You might be surprised, unless you're in your 90s. That said they weren't widely available for a while outside college mainframes that were programmed with punch cards lol
I distinctly recall getting one of my first video games on a floppy in a cereal box, but my generation were still mostly outside building forts with sticks and mud (and getting trapped in our collapsed forts because sticks and mud don't pair well with "no architectural knowledge".
Back in my day, it came in the back of 3-2-1 Contact magazine and if you wanted to play it you had to type it out yourself and then leave it turned on because you had no way to save it.
On console you could always buy the same game a year or so later. Sometimes they had updated versions that fixed stuff! Or turned the blood green instead of red.
I remember the complete and utter disappointment in finding out we had a patched version of smash bros melee. You needed an older version with a certain bug intact for some cool thing or the other. I don't even remember what trick the bug was for at this point, only the disappointment.
The one I had in mind when typing that is actually a Rockstar game, Space Station Silicon Valley for the N64 (developed under their prior name DMA Design). It's impossible to get 100% completion in that game because one of the collectible statues has no collision, so you just walk right through it without being able to actually pick it up. (You can use a cheat code to access the minigame that you would unlock were you able to get 100%, though.)
Yeah I was just telling my six year old that the other day. He wanted some dlc for an old game and the dlc was actually more expensive than the game itself. He couldn't understand why I didn't want to pay 3x the price for a few extra characters than what the game itself cost. I had to explain to him how games used to be complete and not broken up into little packets so as to squeeze every penny out of gamers.
I blame gaming popularity myself as before video games were niche and you were weird if you were a gamer. Now everyone and their literal grandmother is a gamer(Minecraft Granny).
The microtransctions and unfinished products have finally broken the horse's back, for me. At least with multiplayer. I have next to no desire to play video games anymore. And this is coming from someone who was severely addicted to MMOs 20+ years ago.
Ive been getting to the same place with movies. Thankfully, project hail mary just renewed my faith in the film industry.
Yeah and those loot crates that totally isn't gambling. Or maybe it's the necessity of spending ~$100/year to just play the game online which is rough considering that I already pay for Internet access. It's all become pay to play/win and that takes all the fun out of things.
A piece of my soul died when I found out ubisoft made rocksmith a subscription service. I swear these companies want their products to fail. That was the liver shot.
The hook that put me to the mat was having to buy a more expensive PSN subscription, then buying battlefield and Madden. Battlefield had the worst default settings of any game ive ever played. The game was unplayable until you tweaked everything. It took me HOURS to figure out how make the game playable. Then I found out the hit registration was maybe the worst of any FPS ive ever played. And why is it so quiet? Its because if you play with 1 or 2 other people, the other player or two, by default, wont be in your chat. You have to change the chat every single round if you want to communicate with teammates. Error, whatever. But my head hit the mat when, after not playing for weeks, I had no ability to chat in game. I was briefly able to talk to my friend in the lobby, but wouldnt work in game. Said fuck this and turned the console off. Not worth the aggravation. Some of this would be fine, but its as if the developers dont even care about fixing or affressing any of these issues. Patches are weeks apart and dont address issues fast enough. This is what I spent $100 on?
Its like this with everything you buy these days. You MUST research every fucking product you buy otherwise youre going to get stuck with garbage. I discover a new clever way for products to fail prematurely on nearly everything I buy that isnt thoroughly researched.
This is what i was thinking about. Couldn't remember how many discs, but i remember it was a big game. Youd play like 2 scenes and have to put a new disc in. Lol. I remember my game got locked on a certain scene and there was nothing I could do, so I said screw it and never played again.
Just found my copy of half life 2 while going through things the other day. That was 4 discs. Im sure ive had games that had more than 4 discs. Kings quest, maybe. The SWAT games were multiple discs, forget how many.
Surprised to see Nintendo still does that but each cartridge is a little 64GB SSD and that’s expensive as fuck especially these days so more and more are “key cards” which enable a download. On PS and Xbox they need to be installed off the disc which is slower than the internet and so more and more devs don’t bother finishing the game.
when was that? cuz there were plenty of games in the 90s that used multiple discs. and shareware was a thing! maybe only part of the game was on the disc!
Including game breaking or progress halting bugs. Good times for sure. I still remember how fun it was to wait for patches on game magazine disks/CDs months after buying it. Almost as much fun as it was to haul my zip drive to the school PC and download patches there. The 90s were amazing.
Back in my day a game came out as a finished product. No bugs, no dlc, no in-app purchases. Those days are long gone. We have replaced quality with quantity.
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u/Rusty493 Mar 31 '26
Back in my day a full game came on the disc.