Tell me your stories about PC gaming before Steam. Are there games not on Steam from that era I should seek out?

[Deleted member 1659]

So I've been buying PC games for a long time but my teenage to adult life pretty much overlaps the Steam era. Most of the physical PC games I bought as a kid were heavily discounted at gaming stores several years after their original release. I'm more curious about how teens and adults did it back in the day. I know piracy was a big thing back then so I'm more curious about how you legitimately got games.

Couple things I'm curious about:

Were there game stores in your area dedicated to PC games? When I was growing up, it was rare for me to see physical PC games being sold even at stores dedicated to video games like EB Games. They never had them at Toys R Us which is where I got my "normal" video games from.

It seems that PC gaming and console gaming during that era were very different as well. At least different enough that there were entire gaming magazines dedicated to just PC gaming. What's up with that? I would have been super interested in Doom as a kid.

Just a sidenote about game recommendations, they dont have to be good games necessarily. I'd be curious about some historical oddities as well. Like I stumbled on an obscure adventure game called the Neverhood a while back. Super interesting concept but the actual game was meh.

 

[leng jai]

 

[TheYanger]

Click to shrink...

Lord no, ain't nobody have enough hard drive space to have 2 dozen games installed fam.


EDIT: and more seriously OP....not really sure what you're looking for I guess. You just bought a game, put the disc in, and installed it. It's not that different than installing anything else on your computer, it's just that physical media is dead now, but aside from literally putting the disc in, it was the same.

Now when you go back pre-windows 95 (which is when I would say DOS started to finally phase totally out of the scene for gaming) it gets a lot more fun, configuring sound drivers and whatnot, or even farther and just dealing with different graphic formats. But prior to steam? Nothing special. Piracy was basically always possible, up until the early 90s you usually got pass codes or spinner wheels or whatever else to protect against it in the box, but certainly not every game had them. Then the internet came around and piracy got more common over time, and PC gaming had a pretty big slump - still good games but it wasn't profitable enough for the big boys, then things turned around in the mid 2000s, not entirely because of steam by any means, but because of unreal engine and development tools codifying the development pipeline in a way that didn't require separate studios for each version of a game anymore.

 

[yaffi]

I usually just went to Media Markt (Germany) to browse and buy PC games. Back then they had a huge selection. I remember buying stuff like Diablo 2 (LoD), Warcraft 3, Gothic 1+2 (NdR), HoMM 3+4, Baldur's Gate 1+2 (ToB) and games that are pretty much forgotten now like Summoner.

 

[Static]

I was a Command & Conquer fan who became a Blizzard (particularly Diablo 2) fan who became a Valve fan. I'm still the last two of those things. Diablo 2 was a big deal. It felt like Diablo 2 and Starcraft were games that lasted a life time. They were some really cool shit in their hay day. I don't know that anyone needs to seek either out today, though. They're still great and always will be but there's always fantastic new shit coming out and almost all of it lets you set your resolution higher than 800x600.

 

[Xeontech]

I would have said city of Heroes

But it's gone :(...

 

[texhnolyze]

I mostly play MMORPGs in the entirety of 2000s.

 

[Meccs]

I think even old games are on one service or another by now. Wing Commander, X-Wing games for example are still awesome if you can get over the dated 3D graphics.

 

[Deleted member 1659]

Lord no, ain't nobody have enough hard drive space to have 2 dozen games installed fam.


EDIT: and more seriously OP....not really sure what you're looking for I guess. You just bought a game, put the disc in, and installed it. It's not that different than installing anything else on your computer, it's just that physical media is dead now, but aside from literally putting the disc in, it was the same.

Click to shrink...

I'm more interested in the culture around gaming back then on PCs. When I was a kid, nobody really talked about PC games on the playground, the gaming magazines we read didn't have any coverage for them but yet there is a long rich history of it that gamers tend to gloss over. There must have been something because the further you go back, the list of PC exclusives seem to grow more and more massive.

 

[Beje]

stories about PC gaming before Steam

Click to shrink...

I own a handful of (legit, original, not pirated) boxed PC games from the mid 00s that I have to use a pirate no-CD crack and similar sketchy patches in order to make them work even on old hardware due to predatory DRM that would be considered outright malware nowadays and current OS's identify as such.

 

[Unkindled]

Claw and Ancient Conquest.

 

[PuppetMinion]

Basically the PC back then was often more like a console where you mostly bought physical disks. You went and got the cd, put it in the computer and booted up the game. Often from the launcher that booted up when you put in the disc. Assuming it was already installed.

 

[Calibro]

One of the best pre-Steam indie games right here. Played for hours and hours when I was a kid. Downloaded tons of custom levels. Still have warm memories of it.

 

[.exe]

I used to have a sizeable library on Direct2drive before that went under. That was where I got Split/Second. It wasn't available for years until about two years ago when it popped up on Steam together with a bunch of other Vivendi published games. D2D has since reappeared but my library is still lost. Sucks!

That Clive Barker horror game is something I owned physically. Got it from a relative as a gift -- judgement-free zone pls hah. Anyway, it never appeared on Steam or other digital download stores as far as I know. Everything else has eventually popped up on either Steam or GOG.

I didn't play much on PC back then, but it was a PITA with CD-ROMs. Had to keep them in your drive at all times. I always just downloaded no-CD cracks. Fun times. You never knew for sure if you'd accidentally download a virus.

Oh god, I just remembered how I played so much Total Annihilation and brought it over to friends that disc 1 eventually scratched up so bad from the back and forth that it couldn't be read anymore (kids, never careful with anything). That was sad. What a game though!

 

[samred]

You may have passed your floppies/CDs around to a few friends, but it wasn't like today where a single copy can just fly all over the Internet in seconds. Plus, you needed the CD in the drive during the CD-ROM era, or you needed to keep the big-ass instruction manual around for random "piracy" checks ("what's the fifth letter on page 27," etc).

I bought most of my boxed PC games at Babbage's, though I didn't have a computer in my house until 1995, so, mostly the obvious stuff (Doom, Duke 3D, Quake, WarCraft II, StarCraft, Diablo) and some of that era's weird hangers-on (Jazz Jackrabbit, a Duke 2D game compilation, Hexen, Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, Riven).

That's also where I got my first Gravis Gamepad. This was as good as PC gamers had for what felt like an eternity:

 

[Kemono]

 

[skeezx]

my biggest gaming regret is being 'of age' during a lot of PC milestones but being totally oblivious to them. Ultima, Fallout, Elder scrolls 1&2 and even Quake was stuff of another universe back then, wasn't disinterest i just never thought bothering with it until decades later

on the odd occasion i did dip into PC the game wouldn't install for whatever reason. i grew with the mindset it just wasn't a suitable gaming device outside of command and conquer or whatever. if you told me 90% of my gaming would be on PC in 2019 i'd be very, very confused

 

[DSP]

Command and Conquer was the biggest one for me, I think the series was huge overall back in the day. Felt like everybody played it to some extent at least.

There are countless FPS games some of which that I don't even remember the name of. There used to be so many of them being made 98-2005 ish, all single player. Most of them were honestly junk. Heard of games like IGI? Pariah? Chaser? Still I really enjoyed those years, felt like there was a new fps to check out every month even though most were terrible. Then COD came out, it changed the game. First CoD was a very big game for me, bigger than HL2 even. It actually felt like you're playing a movie and that basically defined the direction for the next decade of games.

edit: Forgot SWAT, that was probably my favorite FPS games then and there is really nothing like it anymore.

 

[Pooh]

Let's start a ResetEra shareware ring! We'll mail floppies to each other. Anybody got the latest Apogee game?

 

[Static]

That's also where I got my first Gravis Gamepad. This was as good as PC gamers had for what felt like an eternity:

Click to shrink...

When was the flightstick flood? I feel like they were somewhat everywhere around that time and every time I saw the Gravis I was just like "But why?"

 

[Cliff Steele]

First PC Game I bought was Kings Quest V. That was in 1992 I think. I was 8 back then and had some money from my birthday. Even tho I had consoles like the Mega Drive or later the SNES I was always drawn to the PC as it had "mature" games. I played mostly PC right through to this generation actually. Because all my friends had PCs and a lot more free time than today we played Multiplayer or LAN games almost daily. Stuff like Command and Conquer, WarCraft, Diablo... You name it. I played mostly strategy games with the odd RPG in between. Gothic, Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale, you name it. Later I started to play shooters. In 2002 I almost exclusively worked on a huge Shooter catalog. Finishing one by one. But also back then I just went to Media Markt and bought my games disc. Only stuff I heard friends raving about. One particular game they all praised was a small game called World of WarCraft in 2005. So I got myself Internet and the downfall began. With the release of the Xbox 360 I got back into console gaming a bit only to make my 360 a Gears of War machine and staying on WoW all the way to Lich King. In 2009 I had 6 games on my Steam Account.

I now own close to 600 :/

 

[Valdega]

PC games had a pretty prominent retail presence in the 90's. I remember walking into an Electronics Boutique and seeing an entire wall filled with the classic big box PC games. It was a beautiful thing. Most games came with big manuals that were actually interesting and useful to read. Shareware was also easy to find. I couldn't afford to buy full games as a child so I relied on discs that came with PC gaming magazines and shareware that I could find in various stores. PC gaming magazines were pretty fantastic back then. Really thick with far fewer ads. I've kept all my magazines since the 90's and you can clearly see them shrink in size and become disproportionately filled with ads over the years.

That said, I don't miss physical at all. Discs are a nuisance and it took a while before DVD became standard. By that point, PC games would routinely ship with 3-6 discs and had 20+ minute install times. Then there was as all the DRM. Disc checks, CD keys, online activations, limited installs, etc. Patches were a nuisance too. There were no automatic updates back then so you had to do research to see if there were any patches for your games, then go and find a reliable and fast website to download them from. Then there was the 3D accelerator debacle before Direct3D became standard. Basically, every GPU vendor had their own chipset and API, requiring specific executables just to make use of 3D acceleration. Rendition, Matrox, PowerVR, 3DFX, ATi, S3... it was a mess. Not all chipsets were supported by all games either. People who complain about modern PC gaming being too complicated have no idea what they're talking about.

As for games, things were way different back then. Activision actually released a diverse range of games, from adventure games like Zork to future sports like Hyperblade to vehicular combat like Interstate '76 to RPGs like Vampire: The Masquerade to mech sims like Mechwarrior. Pretty much the exact opposite of modern Activision. Raven, now relegated to pumping out CoD DLC, made a lot of PC classics like Jedi Outcast, Soldier of Fortune, Hexen and Heretic. Microsoft was fully behind PC gaming at the time, releasing some of the best peripherals and a wide variety of exclusives like Midtown Madness, Age of Empires, Crimson Skies, Motocross Madness, Freelancer, Starlancer, etc. Interplay was huge in the PC space, releasing most of the classic CRPGs as well as Shiny's more eccentric offerings like Sacrifice and Messiah. The modern AAA landscape is actually pretty depressing by comparison, with far less innovation and creativity.

 

[Cipherr]

Constant uninstall and reinstall due to freaking small ass hard drives and I was too young to afford more.

I lived on demos on PC magazine disks at times too.

I had flaky friends who would never finish a Might and Magic game (I think thats the one where you build your side and battle the other?). It was annoying. I loved that game.

I cant think of anything else except blue screens when the hd had 'bad sectors' and when a ram stick went bad etc.

Edit: Oh this is about how you bought them? Back then, all the Software Etc/Babagges and other game stores had PC game sections. Walmart and the like had them too. It was completely normal back then.

 

[Atolm]

PC games here were grouped together with professional applications like Office and Photoshop. I remember seeing those flight sims with boxes around 2-3kg (due to the insane manuals they used to carry) and HOTAS sticks. Console gaming in the kids department.

 

[Anthony Hopkins]

I would go to a retail store, buy the game I wanted, go home, install it, play it.

 

[Deraldin]

I bought all my PC games from EB Games. In the late 90's and early 2000's my local EB stores had more shelf space allocated to PC games than they did to any one console. PC big boxes took up a lot of space! I don't remember much about the larger standalone EB store, but the one in the mall had the entire right hand wall for PC games. The back wall and what remained of the left wall on either side of the checkout counter was split between Nintendo and Sony. PC games at other stores were limited availability from what I recall. I remember Zellers used to have cheap value games near the cash registers. Jewel cases only. No box. Most of the time what you would find would be things like various solitaire packs, or mahjong, things of that variety. I remember buying Earthsiege and Alien Legacy for a couple bucks each from a bin of clearance games.

Most of my early PC game stuff was burned CD's from family. Command and Conquer: Red Alert and Terminal Velocity were the two big ones that I played a lot of. I didn't really have any money of my own back then so I was at the whim of my parents for what games I could buy. Even up till high school in 2002 or so we had lots of games that were burned copies traded among friends at school. By that point we had hit CD keys rather than code words from the manual. Ended up with Starcraft and a love of stealth games from the one friend that owned a copy of Thief.

Console gaming was a thing but it wasn't huge. I think about half of my friends had a playstation or N64, but outside of Final Fantasy and eventual GTA3 I don't remember people talking about them much.

 

[Deleted member 9857]

check out the No One Lives Forever games if you can find them, they're trapped in rights purgatory but the second is one of my favorite FPS ever

 

[BigDes]

I own a bunch of big box pc games that I do not believe are available on steam or other stores

Including Blade Runner. Which is an amazing point and click game even now.

 

[Ploid 6.0]

Best game I ever played, Final Fantasy XI. When I moved to PC from the PS2 version I still hadn't installed Steam. It took a long while for me to eventually need steam for something.

I remember buying a lot of $5 PC games. Battle Bots was one of them. A big sim city/copter/racer/etc pack was something else I got. Lots of interesting games that I would probably never play today.

Oh I got a full Deus Ex from a PC magazine.

 

[Isee]

I bought PC gaming magazines to get access to news, reviews and demos.
If I liked a game I went to a store, bought it, put in the installation medium (first diskette then CD-Rom) and played the game. During the pre 3d acceleration times I had two bot discs for DOS (XMS and EMS) that worked for most games.
Drivers and plug 'n play started to become reliable around late win95,98 (though not perfect) and pc gaming was more easy from year to year. Long gone are the times of setting jumpers, master slave configurations, extended Vs expanded memory, IRQ management, joystick calibration, different connections and ports.

Classic, good games that aren't on steam? Where to start?

Privateer 1+2
Syndicate 1
Most LucasFilm adventure games like Zak Mckracken.
Wing commander 1/2 (should be on origin)
Command and conquer (origin)
Ultima 7 (origin)
Wizardy 7
Jedi Knight games (GOG)
Mechwarrior 2 and mercenaries
StarCraft (battle.net)
Alone in the Dark (pre Resident evil, but resident evil style horror game)
Duke Nukem 3d
Quake 1
Gobliiins

And many, many more.

 

[ghostcrew]

My pre-Steam story is that before Steam was a thing I owned a boxed collection of all the Half-Life games (pre HL2, so all the expansion). My dog ate it. Digital is amazing.

 

[Luxor]

Buying old games in the 80's and 90's involved huge boxes, 300 page manuals, colour coded wheels to combat piracy, multiple floppy disks and jiggling about with autoexec.bat and config.sys - F15 strike eagle and Falcon wer the ones I always remember

You kids don't know you're living /oldmanshoutsatcloud

 

[HandsomeCharles]

Freelancer! My first proper introduction to online gaming, and it has a really fun single player campaign too!

Don't know how you' get a hold of it legally any more to be honest.

 

[Ploid 6.0]

Oh I had a game called Falcon something, the manual was huge.

 

[Stiler]

In the 90's when I started PC gaming around 93'ish or so getting games worked pretty much like console games.

For the best selection you would go to a dedicated game store, back then this meant going to the nearest mall which was about a 30-40 min drive away. There were three gaming stores back then, you had Babbages, EB games, and then Software, etc (that was the actual name, software, etc).

At these stores they all had a decent stock of pc games and generally the employees could help you out if you had questions about a game, etc. They also had console games too, but unlike today it wasn't like "console games and accessories and then a tiny tiny pc section, it was a good split with major pc gaming front and center.

As far as buying games outside of the mall, there was always your Wal-mart and K-mart stores, which although they didn't have as big a selection as those game stores you could still find some good games (and they actually had some great cheap-game deals from time to time where you could find some gems you didn't even know about). They generally stocked the newest "big" games too but the more obscure or such you wouldn't always find there.

As far as playing games back then goes, without steam most games you just played, just popped in the cd, installed it and then off you went. Early games might have had a keyword copy protection, where it'd ask you for a word that was found on "x" page of the game manual or some even had a "code wheel" that you used, and then later on they had the ole "cd key" copy protection. Some games back then? They just didn't have anything, no copy protection or nothing, just install the game and enjoy it.

There were some services that pc games made use of in the mid-late 90's for online play, one of the most popular ones was called "Heat.net" that was bundled with pc games a lot, with "heat bucks" that you could use on the service.


Another popular one of that era was gamespy, which many games made use of for their online play.

Then you had a microsoft service that was called "The Zone," which many microsoft games used and others, like the early Rainbow Six games for instance, or motocross madness which was hell of a great game.

There are so many great 90's games that I can recommend.

One of my personal favorites is the RTS game series Myth, which was developed by Bungie (yes, the same Bungie that went on to make Halo). Myth I and II are amazing games, they focus solely on combat and telling a great epic storyline and the combat is just perfection. HIGHLY recommend them even in this day and age (sadly they aren't sold digitally, which is a bummer) but are still worth checking out.

They also had amazing multiplayer, which even to this day still has people playing it online even though bungie.net closed years ago, the fans didn't want to lose it and so they ended up setting up their own service, as well as updating all the Myth games to work on modern OS's as well as bug fixing, etc (they work on Windows 10 with these).
You can see the updates and things here if you ever decide to check it out:
http://projectmagma.net/


Another fun game that is quite forgotten about these days is Rocket Jockey, it was just a fun little sports game that was a blast to play:

 

[BigDes]

So one of the best gaming moments in my life was a pc gaming thing kind of

I was walking into town and found a cd wallet lying in the middle of the street

Inside was like
Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate 2
Icewind Dale
Planescape Torment
Broken Sword 1 and 2
Commandos 1 and 2
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
AvP 1 and 2
Jedi Knight 1 and 2
Civ III
Deus Ex
Thief 1, 2 and 3
Fallout 1, 2 and Tactics
Gal Civ 2
Half Life, Opposing Forces and Blue Shift
Hitman 1 and 2
All the Oddworld games
SWAT 3



Inside were like the some of the absolute best games on pc, the dude who lost it had even printed out the serial numbers of the games on them so I didn't even need to no cd crack them. I feel so bad for the person who lost the wallet but there was no identification or address in the wallet, we even took out an ad in the local paper but no one answered it.

 

[Deleted member 46598]

Edutainment.

I didn't do any PC gaming again until the mid 2000s when I discover the old ID software games plus a ton of odd late 90s stuff that could run on my Pentium 2 crap computer from the turn of the century. Things didn't improve much over time so most my PC experience was pre-Steam while it was growing, and I didn't get into modern PC gaming until 2011. A lot of them are on Steam but many are not.

The best one I know, albeit AFTER Steam was a thing is probably Swat 4. One of the best shooters ever made.

 

[Code Artisan]

You had to manually download and install patches, each one leaving an entry in the list of installed programs. That was really infuriating. You also had
to install many clients like WON, Gamespy, All-seeing eye, Battlenet, ...

A game that i enjoyed and that is not available neither on Steam nor GOG is Gunman Chronicles

 

[Deleted member 10549]

In my country, pre-steam pc gaming was all about piracy. It was just normal here.

 

[Tizoc]

Most LucasFilm adventure games like Zak Mckracken.

Wing commander 1/2 (should be on origin)

Wizardy 7

Jedi Knight games (GOG)

Alone in the Dark (pre Resident evil, but resident evil style horror game)
Duke Nukem 3d
Quake 1
Gobliiins

And many, many more.

Click to shrink...

Umm some of those did get released on Steam

A dozen LucasArts games got released on Steam, but are as DRM-free as the GOG release
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?publisher=Lucasfilm

Scroll down to see more

Wing Commander 1 and 2 are on GOG as is Syndicate 1 iirc.





Duke Nukem 3D got updated re-releases though wouldn't they play and allowing modding much like the original game?


Quake 1 and 2 are on Steam AND GOG with mods to let players use the original music.

3 Goblins games are on GOG.

 

[Oreiller]

I wasn't really a PC gamer before Steam, but I remember spending hours playing Starcraft, Warcraft 3 and Oblivion on there. I was also really fond of Sim City 3000 and other sim games, like Ceasar or Zeus.

 

[Kattlauv]

check out the No One Lives Forever games if you can find them, they're trapped in rights purgatory but the second is one of my favorite FPS ever

Click to shrink...

Oh my god yes. Had so much fun with those.

 

[nded]

I still yearn for Aliens Vs. Predator 2 and the No One Lives Forever games.

 

[JayBee]

RTS games all day everday. Started with a 3.11 though, with keen commander etc. Then later point and click games RTS, diablo 2. Wacky wheels, skunny karts, great mario kart clones imo. It was a different time because WASD for 1st person shooters still wasn't the standard.

Edit: Oh yeah, baldur's friggin gate.

 

[Kunomori]

I miss an Eidos game named Fate of the Dragon

 

[OhNoMelon]

Outside of a few items I think like 90% of my pc game buying pre-steam was going into GAME and getting a bunch of Sold-Out budget releases that were always like 3 for £10 or whatever.

Blade Runner and ONI are some old favourites that aren't available digitally.

 

[Joffy]

I was mainly a fan of those bad ass massive boxes. Loved opening them up to see how many floppy discs/cds were inside and then they'd often have like full blown books and stuff inside them. All completely impractical of course but have a single game be as large as a PS4 definitely made it feel important (until I was installing the 5th disc)

 

[Deleted member 9035]

happypuppy.com

 

[Deleted member 3897]

Fileplanet.com for patches and stuff. Felt like walking on a minefield clicking through that site where the mines were toolbars, viruses, trojans, pop-ups etc.

 

[Static]

happypuppy.com

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