Hello everyone!

What was it like? What kind of trends were there? Were you around for big releases? If you have info or experiences that go beyond these questions I'll be glad to hear about them!

I was a console kid myself. I had an NES. I only had the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt game but I would sometimes rent games at a few local shops. Later on I got a Genesis and that's when my library really grew.

I would occasionally go to my cousin's house. He had Doom 2, which I really enjoyed but at the same time it did scare me. He also had Warcraft: Orcs and Humans and a Kart game that I think was called Wacky Racers. I got my first PC at around 2000.

Nowadays I mostly play old games and a few Blizzard titles.

Shit for me Duck Hunt was gaming in the 90s. :P My junior and senior year in high school was when the Sega Genesis hit but by that point I was too busy smoking pot and jerking off.

Mid 90s was all about the first generation of FPS. Me and my friends played the original Rise of the Triad, Doom, and Duke Nukem. Traded lots of floppy disks in the age of physical media. Late 90s was RTS and isometric RPGs like Fallout and Diablo. Me and my pals would get smashed and sit around playing Age of Empires or Dark Forces all night long. We were easily entertained back then. Good times.


*I'd like to add that we also had lots of small computer shops around still where nerds would congregate and buy and talk shop about games. It was like a real world geek version of Twitter or Facebook way before social media. In the 90s computer nerds still had to summon the confidence and energy to actually go outside to get anything done. Now you can do basically everything from a mobile and never have to leave the couch.*

I primarily played console games (and still do), but I always thought of it as more of a hobbyist thing in the early to mid nineties.

You went to a computer or ham radio convention to buy floppies of shareware episodes of games, or cds that advertised 300+ games and you sifted through the tetris clones or whatnot coded by amateurs in their spare time to find quality games you can enjoy.

(and then you ignored the nag screens and just played the shareware version forever, lol)

My family had an NES, later a Genesis, and later still, our first computer (early '95 Gateway with a Pentium something-or-other, 2X CD-ROM drive, and Windows 3.11). We never had all that many games for any of the systems, though, so most of the titles I played were rentals, with a few more I played (or saw being played) at a friend's house.
The PC was where I really started getting into games for real, though. Thanks to cheap, easy-to-find shareware and demos, one could experience a lot of different games of several different types without laying out a lot of money. I spent hours playing Might & Magic II (though I spent at least as much time and effort making maps on simple, custom word-processor-made map sheets as I did playing), Duke Nukem 3D (there were some pretty cool user-made maps one could find, even without Internet access), Discovery: In the Steps of Columbus (an imperfect but really fun little gem about colonization of the New World), Daggerfall (it consumed my time on and off over the years like Skyrim does for people today), and innumerable shareware games and demos. I also bought my first console of my very own, a Nintendo 64, and enjoyed GoldenEye and Super Smash Brothers immensely.

(BTW, the kart racing game you remember is probably <i>Wacky Wheels</i>, which had a shareware version back in the day.)

The main thing I remember about PC gaming in the 80s and 90s, aside from the big releases and stuff, was that there was always this anxiety about getting your new games to run at home. You'd put the disk in and then have to screw around with config files and IRQ settings and crap before you got to enjoy what you'd bought. And sometimes it still didn't work because your system was so weird. Oh, and you still had to read manuals back then, too. In-game tutorials weren't entirely a thing at that point.

Well I've been a pc gamer since day one, dad wouldn't let me descend into darkness and touch a console until early 2000s.

My first games were Wolfenstein 3D and Doom 2, I'm from 92' so I started playing games around 97' if I'm not mistaken, and that's what I remember, because dad always say we (we are three brothers) started playing since we were little bastards, killing monsters and soiling diapers at the same time.

Yeah, that was it! Wacky Wheels!

Also, I forgot to mention my experience at computer camp. I was transferred there after regular camp became too dangerous on account of my asthma and allergies.

I played Star Wars chess. I really loved watching all the different animations. I also played Skyroads. I tried Sam and Max but couldn't get anywhere. I saw some kids play through Prince of Persia. I heard there was some kind of Robocop game but I never saw it.

Hey, some of the most interesting games were coded by amateurs in their spare time!
But, yeah, there was generally a lot of chaff to sort through. I used to have a notepad file listing the worthwhile or interesting (to me) titles I had found on a couple such "hundreds of games!!1" shareware CD-ROMs, complete with the paths to the executables (so i could access the games directly, where possible). And people wonder why the shareware model died out, and few games offer demos anymore. =)

I pretty much saw all the old games here come out and still own many of the physical games I bought then. I saw the transition from 5 1/4 -> 3 1/2 disks, and then finally to CD's in the mid-90's. I got a 486 SX 25 (technically the whole family's, but I used it the most) in 1992 and got a Gateway 2000 486 DX4 100Mhz full tower (god computer at the time) as a highschool graduation present a few years later. I even still have my external US Robotics 28.8 modem for it.

- They had entire stores devoted to PC games. My favorite was Egghead Software, where they knew me by name. 100% PC software and a large game selection. Prior to Gamestop turning into the shithole business that it is now, they were known as Babbages and also sold primarily PC games and software. Electronics Boutique had a a good selection of PC games, but also dabbled in console games as well. There was CompUSA, which was a HUGE PC store. Another favorite of mine was Media Play. They had at least 5 aisles of PC games, one of which was purely clearance, where you could get brand-new boxed games for $10-20. Going there was like a kid going to Disneyland. I must've spent thousands on physical games back then between all those stores.

- People into computers was much more savvy back then. Now computers are ubiquitous, and very few people really come under the category as "knowing what the hell they're doing" (I'm saying this as someone who did professional software development for 21 years). Back then, you had to be able to navigate and control DOS, which is a lost art these days, even with people having DOSBox. If you give the average user DOS these days, they just stare blankly at it and drool appears in the corner of their mouths. Granted, PC knowledge is relative. But, even the average user was more willing to get their hands dirty with the guts of the OS than I see typically now.

- Web sites were more tacky and clunky, but had far more personality to them. Back then, you had to know enough to navigate HTML editing by hand and construct something with that to have a web site. So, there was far fewer sites, especially devoted to niche games, but they were much more interesting if you ask me. Now, all the sites look homogenized, though information on pretty much any game is plentiful.

- Games and gamers on PC were much more willing to tolerate and overcome complexity. People read manuals, which were often thick and necessary to actually knowing what to do in many games. Games like MOO et al, along with the deep rich RPG's of the time are indicative of this. For the most part, I don't see this depth very often anymore with very few exceptions (Serpent in the Staglands being an outstanding example of this sort of game's return). Gamers unwilling to contend with even a modicum of complexity stuck to consoles. I knew very few people who did this, given the circles I ran with in high school. Most people I knew played and preferred PC games. A fun anecdote on this; I installed Doom on my high school's PC, hidden in a DIR where the less technical teachers would find it. Technology class became "Let's go play Doom" class. Good times!

- Networks were rare unless you were working in an office at the time, so multiplayer games were much rarer. Or, at least, finding other people to play with and having them also having the PC hardware and willingness to play with you. Internet was nonexistent unless you were willing to brave Unix FTP sites and programs like Gopher as a search tool (search engines weren't out until around the mid-90's).

Network access was via dial-up modems and BBS's (Software Creations, the home of Apogee, was one of my favorites). I had a package of Win 3.1 tools to do Unix tools through a GUI for internet then, but it was too hard to use and you really had to know the sites to go to in advance, otherwise the tools were useless. Later, comprehensive internet portals came along including the eponymous AOL. My friend and I used Compuserve for a few years. Once Win95 came out and Netscape (precursor to Firefox) was released in-stores (yes, you had to pay $50 for your browser; Netscape 1.0, and yes it was worth it), then the internet became a more commonplace thing, at least amongst PC gamers.

My friends back then would trade me booze for fixing their computers. An equitable trade at the time.

When I went to college in the late 90's, we were given 50 MB for our computer account (this is in a Programming curriculum). My friend and I were the top 2 programmers in the school and when we discovered one lab had CD-rom drives, I declared I was bringing Duke Nukem 3D in, and when we could get back into the multimedia lab, we were going to both suck up the 34MB to install Duke 3D on both our accounts and hobble through the semester with the remaining 16MB for programming projects. It took about a month before we could get into that lab again as the door was nearly always locked, but eventually we did.

From that point on, Database class became DukeMatch class and the Windows key became the "teacher is coming key". We'd get to class, start up the Unix command line with whatever our current project was, and then open a DOS windows and bring up Duke. We both were on top of the class enough that playing Duke Nukem 3D instead of paying attention didn't affect our grades. There were times where we were neck-and-neck on frags and the next class was already walking in, but we were both determined to break the tie and walk out the victor. Fond memories!

Here's a few pics of my PC hardware and software collection from then :
[url=http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad111/Firebrand9/Old%20PC%201.jpg~original]Pic 1[/url] (Gateway 2000 DX4 100 Mhz, Thrustmaster F-22, and Magic Carpet on the desk in this pic)
[url=http://i927.photobucket.com/albums/ad111/Firebrand9/Old%20PC%202.jpg~original]Pic 2[/url] (Netscape 1.0, Every version of Magic Carpet, Both versions of Tie Fighter, Stonekeep, Tekwar, Falcon Gold, and LOTS of programming software and books)

That's a rude thing to ask someone you barely know. At least converse a little first.

Its all about gaming magazines for me.

Who holds the magazine holds the power.

Fewer games releases. (the rareness makes it interesting)

You actually play the games and know the story until it was marked in your brain. (thus become today legendary/cult title)

Sometimes you have to play a buggy games with no patch at all.

(sometimes nowadays when i see people complaining about graphics (view distance, pop up textures) & game options ( graphic settings, no option for turning on subtitles, no skipping scenes) before they even try out a game makes me mad)

That took me a second. XD

Babbage's, actually. =D But I didn't know till now that they later became Gamestop.