if 1999 was this bad.. what would Williams say now?

[Theldaran]

I was just happy knowing enough to launch a game in DOS.

If you were using Windows 95 like me, you had to reboot in DOS mode to play DOS games. A hassle, but not really a challenge for an eager kid.

I don't think you know what he meant by that statement.

Many of the later-game DOS games had quite absurd base memory requirements to run (this is the first 640k of memory, before protected mode executables were a thing) - examples that pop to mind from my youth are Alone in the Dark 3 and Falcon 3.0. This was tricky because you also had to have enough base memory to load device drivers - such as MSCDEX for CD-ROM, sound card and even mouse. Although only a few games had extreme requirements (I remember AitD3 requiring something like 617kb or some stupid shit), many games wouldn't run without some optimization. The way to accomplish that was to edit your autoexec.bat and config.sys files in such a way as to sequentially load the drivers into memory in neat blocks (the order mattered because memory was allocated in 'chunks').

Later on, there were programs like MEMMAKER.EXE in DOS 6.0 which purported to do this automatically, but they never worked properly and optimizing by hand was always better.

This was a sort of barrier of entry that kept mongoloids at bay. And remember, this was the era before the Internet, so answers weren't just a search away.

I miss those times.

I was around by then, I know it full well. Look at the previous page.

I DON'T miss those times, at least if we're sticking to booting games, if I reflect upon them with tenderness it's because it was my puberty.

About digital platforms, Steam outdoes them all aye, but only because anything and everything can be sold there, and that's not necessarily a good thing, it has been criticised a lot recently. Other platforms still thrive, such as Origin, built upon the criterion of "EA games repository". The same with UPlay. Those platforms won't go away easily as long as they have such a massive following, as they offer games you won't find on Steam.

GOG does a lesser job with DOS-, 9X-era and from the 2000s games (which is their original leit motiv), but they still offer brand new games without DRM, so it's always an option to consider. Not as much wild variety as Steam, and certainly less sales, but they carve their own market.

 

[Dreed]

While what she says absolutely applies today, back in 1999 this was straight ignorant elitism. "Point and click adventure games are for prestigious individuals and so intellectual! those first person shootans are for idiots!".

Especially since she then had under her belt masterpieces like Phantasmagoria and Shivers in 95, and King's Quest 8 in 98...

 

[Cael]

I was around by then, I know it full well. Look at the previous page.

I DON'T miss those times, at least if we're sticking to booting games, if I reflect upon them with tenderness it's because it was my puberty.

About digital platforms, Steam outdoes them all aye, but only because anything and everything can be sold there, and that's not necessarily a good thing, it has been criticised a lot recently. Other platforms still thrive, such as Origin, built upon the criterion of "EA games repository". The same with UPlay. Those platforms won't go away easily as long as they have such a massive following, as they offer games you won't find on Steam.

GOG does a lesser job with DOS-, 9X-era and from the 2000s games (which is their original leit motiv), but they still offer brand new games without DRM, so it's always an option to consider. Not as much wild variety as Steam, and certainly less sales, but they carve their own market.

The games of those times pretty much work out of the box and their requirements are reasonable. Not like the bloated, buggy, GPU melting snail-like monstrosities we get these days, epitomised by the new HBS game.

 

[agris]

While what she says absolutely applies today, back in 1999 this was straight ignorant elitism. "Point and click adventure games are for prestigious individuals and so intellectual! those first person shootans are for idiots!".

Especially since she then had under her belt masterpieces like Phantasmagoria and Shivers in 95, and King's Quest 8 in 98...

It doesn't sound good, but I'll absolutely take an elitist attitude, despite how it may rub our pride or sense of decency the wrong way, over an attitude that says "we must simplify for the masses". Because that's exactly what happened - to sell to as wide an audience as possible, to be 'mainstream', means to remove those elements that provide a barrier. That require effort, or thinking. To go mainstream is to cater to the lowest common denominator, and is fundamentally a worse treatment of a human being than exposing them to arrogant, elitist statements.

 

[Telengard]

The quotes from Ken Williams are more cutting.

But what the two of them were lamenting about back when was the fact that as my generation was aging out of video games, the Nintendo generation (that would be you guys) were enamored with flashy graphics and action and couldn't be arsed to sit down and listen to a story or play a turn-based game. For your generation, there was Baldur's "Not Your Daddy's RPG" Gate and Diablo "So Simple My Grandmother Can Play It". Meanwhile for Adventure games, that meant their audience was - at the time - actually shrinking. And i don't mean shrinking just around the edges, I mean sputtering downwards fast. In fact, LucasArts was playing with a fraction of Sierra's audience size when they started making their games.

But while there is much truth in the above, the Williams's statements are missing one piece of the puzzle. And that's how people make purchases. People's time and income are not infinite, so they make choices. In an earlier time, people who favor exploration in games, classic rpgs offered their best chance to fill that desire, really their only chance. These days, though, they can choose to spend their time and money on Skyrim (as most Codexers do) or Grand Theft Auto VII, etc etc etc. And thus as they spend more of their time and money in those places, they have less time and money available for traditional rpgs. But really, they're just maximizing their satisfaction by spending their time and money on 3d wanderlust games. (Of course, if they were men, they would buy a flight stick and a plane simulator and do an actual exploration game, and not some petty trifle, but I digress.) Meanwhile, people who played Adventure games for the story and not the puzzles, back when that was the only place to get story in games (outside of the intro in the manual, I mean), well, now they can get story in rpgs, in date sims, in survival sims, and even in FPSs, for gods' sakes. So if they're only in it for the story, they no longer need Adventure games to get their fix. Which means the audience for Adventure games didn't just shrink generationally (though it did do that, as well), it shrunk because people who were just there for the story no longer had no other choice in their purchases.

RPGs have a third strike, and that was the many changes to D&D. Original D&D was a whole generation of kids' entry into RPGs. It was simple (for an RPG), 40-page manual, not much to learn, etc etc. Good entry game for nerdy kids. And for a long time, D&D was the gateway bringing in the next generation of kids into the hobby, while just about every other successful rpg staked out a more complex space in the market. D&D later chose to abandon that position, though, and become much more dense. This choice pleased the older crew of D&D fans, who wanted something more complex, but it weakened recruitment for the entire hobby. And the key is, no major rpg company stepped in to fill that void, so the average age of the rpg player has steadily gotten older. Which doesn't mean there is no recruitment, it means recruitment numbers are bad. Like flashing red light DANGER bad. Dangerous, because that means there is a limited audience to sell to, and that already limited audience is only going to keep shrinking.

Adventure games don't have that problem, so they have maintained a fairly stable, if small, audience. They are also way less difficult to make, so their indie scene has remained fairly vibrant throughout. Which leads around to what might people from the past think of the modern gaming scene. Actually not much different, maybe a little mellower. After all, what does it really matter as much to you what the grandkids do. And from that aged remove, what the kids chose and what the grandkids chose, it all looks the kinda the same to you. You know, "Those damn kids and their Nintendos!" isn't really any different than, "Those damn kids and their phone games!"

 

[Makabb]

There was no unity back in the day, and developers knew how to code and every game was running on its own engine specificaly made for the game and not 50% of games on unreal engine and 50% on unity.