Digging through old posts on comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg

[Old Hans]

There was never a doubt in my mind that also during the so called golden age, codexers were complaining about the decline.

Well, RPG fans complained about the decline in 1996 because there WAS a genuine decline in that period. A few years later, a subset of RPG fans who hated RTwP combat complained about its increasing dominance, but I don't think anybody else did.

It'd be interesting to see if anybody thought "RPGs are going down the toilet" before 1994, but I don't know where you could find discussion about that.

heh I'm sure there was. If its anything like tabletop wargaming and old grognards lamenting the fact that the rulebook only has 400 pages of charts

 

[octavius]

Last time I hung out on the Usenet gaming forums, there was a fucking guy called "Steamkiller" who posted an insane amount of antisteam bullshit. We thought he was just trolling but he apparently supplied the forum with proofs of buying the same game over and over again to "support pc gaming". He was awesome.

Italian or Portugese guy, wasn't he?

 

[aris]

There was never a doubt in my mind that also during the so called golden age, codexers were complaining about the decline.

Well, RPG fans complained about the decline in 1996 because there WAS a genuine decline in that period. A few years later, a subset of RPG fans who hated RTwP combat complained about its increasing dominance, but I don't think anybody else did.

It'd be interesting to see if anybody thought "RPGs are going down the toilet" before 1994, but I don't know where you could find discussion about that.

You did find yourself posts of the decline from 98, albeit of another game. I bet that if you search enough, you can probably call some guy calling fallout the messiah of decline, because it doesn't have a party, like the complaint was for many of the 96' games

 

[Great Deceiver]

23/1/1996 - "The Decline of Computer Gaming": https://groups.google.com/forum/#!s...sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg/_b7L-lZ18uQ/5vANimA82voJ

The ironic thing is that the Golden Age of PC Gaming started not long after this. The merging of video and computer games only became a real problem with the release of the X-Box in 2002.

My golden age of PC gaming was probably between 1989 and 1994. Sierra EGA adventures on my old HD-less 8086 XT, Ultima 7 on my 386 and Doom 2 on my 486, there were just too many awesome games.