoyances were resolved, and we still saw some new ideas cropping up. Now it seems like we are just kicking the can down the road. We don't get titles like Mass Effect, Dead Space, Beyond Good and Evil, Bioshock, etc anymore. Now it's all multiplayer and microtransaction riddled garbage. Occasionally we get standouts like Doom 2016 and Eternal, Control, and others, but by and large everything is just repackaging of the same ideas.

In the last year or so I got into retro collecting, and I've been playing older titles I've either played before, or played games I missed. For example, I recently played Jade Empire for Xbox for the first time, because at that time all I really played was shooters. Going back and playing these old games I've come to realize some of the classics that I just blew off back in the day. The biggest problem that I've found with going back and playing older games is the technically unrefined nature of a lot of them. We've become spoiled by autosaving and other niceties, that now I find it a hassle to save scum, which is something I used to do all the time without even thinking about it.
 
My favorite games where actually 80's and eart 90's dos titles, Cyber Empire, Warlords, Megatraveller, fallout 1/2, Wasteland, some of the old Sierra titles, Dune, mechwarrior, crescent hawks 1/2, etc. It was an age where games tried new things and delt with technical limitations in interesting ways. Today it just seems everything is thrown into looks and then multiplayer, AI is largely garbage in everything, and increasing difficulty just means giving them larger health bars and more dps.
 
Although, realistically, there never was a *Fallout* 3. Unless you count Fallout Tactics.

Just goes to show how hard it is even to take an edgy game and make it modern. Turn it into an Elder Scrolls total conversion, which wouldn't have been possible without TES in the first place...

Could you imagine trying to pitch Myst to a publisher today?

"Our game is the prologue to a book, which we haven't written, about books, that, uh...my brother...also there definitely can't be music, either that, or we'll put together some groundbreaking soundtracks down the line. It all really depends on the speed of the next generation storage. Which doesn't exist."

Wait, that actually might work. How did the CP2077 pitch go?
 
Nah, more than half of the big new titles are sequels, prequels, remakes, and spin-offs of the great games from, say, 1985 through 2005. They were crude from gameplay perspectives, graphics, all that, but they took risks that no publisher has the stones (not to mention, financial liabilities) to really follow through with better at-core games made today.

You could literally not make Mortal Kombat today if not for the fact that it already exists. That's true for Super Mario, Final Fantasy, Counter-Strike, Civilization, Grand Theft Auto, and so many others. Oregon Trail, even.
Not sure how true it is, take a game like Civilization having a Sid Meier's type behind a project open the door (especially after big success of many not that dissimilar title), or any of those title more risky than say Death Stranding a giant budget walk simulator.

What special about counter-strike ? FPS was pretty much the most popular genre of the lates 90s or Final Fantasy (greenlight after Dragon Quest proved without doubt the commercial interest for such a game and took the most conventional has possible creative decision all around) ?
 
Not sure how true it is, take a game like Civilization having a Sid Meier's type behind a project open the door (especially after big success of many not that dissimilar title), or any of those title more risky than say Death Stranding a giant budget walk simulator.

That's my point: these games exist because of the legacies they represent. Civ exists because of Sid Meier. Death Stranding exists because of Hideo Kojima.

You think a company would touch Counter-Strike today? Play as a team of radical terrorists? Worse yet, a team of paramilitary police forces?

JRPGs only exist because of early D&D games, and what they paved. You would be hard-pressed to make a Planescape tabletop game today, let alone a video game, if not for momentum already in place in gaming history.

Publishers today have too much to worry about. They can't go out on any limbs, unless there's nostalgia or history involved. And a lot of the games they do make with any edge are safe versions of older establishments.
 
You think a company would touch Counter-Strike today? Play as a team of radical terrorists? Worse yet, a team of paramilitary police forces?
Post 2001 maybe that it would have been set in a different setting (would that be important ?), but with how popular capture the flag type of shooting online match was around that time an Half life mod around it to play those, is that a particularly big risk ?

Civ exists because of Sid Meier. Death Stranding exists because of Hideo Kojima.
I thought that was my point, how is it different now versus back then ? The debate was that a risk like Civ could not be made today, I responded if someone powerful are behind a game, following not too dissimilar success (railway tycoon/sim city/etc... just before civ), I feel like it could happen today, has it did with Death Stranding.
 
In '93 we had a weak 386 DOS system that was just about good enough for lucasarts games. In '95/96 my family got an Pentium MMX / S3 Virge system and I got Mechwarrior 2. First full 3d game I owned and such a night and day difference compared to anything else I had experienced to that point - ruined me for game consoles for years.

Seconded. Mechwarrior 2 in 1995 was the game that really pulled me into PC gaming and modding. Played it on a friends machine right after it released, then immediately ran out and bought a P90/ATI Rage machine just to play that game. Prior to that I just dinked around with PCs and played a game here and there.
 
Uh mate, HR is the original. They made MD later, that's the sequel.
edit: nvm, found it. Wow that is old!!


lol the sequel wasnt that great, i did manage to finish it once.

the og deus ex is imo one of the top 10 games of all time.
 
but with how popular capture the flag type of shooting online match was around that time an Half life mod around it to play those, is that a particularly big risk ?
Sorta. Look at the difference between Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. One's a serious game with a lot of interest, the other was a fun sideshow.

The debate was that a risk like Civ could not be made today, I responded if someone powerful are behind a game
And that would absolutely happen, but it wouldn't be Civ, or Myst, or the Oregon Trail. It would only be Tom Clancy or Madden.

To be honest, Madden almost failed, and even games like the Lego franchise were on death's door, well before they were video games.
 
And that would absolutely happen, but it wouldn't be Civ, or Myst, or the Oregon Trail. It would only be Tom Clancy or Madden.
I am not sure why Death Stranding wasn't the perfect analogue example, of a powerful video game maker putting is weight behind an thought sell project (if Civilization really was specially a thought sell when it got greenlight, I am not sure I see why it was particularly risky), I would put Death Stranding way above Civ 1 in hard pitch.
 
Because both of these guys are proven creators. If they were new people, and their previous games didn't exist, they couldn't get the backing they do to make new games.
 
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