Gaming Then vs Gaming Now

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.
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  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.
- 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.
- God damn I completely forgot about multi disc installs! That was the pits.

- "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?
- 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.

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.
  
  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/STOP and SHIFT.
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE
Press PLAY on 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)
- Ok, gramps it's tile for your nap.
- Commodore 64?
  
  Yes indeed. It would also work (at least similarly) for the VIC-20 and other Commodore computers 🧑‍🏫
- Datasette was so fricking slow...
  Thanks for fastloader

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.
  
  *never will play
  Collecting is most of the fun

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.
- 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

- "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?!

Install with GOG a single time. Be able to archieve old versions in case gameplay changes.
wine ./bin/x64/Cyberpunk2077.exe
Done.

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\cannon to save a step.

Don't forget about:
#THIS GAME SUPPORTS AN AUTOSAVE FEATURE DON'T SHUTDOWN YOUR COMPUTER #🆗

Depends on the game, factorio is available both on steam and as a direct download (in fact, devs recommend purchasing on their site and transferring to steam if you want) and you can just click the factorio executable to start the game. Now KSP2? That's the second thing by far
- Factorio is the shining example of doing things right in the gaming industry, IMHO.
  
  Dyson Sphere Program as well. Though this whole Unity thing may fuck that up

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.

Legitimately why I still pirate some games that I purchase through Steam.
The pirated copy runs better 95% of the time, and people can't even argue that you're meaningfully stealing because you already own access to the same exact game.

The enshitification of everything.

EULA bullshit
uninstall
reinstall
uninstall
reinstall
uninstall
reinstall
uninstall
reinstall
uninstall
reinstall
uninstall
refund
😬

To be fair, the vendor intro 1-2-3 taking a while has been a problem since PS1 era. With the PS2 came an extra serving of infinite cutscenes
- You cannot tell me that the opening/title cutscene of Chrono Cross is anything less than a legendary example of a proper opening sequence both visually and musically.
  https://youtu.be/180sjeAMKPE?si=xRFXcywMYCQo7TyR
  https://youtu.be/PZ595N9NZVg?si=T76rJ3M3tGO1zUu8
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://youtu.be/180sjeAMKPE?si=xRFXcywMYCQo7TyR
  https://youtu.be/PZ595N9NZVg?si=T76rJ3M3tGO1zUu8
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
- Agreed, it has been around way before that. The Apogee intro is still engrained in my brain.

Itch.io is pretty straightforward. Download .exe and play.
- Same with gog except it needs installation

Ya'll motherfuckers are forgetting the days when you had to have a fucking paper-slot decoder thing or read word 3 on page 50 of the manual to start your game.

Vulcan Shaders have stepped into the ring

TBF it used to take a really long time with multiple disks to install literally anything.
- You guys were installing things?
  I used to load my games from scratch. Every time. From tape.
  
  From tape? Amateur. Why doesn't anyone key in the code for games that were printed in magazines anymore?
- Diablo 2 was like 3 different discs. One for every 2 acts i believe.
  
  It was a "Game Disc" and a "Video Disc". You could choose to copy the Videos during install or you would have to physically swap discs when you got to a rendered cutscene (which was only between acts, but still).

pirated games don't have this issue. been doubleclickjng exe files for all my games

This is why I just went back to playing Red Alert 2. My install from 2001 still works.

I hate this, above Steam client is slow as hell (GOG isn't much better). But you can hack it in most games to start the game clicking in the Icon. Look at the properties of the games in the folder, there is usually a game launcher, it is this one whose icon appears when this game is installed, it is this one that launches Steam (or GOG), but apart from that there is usually the original executable (look also in the subfolders, mostly in bin) which directly launches the game without Steam or GOG.
- If your steam client is slow. Try disabling hardware acceleration. Worked wonders for me. Steam went from being slow to super responsive.
  
  Maybe, but anyway I use it only to install the Game, but not to play it. All this shit when launching a game, with all the Steam loads makes me sick, plus it stays resident after finishing the game, having to close it separately, uselessly spending RAM on my poor Laptop which is not very bulky in this sense either.

I dunno about all this, I just play games from Atari, NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, Playstation, etc. Maybe I'm simple but I'm also having fun :P
- Yeah, I went console when I realised I wanted to spend time actually playing the game.
  Sure I'm missing out on the absolute highest settings, mods, etc.
  However, I spend 55 minutes out of an hour actually playing the game.

missed the bit about windows forcing an update and reboot, then crashing to an irreparable state, forcing a reinstall of the whole os and games that were installed.

Hate this bullshit so much.

well at least I don't have to keep the CD in the CD Drive to actually play the game now

Half of that never happens to me tbh and the vendor intros were mostly a thing in 2010ish games (for me).
But something that is not on the list and I hate is if steam just starts another game launcher where you have to click something (like Witcher 3 or cities skylines).

Some of my favorite games from back in the day had a half dozen vendor intros. There were a few years where they were completely out of hand. It's not all so bad these days.

Made by someone who wasn't around back then. Getting games to run was just as if not more tedious than it is now.

I hate that this is so accurate
- It's nowhere near accurate. This guy clearly never played wingco 3 with it's 15 minute intro.
  This guy clearly also had never played mechwarrior 3. A game by microprose no wait fasa interactive no wait microsoft no wait some other investment party.
  This guy clearly also never fucked around with EMS or XMS.
  This guy also never lived in the pre windows era. (clicking on an exe, come on people.)
  Reality was:
  Installing a game was an afternoon. Ever swapped 14 floppy disks? Then came cdrom which made it better (double speed master race @300 KB/sec! Yes! Now it only took an hour!
  Then
  D: CD\GAMES\GAME (enter)
  GAME.EXE (enter)
  this game needs 605 KB free base ram. You have 585 KB. Please free up ram and try again
  (muck around with qemm386 and if you where poor emm386) Reboot, reboot, reboot.
  CD\GAMES\GAME (enter)
  GAME.EXE (enter)
  Crash.
  Reset.
  CD\GAMES\GAME (enter)
  Config.exe (enter)
  Scroll with arrow buttons to sound Config. Check. You can't remember the dipswitches you set on your soundblaster pro. Open the cabinet, remove the card. Look at the dipswitches on it. you see now you set the dipswitch to irq 5 instead of 7. Fuck, that's it. You also make a mental note of the dma channel and the memory address. Fuck that, you couldn't remember it last time so you write it down. Irq5, dma 1, 220h.
  Reinsert to the ISA slot, close cabinet. Reboot. Fuck. No sound from the cdrom. Guess you knocked that flimsy cable loose again. Fuck it, this game fortunately has no cd audio.
  CD\GAMES\GAME (enter)
  GAME.EXE (enter)
  Crash.
  WTF?
  Oh I'm so fucking dumb, I didn't set the irq in Config.exe of the game, I just wrote it on this piece of paper. Ffs. Reboot.
  CD\GAMES\GAME (enter)
  Config. Exe (enter)
  Scroll to soundcard, change the irq from 7 to 5, check the dma... That's good, check the memory address... 240h.. Fuck. Good I catched that as well. Change that also to 220h.
  Exit,
  Game.exe.
  Crash.
  Godfuckinghelldamnit.
  The fucking retarded mouse driver conflicts with qemm. I don't need that fucker for this game, remove it from Config.sys. Reboot.
  CD\GAMES\GAME (enter)
  GAME.EXE (enter)
  Glide3d error on line 2365. You need version 2.13. You have 2.10.
  Oh fucking hell.
  CD windows Win.com
  No mouse detected.
  Fuckingthefuckfuck.
  Edit Config.sys, unrem The mouse driver, remove the qemm optimisations because they clashed with the mouse driver.
  Reboot.
  Win. Com. Click on netscape. Start the modem. [modem sounds] 56k6 baby! That fucker is fast!
  Click on the address line (netscape crashes)
  Sigh. You're to tired to even curse at this moment. Click on netscape again. Click on address bar, http://www.3dfx.com
  Wait.... (loading at 4k a second)
  Click on support
  Wait.... (loading at 4k a second)
  Click on drivers
  Wait.... (loading at 4k a second)
  Click on glide
  Wait.... (loading at 4k a second)
  Click on download latest.
  Wait.... For 30 minutes for it to download. (loading at 4k a second)
  Your mum wants to call your aunt. You have to hang up that computer bullshit NOW.
  Fuckingthefuckhelcuntshit.
  Mum, it's only 5 minutes remaining! I don't care, I'm out of eggs and I need them. Maybe you're aunt has some otherwise I have to go to the store. Hang up now!
  Fuck. Hangup.
  Wait.
  Do it all again.
  Finally downloaded. You just know you're going to get your ass chewed up by your dad because you where downloading for over an hour, it probably costed somewhere around 5-7 bucks to download this driver because of the egg fiasco. Anyway, install the driver.
  First unzip it.
  C: Cd\temp Unzip Glide3d.zip
  Error unreadable byte at 435543.
  Sigh.
  Download it again
  (now you know for sure you're going to get it)
  This time it unzips.
  Install.exe.
  It installs.
  Finally.
  Reboot. Start game. Not enough memory because of the new glide driver. And you forgot to unload the mouse driver.
  I'll take current day ads, tracking and the sacrifice of the soul of my firstborn due to EULA'S any fucking day
  It's like jack Nicholson said in a few good men:
  THE TRUTH? YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!
  (I lied a tiny bit, Glide3d usually meant a dos4gw game which finally meant 32 bit addresses and no conventional memory bullshit. But you can change that for any other driver you needed)
  
  I'll be honest I didn't read most of that but I see you are a tormented soul and sorry that we are not that old to know or had the misfortune to play many buggy games.
  
  Insert disk 14.....
  [Angry grinding noises]
  Failure reading drive A Abort, Retry, Fail? R
  [More angry grinding noises]
  Kids these days have it so easy.....
  
  The meme clearly isn’t about installing games, it’s about starting them. And I seriously doubt OP is referring to any sort of floppy games at all. They’re most likely referring to many of the cd rom based games that literally were “click exe to start” and they just did. Everyone here is focusing on their experience with floppy games and completely ignoring that there was a time where games did work like this.
- From very recent memory, unfortunately.

I remember having to hunt high and low for the dune 2 manual to find out how heavy an Atreides airfield is because that’s what anti-piracy measures were back then.
Also it was much more of a crapshoot whether or not a game would work at all. Some games just completely refused to be played outside of specific hardware, especially when it came to video cards. Stupid messages like “sorry, you must have a GeForce 2300 or newer to play” that literally checked if your video card name started with some specific string…
Similar kind of thing with sound cards. Most games had a couple options for sound: if you have a sound card that contains the magic words “sound blaster” you got to enjoy nice sounds! Otherwise hope you like some kinda shitty half-attempt at MIDI sound.
And every game ever came with an EULA, if it wasn’t in the game it was in the manual or in some readme. It’s just as meaningless now as it was back then.
Then when CDs came out, sometimes they’d get scuffed and become impossible to install, so you’d have to end up buying a game twice because your cousin got a hold of it.
Things haven’t changed that much. There’s still a lot of shitty games, with a few that are great. It’s more like micro transaction or “free-to-play” games instead of shovelware now for the most part it seems though.
Everyone remembers the classics and forgets the duds!

you can disable steam ad windows

Don't forget you gotta update your driver's too before even beginning "Launch Steam"

For most games, including ones on Steam this is what I do.
Being up program launcher with key combination.
Start typing name of game, hit enter.
Then if Steam is not open Steam launches,. Game launches.
Get yourself a launcher program. Having to bring up Steam and search a library of dozens of games seems maddening when you could just type a few letters.
- So I install a launcher that launches steam to launch the game launcher?
  
  He means like Wox or Power Toys Run
  
  By launcher I mean something like Spotlight on Mac OS. The Windows Start menu probably has some of this functionality, at least for launching applications and can be brought up with a key, there are probably alternatives as well. I'm on Linux and use Rofi for this.
  I don't mean a large program necessary for launching games, I mean a very lightweight program that can launch your games, or any other app, and more.

Minesweeper might be the only game I know that opens directly into play game. Everything else "then" still needed us to press play.

I love the fake "offline mode" of Steam which for certain game, doesn't work.
I knew it was already shitty 20years ago when Steam get popularized by this shitty game (Counter Strike),

I used to have the irq of my sound blaster 16 memorised because you need to put it in for every game.

People praise Steam, but it's one of the most bloated, unnecessarily convoluted examples of feature creep on my machine, and it always wants to run in the background and check for updates. Even when I do remember to exit properly, it takes several seconds of thinking before it closes. I've resorted to using task manager instead.
Almost any launcher is less annoying to me than Steam, but then I've never been one to use or want the various social aspects. I wish there were a lite version for people who just want to use it to buy and play games.
- What other launchers do you use?
  For me its like yeah steam has some annoyances, but overall it is pretty good and mostly works. Ubisoft and EA usually have more annoyances and/or straight up don't work.
  
  EGS only takes a few seconds to launch, doesn't shove an annoying popup ad in my face every time I open it, and completely exits the application when I click X
  I've actually bought the EGS version of several games just so I don't have to deal with Steam's bullshit
  I've also got some indie games that don't use a launcher at all, and I use the Windows version of ESO so I don't need a separate launcher for that, which is my most-played game of all
- I wonder if a batch program wouldn't help you to bypass task manager too, mmmh
  
  It would! I've actually considered that, but honestly I just don't use Steam enough to justify it. I'd probably use it a lot more if it didn't feel like such a chore to run.
- Yeah, steam is way too bloated for me. Usually it makes it impossible to do stuff at startup since the new UI version uses more resources
  
  I've come to accept that it's going to update every time I launch it, which makes it a pita since I work long shifts and have very little time to play games to begin with.

i'm tired of software constantly needing to download fucking updates for every little fucking thing. you can't just use sEcUrIty as an excuse to make things 2000x more annoying
- It would go a long way to provide a changelog so we could appreciate whatever work went into the update. Looking at you, steam.
- Gamers are the only people who complain when something is improved for them for free.

All the people that defends steam, probably use mcafee antivirus.
- From "double click game.exe" to beginning actual gameplay took all of 68 seconds just now on a fairly average AAA game I have (Gotham Knights,) and 90% of that was just loading time with no further input required. This was on Steam (which was not running in the background because I stopped it first,) but because I used a desktop shortcut, I did not have to click through all the menus and close the ad window.
  I use Avast, thank you.