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.
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.
Back in the day:
Click game.exe
“What’s the 8th word on the 24th page of the manual?”
fuckwheredidiputthemanual.png
“Please insert disc into drive D:/”
Set up soundblaster irq dma bzzz bzz
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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 ‘>_
Datasette was so fricking slow…
Thanks for fastloader
Commodore 64?
- Press
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.
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.
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.
This is why I just went back to playing Red Alert 2. My install from 2001 still works.
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.
pirated games don’t have this issue. been doubleclickjng exe files for all my games
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…
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!
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.
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.
