In 90s i did my biggest part of gaming. And it's not a pretty story.

I firstly had an console that was called "Terminator". It was basically an Nintendo Famicom clone, pretty much one of few of the kind you could find in my country in that period. It was even receiving Nintendo NES cartridges. Anyway, the thing with cartridges was pretty much the same, as you were finding "clone" cartridges, not the originals. Most popular were 9999999 in 1 cartridges. You were basically had an Chinese cartridge with a lot of games on it. I remember i was playing a lot of Atari 2600 games on it.
That was pretty much my "gaming" after 1990.

Meanwhile, in around 1993-1994, i started to go at an informatics club. There we had some old PCs, HC85. They were actually made in Romania. Everything on those PCs were stored on cassettes, even Basic programming language. On that ones we were playing mostly Commodore 64 games, like Game Over, Jetpac, Commando, Contra, and even ports of older games from Atari, but we were playing them on PC.

Then, personal PCs started to be a thing. We got an Pentium I at that informatics club, and we went crazy when we saw the difference with our HC85s. Unfortunately, we only had one computer, and we were learning to use it one by one. On that one we were playing Descent and Heretic a lot. I actually don't remember playing something else.

Then, one friend got his own home PC too. We were going almost each day, after school and we were playing at his computer. Wolfenstein 3D was the game that we played a lot. We were taking turns until we were dying.

After a while, my parents got me an PC. I was so happy. Played all kind of stuff that i could find. Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Warcraft 2, Lemmings, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D. God, i remember when i managed to get an uncensored version of Duke Nukem 3D. It was so nasty...
Anyway, beside that, i started to break that PC's software into pieces. My parents were getting used. Every few days, they would see me in front of Windows 95 installer. I think i reinstalled that OS hundreds of times after i was breaking it up by trying all kind of silly things. Anyway, i learned a lot that way. I was going to people to install their OS or remove viruses, as those were a problem back then.

After that, we started playing Co-op games, especially HOMM3 and Worms. And also, internet cafes started to appear, so we were getting into multiplayer too, Quake, Starcraft, Warcraft 2, Age of Empires.

Now, in that period, we didn't had a clue about copyright. Even authorities didn't cared about it. You would find all kind of CDs with ripped games in stores. Most games we would share one with another on diskettes. Big releases were not reaching our country legally. We were using pirated versions of everything. And it was not of bad will, we simply didn't knew better and we didn't had alternatives. You were going into an store that was selling computer games, you would see one CD with Doom, Duke Nukem, and Wolfenstein 3D, all on the same disk, with a printed cover. We didn't had a clue that we're not buying an official release.

Then, few years after, in around 2000, we started to have official CDs in our stores, and we understood what piracy is. We started buying games, trading them, etc. After that, we kinda reach present times.

There was definitely a greater degree of complexity. But let's not take that at face value. You see, there's complexity that comes from richness of content, greater degrees of interactivity and generally expecting gamers to be that bit brighter than the average.

But then there's also the kind of complexity that comes from the games themselves being dumber in the way they were designed. For instance, the first Warcraft only allowed you to select individual units and you had to click MOVE on the bottom bar and then click where you want that unit to go. Warcraft 2 had you selecting units in groups and right clicking where you want them to go to or what you want them to attack. Simpler, but much more intelligent.

That's a basic example, but entire games were made like this back then. They had both the intelligent and dumb kinds of complexity.

If you want an analogy, Apple is pretty good. They love to simplify things right down. Which can make them much more user friendly. But then they go too far and remove vital ports and as a result put out hardware that's a fraction as useful as it would otherwise have been. Intelligent simplicity and dumb simplicity.

One of my favourite examples of a really fucking complex game in the 90s is X-Com Apocalpse. Not only the usual things, such as base building, research and your squad gaining experience and new weapons, but also a whole city to protect that can be destroyed bit by bit, both on the tactical and world map. Given that each building belongs to organisations that sell you weapons, vehicles and other items, you have to be really careful who you piss off. There are plenty of alliances between the organisations and you can foster some of your own too.

But for all its intelligent complexity it also had a lot of dumb complexity too. Each screen had a fuckton of icons and the whole UI could have been much better designed. Instead, every option was simply dumped onto the UI as a separate icon.

Now compare this with the more recent XCOM and you can see how things have definitely moved forward, but also why so many want a return to the good old days of games that weren't so dumbed down.

Wow! Once upon a time eh?

I was one of those most rarest of rare breeds: a Mac gamer. I remember feeling really annoyed and disappointed that the other people in school weren't really interested in talking about games, especially since we were all playing the same games (DOOM, Warcraft, StarCraft, Diablo) -- they were just more interested in puffing up their ePeens, just like how console/FPS/industry fanbois do today.

What was really neat though was that the major porting companies of the day actually took the time and effort to put out ports that had more content or enhanced features vs. the original Windows/DOS releases.

Did you played the Martathon games at launch......wait never mind your avatar :P

I actually posted a giveaway about this:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_amazing_90s_best_gaming_decade_giveaway/post1

There were some great stories by the participants. Here is my own:
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_amazing_90s_best_gaming_decade_giveaway/post39

This! I remeber trying to beat levels just to watch some cutscene and finally, well, the end......................and in that respect "Batman" for SNES had the most dissapointing "cutscene" ever.

I'm not really an expert at programming or anything tech related, but is it possible the reason there hasn't been leaps like that is because there isn't much more room to move into?

I think casual gaming/gamers in the 90s were at best invisible. The reason for that is games took several hours to learn (where the term "Nintendo hard" comes from), and untold hundreds to master. Look at something like Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and compare it to The Frozen Throne. When you play Frozen Throne it's almost impossible to go back to Orcs and Humans because the UI overall is so much better.

Another example would be Baldur's Gate 1 (98) vs Baldur's Gate 2 (2,000). If you're a patron of the GoG section dedicated to those games, occasionally someone would make a post about how frustrating the UI and gameplay of BG1 is because they became so used to the BG2 engine.

Do you realize that most people who played in the 90ies are now around 30 and have moved on and that the PC gaming master race you seem to loathe so much is usually younger ? Not that I am blaming anyone here, but its just a matter of accuracy.

What I definitely miss from the 90ies, was the handcrafted nature of games, they where made by passionate people and less influenced by men in suits looking to sell us DLCs and cutting content in pieces. I was also a lot less about "community" and "identity" and more about having fun and begin immersed.

You're kidding me, right? I can't speak for other gamers of the 90's but I remember when, for my platform, games were few and far between. Yeah, we had some awesome ports, as I mentioned earlier, but for a long of games, ports were late, buggy, poorly optimized, or even feature incomplete.

Now, things have grown by leaps and bounds. The rise of crowdfunding, as well as profileration and maturating of tools like WINE, AGS, RPG Maker, Unity and the Unreal Engine have lead to a staggering amount of excellent quality games available for OS X and Linux, as well as for Windows and consoles. Wadjet Eye's games, FTL, Wasteland 2, the new Shadowrun games, and Pillars of Eternity -- as well as upcoming games like Nekro and Torment: Tides of Numenera are excellent examples of this. For those of us craving truly classic games, or games from ignored genres, we still have places like GOG or even Steam with its growing catalog of classics.

I'd go out on a limb and say that for a lot of us who yearn for games we loved like PS:T and BG2 (among many, many others across different genres), things are looking pretty awesome.

But the flip side of this is that things have changed for the worse for a lot of things. You could argue back and forth about the "dumbing down" of games, but what has clearly, objectively changed for the worse are the industry's business practices. That's not to say that the industry behaved like angels during the 90's, because they obviously didn't. But we didn't have the pervasive abuse of microtransactions and F2P systems during the 90's. We didn't have the abuse of DLC, and the toxic rise of Pre-Order Culture. We didn't have overhyped and underdelivering games broken up piecemeal to be sold in chunks later like with Destiny. We didn't have single-player campaigns and whole significant features stripped out of the game to be replaced with threadbare selling points like with EA Star Wars Battlefront***.

As Jeremy Jahns quips in his Battlefront video, we "Dinosaurs" are angry not because of the games the industry are making now, but because of the game the industry is playing with us, the consumers. We're angry because mainstream gaming seemingly isn't just about making good games for the enjoyment of all, anymore. It's about making money in what's arguably the most cutthroat, sleazy and laziest way possible. Time and again, we've seen companies reap the benefits of doing right by their customers with excellent products. Instead, the industry seems to be going in a very different direction.

tl;dr is this: This anger you take exception to? It's from people who want more out of gaming, and remember when gaming wasn't just a bunch of exploitative business tactics meant to gouge consumers. It's from people who remember (perhaps, through rose-tinted glasses) that things weren't always like this, and that they don't have to be this way. It's from people want to make gaming better for the new and the old guard alike. I can't imagine how that could be a bad thing.



***I'm sure someone out there with a better memory than I will point out instances of all of these that occured during the 80's and 90's, but I find it hard to argue that these problems were just as pervasive and widespread back then, as they are now.

Computer Gaming World was my gaming go to in those days, what PC games I did get to play were few and far between so I played many many hours of each. I played Civilizations 1 countless times, Mechwarrior countless hours and a few others.

I remember playing scorched earth with 8 friends all around a single PC taking our turns and talking. We also swapped games since they were all on physical media. I remember playing monkey island for the first time after borrowing it (and the manual) from a friend. I also really enjoyed text adventure games, though I don't know if I still could today.

PC Gaming in the '90s was tricky stuff. There were lots of demos floating around, but little cash to buy full versions of the good ones. I got so frustrated wishing that I could play all of Solar Winds.

I do have some very fond memories of playing The Oregon Trail in my school's computer lab, though. So, so much cooler than Number Munchers.

I miss the excitement of opening a freshly purchased boxed game and the ritualistic smelling of the manual.


Mmmmmmmh

Oh man, not with a bang but a whimper. Nearly all of them were like that.
I wish i still had my boxes. The artwork alone is worth having on the shelf.
Or Mavis Beacon 'shudders'