One thing about 90s PC gaming was that i as all kinda kludgy, at least before Windows 9x set it in order with DirectX. PC wasn't really intended for games, but somehow it became a patchwork of additional (sometimes very expensive) hardware items that filled the gaps.

Want sound from your games? Ok buy a Soundblaster sound card.

Not happy with the quality of the music on your Soundblaster? Ok buy a Roland MT-32 or LAPC-1 MIDI synthesizer which costs an arm and a leg and isn't really designed for gaming, yet gives you godly music in games because for some odd reason PC game developers liked to support it widely, even though only few PC gamers had them.

Then find out a way to hear both your Soundblaster and Roland at the same time, because for the best experience you were supposed to get the music from your Roland but digitized sound effects and speech from the Soundblaster, for those games that supported using them at the same time. E.g. own set of speakers for each sound card, or use an external mixer to mix the sound sources together, or maybe sometimes it was possible to redirect the Roland music to the Line In of your Soundblaster and use its mixer?

Want better 3D graphics with your games? Buy a 3Dfx Voodoo card that sits beside your normal graphics card, and connect them together with a loop cable which will redirect the video from your normal graphics card to the 3Dfx card, and the 3Dfx card will switch the video input based on what you are running.

Add to that the need to know how to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat for certain games, or creating separate boot diskettes... yeah it was all kinda messy, and it took some true dedication to be a PC gamer. Even though PC gaming is far for trouble-free nowadays either, it is much easier than back then.


On the other hand, somehow PC just kept proving the naysayers wrong over and over again, somehow PC was able to meet the new gaming requirements even if was sometimes quite messy and/or costly. Back when the rumors of the first good 3D accelerator cards came (Rendition Verite, 3DFx Voodoo, Matrox something something etc.), I recall some console enthusiast proclaiming that they will never really take off because each 3D card will have its own "standard", and also they proclaimed it would be technically impossible to come up with some kind of universal API standard which would allow a game to work with different graphics cards without direct support.

Yeah at first, on DOS games mostly, each 3D card had to be supported separately (e.g. to have Glide support, or support for Verite...). Yet, later Direct3D and OpenGL pretty much did what that naysayers claimed would be an impossible scenario and an unrealistic pipe dream for PC gamers.

Similarly while PC gamers were getting serious about online gaming with Doom, Duke3D and especially Quake, I recall certain console enthusiast proclaiming online gaming will remain as a niche for nerds, and it will never take off on consoles. His main argument was that e.g. fighting games would always be unplayable online because of the lag, as fighting games require microsecond reflexes and precision all the time. And that alone is the reason why online gaming will not take off, ever.

I wonder if that guy still feels similarly, online gaming isn't mainstream?

And still a jerk:)))))))))))))))))

It was gaming’s Age of Exploration. New genres were being invented constantly, and the ones that had existed longer (point & click adventures for example) were honed to perfection. PC hardware requirements were a nightmare trying to keep up.

Gaming of the 90-es? Hell yes! It started with Ultima 6 and Monkey Island and then came Ultima 7, Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Fallout, Syndicate, Privateer, X-wing and Tie-Fighter, Doom, all of the best Lucas Arts adventures and so many more. A great decade for PC gaming!

Moving on to the Official Brady Games Strategy Guide for "Battle Realms".

"Once you arrive at the Swan's Pool, enemies quickly attack from both the east and the north." -pg 179

My 90's gaming days were with an Amiga 600 in 1992 playing Turrican, Lotus Turbo Challenge, Jaguar XJ220 and Project-X (among the 100's of games I had). I used to come home and dad would let me play about 2 hours per day as I had to share it with my sis. Around 1995 my parents bought a PC, it was a 486DX4 100MHZ, 16mb ram, Dos 6.22/Win3.1 and a 850mb HDD and we also had a Dot-Matrix printer (oh boy that was loud when printing).

Most of my games were dos based, Doom, Quake, Rick Dangerous, Zone66, Jill of the Jungle and I also had a few Win3.1 Microsoft games like Ancient Lands, Dangerous Creatures and Encarta. Could say I've grown up differently than the other kids of my age, they had PS1's and Pentium systems with WIn95/98 while I was still using the 486 system till the HDD died around the year 2000.

I used to see games for sale like Baldur's Gate and other great RPG's, knowing I couldn't run them. By the time I got a P3 system around 2002, I had forgotten about them and played other games. I loved the 90's, many great gaming ideas came out during that period, life was simple then and yet so damn awesome.

Would Baldur's Gate have been completely unplayable with a 486? I actually managed to get to the underwater levels in Tomb Raider 2 with my 486, but then again the first Age of Empires was essentially unplayable on the same system.
I did quick search, but I couldn't find the game's original system requirements anywhere.

LAN parties were really big in the 90s! It was a lot of fun playing the original Red Alert and StarCraft over a LAN! No pesky internet connection needed! :P

I remember when the original Doom came out and it was mega-popular. Everyone had the shareware copy. But then Quake came out in 1996 and--wow--I was absolutely amazed! 3D characters instead of just 2D sprites! Dynamic lighting! It truly was a great time for PC gaming.

Those were the days! I actually finished some games in those years.

I had an underpowered machine (386, 16MHz), but games arrived quite late where I lived. I remember playing Dune and Dune 2. Prince of Persia, Battle Chess, Star Control, Another World, Genesia, LucasArts games, UFO: Enemy Unknown, After Burner, LHX, F15 Strike Eagle II, Alley Cat... All the way up to The Elder Scroll: Arena and Doom 2. I played Doom 2 in game map some times, since it was sooo slooow!

After around '96 I kind of stopped spending so much time around games. I still played some, but I invested much less time in them.

I had to either "share" a PC with my many (way older and bigger) brothers or go to a buddy watching him play, it was terrible.
No, I don't want the 90s back, ever.

I think the CPU would handle it, my dad didn't want to upgrade to Win95 with 16MB Ram, at the time someone told him it would work but would be slow so he kept Win3.1.

With console gaming in the 90s, there was this environmentalist theme going on. Not all games had it, but it was a noticeable trend: games like Sonic, Vectorman, Awesome Possum...is this something that spilled onto PC territory?

Damn that turbo button, it never did what we thought it did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2q02Bxtqds

One thing maybe often overlooked that I remember very distinctly was my first exposure to an add-on soundcard in the very early 90's. The difference between the beeps and boops of an internal PC speaker vs what came out of a Sound Blaster/AdLib/Covox blew my mind.