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

Kings Quest on a Tandy 2000 was amazing I never owned one but it was a cool game. The music and stillness of the game was Amazing it was like as slow paced Arcade quarter eater.
 
Axman said:
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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I feel I am really unclear, because you seem to fully agree.

You say a game like Civilization would never be made in 2020, because no financial backer would have the courage to do a risky project like that.

I am saying I am not sure, Civilization had a proven creator with an incredible track record behind it, and has we have seen with Death Stranding in 2020 that still mean a lot, if someone like Sid Meier's would be pushing a project like civilization in 2020 I could see it being made, specially that Sim City and others simulation was breaking records during that greenlight decision windows, pointing out that I am not sure if it is a good example of a difference between the 2 eras.
 
I'm saying that if you take away their legacy status, publishers wouldn't consider making many of these games today.

Just look at the trouble the developers of Agony went through. Now, imagine if it was part of the Phantasmagoria legacy, or even the Doom legacy, boom, instant green light.
 
Axman said:
I'm saying that if you take away their legacy status, publishers wouldn't consider making many of these games today.
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That true of all things and all time.

The conversation went through like this:

Back in the days game were better, because financier had less stake and were ready to take a chance on a game like civilisation.
- A project like civilisation if backed by the same level of people and in a genre that is having a buzz of the moment like when civ got greenlight could happen in the 2020 imo, look at Death Stranding a much harder sell than that and it happened.

How Civilisation when it was greenlight an example prove that financier were more risk willing in 1990, when they saw a prototype of civilisation and Sim City/Populous were just released to giant success ?
 
I played Wolfenstein in my dorm, back when no one used resnet.
Im old, I don’t like sbmm, abut I hate broken games shipped on a fart of influencers trying to excuse garbage $ grab.
My first experience with getting screwed was an Atari game called Yars Revenge in the early 80s
 
jarablue said:
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.
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I was 25 in 1993- which also marked my entry into PC gaming after a decade of 8 bit computer games. I finally figured out that console software wasn't cutting it for me. SNES was the last console system I owned. (The last SNES game was a very bad port of Wing Commander) The switch to PC was driven by the desire for one game alone.... X-Wing.

But I don't see the 90s as the golden age of PC gaming. It was a time before consoles swallowed up the gaming market, and game development was less monolithic and risk-averse than it is now. It allowed the subgenres to flourish and games were created that big studio bean-counters wouldn't risk a dime on now.

It wasn't that the games were better. It was because the developers were more free and there was more choice. Plus the devs were more dedicated to the single-player experience.
 
I was 5, playing some wizard game on the Commadore 64 where you had to put a donkey on a treadmill to open a door and then fight a scorpion. Never got passed the scorpion. Played lots of potty pigeon too... But a couple years later I was playing, Wolfenstien, then Doom, then Duke and even Blake Stone. Commander Keen too.

Now I still go back to Doom and Duke, And Keen as well.
 
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I'm as huge of a Sierra fan as any. I like the AGI Sierra games, though I'll pass on the PC Speaker. The SCI games where you finally had music with a Roland MT-32 (or Adlib, as I was too poor to afford an MT-32 at the time, but I have one now!) is probably my preferred era of video games.


But I don't think anyone can really claim there's a golden age of games. Part of what made those games fun is considered tedious by modern gamers. Some of what modern gamers love, I consider terrible. Games evolve, and you either need to evolve with them, or be left in the dust. It hurts, but I guess that's a sign of getting older; being pushed out of the way (often forcefully) for the next generation to take over.

The good news (so to speak in a revenge-esque mindset), is that it will happen to all of us sooner or later. Today's gamers will become jaded old people one day as they too are left aside for the next generation of gamers.
 
I don't think there was a golden age. The past always looks brighter that's just how the human psyche works. I put gaming on the back burner for a few years in the mid to late 2000s, but came back at it in 2010 with no less enthusiasm, to me it's still the golden age.
 
I was never into DOS gaming, but once 1998 came along (my first PC). I knew it was my platform to play on.

Those day's we're actually PC exclusives with those huge plastic and box cover cases.

My favorites we're Rainbow Six multiplayer (1998) then moved on to C.S. on HL1 engine and Raven Shield 2003 which was a big jump for just DX8.

DX9 was a totally different story at how fast PC gaming was shifting along. I had a hard time keeping up with GPU upgrades at that time (around 2006).
 
M76 said:
I don't think there was a golden age. The past always looks brighter that's just how the human psyche works. I put gaming on the back burner for a few years in the mid to late 2000s, but came back at it in 2010 with no less enthusiasm, to me it's still the golden age.
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I agree, and some of those "great games" from the past are... not as great when you play them today. They seemed cooler in part because you were younger. I remember how hard Final Fantasy 2 (FF4) seemed to me and my friends. We'd get together and play it and try to figure out how to deal with the bosses and their crazy mechanics. We were like 11-12 at the time. Well I replayed it years later in my 20s. Ya. So easy it was silly. Everything was well telegraphed, the game explained everything to you, it was just as a bunch of kids, we were too dumb to pick up on it.

Likewise while those Sierra games were neat, all of their play length came from not knowing what was going on and trying to figure out the often completely illogical things to do to progress. Once you know the answer to the puzzles, there's zero replay value and many of them it isn't a case of logic-ing your way through, it is a case of just trying random shit until something works because the solution is totally illogical.
 
Sycraft said:
I agree, and some of those "great games" from the past are... not as great when you play them today. They seemed cooler in part because you were younger. I remember how hard Final Fantasy 2 (FF4) seemed to me and my friends. We'd get together and play it and try to figure out how to deal with the bosses and their crazy mechanics. We were like 11-12 at the time. Well I replayed it years later in my 20s. Ya. So easy it was silly. Everything was well telegraphed, the game explained everything to you, it was just as a bunch of kids, we were too dumb to pick up on it.

Likewise while those Sierra games were neat, all of their play length came from not knowing what was going on and trying to figure out the often completely illogical things to do to progress. Once you know the answer to the puzzles, there's zero replay value and many of them it isn't a case of logic-ing your way through, it is a case of just trying random shit until something works because the solution is totally illogical.
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I've had the same experience. Very few of the old games hold up today, and the ones that seemed extremely hard back then look like child's play now. We were just a bunch of dumb kids looking at shiny things, and that made us happy. I mean we used to play with discarded car tyres, anything was a step up from there.
 
Sycraft said:
Likewise while those Sierra games were neat, all of their play length came from not knowing what was going on and trying to figure out the often completely illogical things to do to progress. Once you know the answer to the puzzles, there's zero replay value and many of them it isn't a case of logic-ing your way through, it is a case of just trying random shit until something works because the solution is totally illogical.
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This depends on if you're talking about the point and click Sierra games or the text parser ones. Point and click games really ruined adventure games for me, because the moon logic puzzles shot up dramatically, and the interactivity plummeted. And you'll see this in more games than just Sierra. Even LucasArts, which got rid of red herrings and deaths, which most adventure games follow now, follow your assessment that all you need to do is try every item on every object. And modern adventure games are even worse in that you now have hotspots, rather than every pixel on the screen which could be representative of something.

With text adventures (now known as interactive fiction), you don't have that problem. The difficulty comes into play of trying to think of what you want to do. And the games are more interactive, because you can do more than just look and use on things.
 
Nytegard said:
With text adventures (now known as interactive fiction), you don't have that problem. The difficulty comes into play of trying to think of what you want to do. And the games are more interactive, because you can do more than just look and use on things.
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I mean yes and no. There are some good ones from the old days but some really convoluted ones too. Even some of the all time greats are pretty illogical when you look at it. I got one of the students in to Zork and it was funny watching just how fucked up some of those puzzles are when you don't know the answers. Also if you pop open the code for them (many are now open source, or written in a script language that can be decompiled) you often find there was a lot less freedom than they pretended and pretty much just one way to do things.

Not hating on them or anything, just saying that old games are often not as amazing as our rose coloured glasses give them credit for. There have been real improvements made in gaming. A simple example for more action/skill oriented games is lives. It was a shit system that came from the arcades. There you had to have some kind of limit to get people to feed in more quarters. However at home it made no sense. You played the game, lost all you lives, and then you were done. Couldn't feed it a quarter, just restart the whole damn thing. We finally worked out that was silly and have better ways of providing a system where you have to succeed to move forward, you can't brute force it, but also not just an arbitrary "Oops you are done restart now!" mechanism.
 
Sycraft said:
Not hating on them or anything, just saying that old games are often not as amazing as our rose coloured glasses give them credit for.
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I loathed the FMV craze in 90s computer games. Videocutscenes out the ass in every game from 1991-1998.

There are a few notable moments when FMV was awesome as a story tool (Mechwarrior 2's intro, I-War's 18 minute opening scene, Interstate 76's "TV episode" style) But the rest was rubbish with low-scale acting talent that makes me cringe when I watch it now (C&C, Wing Commander 3, AVP)
 
MW2 was awesome. I remember playing Wolfenstein in college and loading Doom off of a handful of floppies. Good times.

There are a few good new games - but a lot of it seems like been there done that stuff. Most of us old farts got to see developers just try stuff - and there wasn't the malarkey of focus groups and marketing plans with forced delivery dates...

Still, I enjoyed watching the new tech grow exponentially from year to year. Remember when moving grass and running water was amazing? Also the creativity and 'new' of Tomb Raider and its multi level puzzles was fun.

I've spent money on a few dogs in that time. Black&White being the one I hated the most - but the C&C sequals were bad, too. Original COD = great, new CODs? Can't be bothered. I really hate what that series has become.

Yet the recent Tomb Raider was also great and cinematic. Several other titles from the last few years have been great as well.

But it is the fact that PC now plays second fiddle to consoles that bugs me. Console games used to be just for Madden or Mario - while PC games were the top of the line.

Nowadays we have to wait for the port, or see games made for concurrent release - meaning the deficiencies of controllers is baked into the game.
 
SamuelL421 said:
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.
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The best MW game ever that!
 
Saturn_V said:
I loathed the FMV craze in 90s computer games. Videocutscenes out the ass in every game from 1991-1998.
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Yeah but it was all we got. And Wing Commander was so great people are still lining up to pay for it again.

And again.

And the same one again...
 
93' would have been playing X-Wing. 94' probably NBA Live. Mostly though, I would have been partying and chasing tail in grad school and not playing much games.
 



The music is what i'll remember the most from back then. Stuff today just isn't as memorable IMO.

Blew everyone away at the time that this was done all in software, no sound tables.

 
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Mchart said:
The music is what i'll remember the most from back then. Stuff today just isn't as memorable IMO.

Blew everyone away at the time that this was done all in software, no sound tables.
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I disagree. While I *love* old game music, to the point that I redo the track using modern instruments in Cubase, there is great music in new games too. Hitman 2 Silent Assassins' soundtrack is great in total, but the opening piece (just called Main Title) is a masterpiece. Mass Effect's soundtrack is iconic to it. Doom 2016 has some positively amazing pieces. Also some games have music so good that it isn't that you notice, but that you don't. They are scored so well that they blend in to the scene. They are maybe not as fun to listen to standalone, but they are amazing in game. The Last of Us and Skyrim are two more recent ones that come to mind like that.

Also just FYI all that music is wave tables that you linked. Descent and System Shock are MIDI, and the copies you linked are played back by Roland SoundCanvas hardware, which is a bunch of wave tables as the sound generator (with other things like oscillators to modify it). Crusader is basically a slightly custom version of Screamtracker 3 modules, which descend from Amiga MODs. While being mixed in software, it is a set of PCM audio data and then the relevant playback information. Basically MIDI but with the samples included. All of the sound is sample based though, it isn't software synthesis.
 
Sycraft said:
I disagree. While I *love* old game music, to the point that I redo the track using modern instruments in Cubase, there is great music in new games too. Hitman 2 Silent Assassins' soundtrack is great in total, but the opening piece (just called Main Title) is a masterpiece. Mass Effect's soundtrack is iconic to it. Doom 2016 has some positively amazing pieces. Also some games have music so good that it isn't that you notice, but that you don't. They are scored so well that they blend in to the scene. They are maybe not as fun to listen to standalone, but they are amazing in game. The Last of Us and Skyrim are two more recent ones that come to mind like that.

Also just FYI all that music is wave tables that you linked. Descent and System Shock are MIDI, and the copies you linked are played back by Roland SoundCanvas hardware, which is a bunch of wave tables as the sound generator (with other things like oscillators to modify it). Crusader is basically a slightly custom version of Screamtracker 3 modules, which descend from Amiga MODs. While being mixed in software, it is a set of PCM audio data and then the relevant playback information. Basically MIDI but with the samples included. All of the sound is sample based though, it isn't software synthesis.
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I'm well aware what I linked wasn't what almost all of us actually heard back in the day, but the point is that most of the old stuff when listened on Roland hardware sounds great.

Only somewhat modern game I thought had a really standout soundtrack was Mass Effect as you mentioned. There isn't much else that sticks in my head. Yes, the music in Doom was great, but I can't recall it at all. Same goes with Skyrim. Great all-around atmospheric music, but I don't recall any.
 
I think its more than nostalgia for some titles. The Mechwarrior franchise for one has not had any real justice in a long time, Mechwarrior 2 still holds up fairly well.

The Crescent Hawks, MegaTraveller, Star Control 2, Starflight 1/2, Warlords, Colonization, Civ 2/3, Dune, Dues Ex, Heavy Gear, Mission Force Cyber Storm, all hold up well.

The reality is we are looking back at decades of gaming and picking out the highlights and ignoring the mass of garbage. There are more recent highlights too, once you look past the stream of Ubisoft like rehashes.
 
In 1993 I was a machinist building race engines and about to go industrial diesel for better pay and benefits. I know this is PC thread but to me golden age was arcade machines back in the 70s. Can I have my dump truck full of quarters back? :LOL: Remember first seeing a Pong machine at Pizza Hut. "I can control something on the screen? Modern technology is awesome!" .... Tempest was my game. Which centered around that infinite spinning optical sensor knob. Only PC game I have found close is N2O Nitrous Oxide. Glad it's on Steam. Love to see a modern reboot of that one.

Got my first PC late 1998. A pre-built Dell. And first game was Quake 2. Gaming friends had to see for themselves how my STB TNT performed since like many they were under impression a 3dfx card was mandatory for 3D graphics. We all know how that went.
 
I don't know man. I just had really positive memories. Warlords II was the best game. And the sound, when I first heard it from that game on a sound card from 93, was literally unreal. Awesome shit to me. I'll never forget any of it.
 
Mchart said:
I'm well aware what I linked wasn't what almost all of us actually heard back in the day, but the point is that most of the old stuff when listened on Roland hardware sounds great.

Only somewhat modern game I thought had a really standout soundtrack was Mass Effect as you mentioned. There isn't much else that sticks in my head. Yes, the music in Doom was great, but I can't recall it at all. Same goes with Skyrim. Great all-around atmospheric music, but I don't recall any.
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Sometimes that is actually the very best music. When music is real good, you notice it. But when it is great, you often don't. The original Star Wars is like that. Have a listen to the soundtrack sometime. There will be set pieces you remember, like the opening sequence, the Imperial March, etc. But you'll have a bunch that you think "Where was that from?" The reason is that it so perfectly blended in to the scene and supported the visuals and dialogue so well you just didn't notice it.

Oh and just another modern piece that occurred to me that is an all time great is Baba Yetu from CIV4. :D
 
Saturn_V said:
I loathed the FMV craze in 90s computer games. Videocutscenes out the ass in every game from 1991-1998.

There are a few notable moments when FMV was awesome as a story tool (Mechwarrior 2's intro, I-War's 18 minute opening scene, Interstate 76's "TV episode" style) But the rest was rubbish with low-scale acting talent that makes me cringe when I watch it now (C&C, Wing Commander 3, AVP)
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I for one loved the FMVs, they had some unique charm to them. I still re-watch cutscenes from Wing Commander 3 and 4 from time to time.
And seeing FMV on a computer on a 486 no less blew my mind away back then. Until then gaming and reality were two separate words, that's when I realized that games can be immersive.
 
LukeTbk said:
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 ?


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.
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I think you're only getting part of the point. Yes, some of those games if pushed by someone influential could have their start today rather than way back when. However, that is almost a requirement for something new or possibly risky now. It was practically the norm back then, though.

It wasn't just new types of games coming out but simply new and different stories or simply different twists on conventional games. Look at the FPS market back then. There were tons of new FPSes coming out regularly and most of them had their own twist or way they handled mechanics. We don't get that anymore. Most are simply sequels and all too often clones of a previous game. Quake games were not CS were not Unreal were not RTCW/Wolfenstein:ET and so on. They were all FPS games but they also tended to be quite different from each other and each had a style which appealed to different people. I wasn't a Quake fan and never got into CS or Unreal but I played the holy living hell out of RTCW and Wolf:ET with regards to multiplayer.
 
Nytegard said:
This depends on if you're talking about the point and click Sierra games or the text parser ones. Point and click games really ruined adventure games for me, because the moon logic puzzles shot up dramatically, and the interactivity plummeted. And you'll see this in more games than just Sierra. Even LucasArts, which got rid of red herrings and deaths, which most adventure games follow now, follow your assessment that all you need to do is try every item on every object. And modern adventure games are even worse in that you now have hotspots, rather than every pixel on the screen which could be representative of something.
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Ah, you're not wrong, but those Sierra and LucasArts adventures had other qualities that made them the timeless classics. I still replay them every few years.

Sycraft said:
Likewise while those Sierra games were neat, all of their play length came from not knowing what was going on and trying to figure out the often completely illogical things to do to progress. Once you know the answer to the puzzles, there's zero replay value and many of them it isn't a case of logic-ing your way through, it is a case of just trying random shit until something works because the solution is totally illogical.
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You are right about the common problem with the puzzles, but not on replayability. Take Sierra's Gabriel Knight trilogy. It has a great and immersive story that awards revisits after some years have passed. Like rereading a great book once it fades a little from memory.
 
Best times:

amigamainimage-1-620x349.jpg
 
Good subject. It's an individule thing. Will someone playing PC games first time right now feel 2020 was golden age in year 2047 when Holographic gaming is the norm? Good chance. Hope I am there to see it.

Axman said:
Check out Dyad, and if you haven't already played it, Rez.
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Thank you. I remember when that came out and just put it on my wishlist. Think I have checked out near every tube shooter and version of Tempest in existence. Some better then others. None are the same without the aforementioned knob. Like playing a FPS with d-pad instead of mouse.
 
jarablue said:
Diablo 2 was awesome in 2000. Played the shit out of it.
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Yeah I picked up D2 and Icewind Dale on the same day when they came out. I played so much of both of them that week, that all the clicking took its toll and I had to rest my hand for a couple days.
 
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