Oh, man, imagine thinking that minimum requirements weren't a thing before.

I once deleted the operating system just to fit a single game into my hard drive, booted from floppy while I was playing it and reversed the process when I was finished. Sometimes games were aiming at a specific speed of computer and if you had a computer that didn't run at that specific number of megahertz the game just ran like a slideshow or in fast forward. I didn't realize some of my favourite games were running under the speed cap for years sometimes. We just didn't have a concept of things running at the same refresh rate as your screen in the early 3D era until APIs fully standardized. Sometimes you upgraded your GPU and the hardware accelerated version of your old software rendered game actually ran slower.

Also, game developers "then" made arcade games that literally charged you money for dying, then charged you more money for effectively cheating at the game and actively asked you to literally pay to win. We used to think that was normal.

Also, also, we used to OBSESS about games being bigger. The size the game took up was heavily advertised and promoted, especially on consoles. Bigger was better. We were only kinda glad that CDs could do 500 Mb, so we could keep getting bigger on a single disk, but by the time FMV games got popular triple A games were back to coming into books with disks instead of pages. This was still seen as a selling point.

Also, also, also, the assembly code of a whole bunch of old games is sheer spaghetti. Half of the mechanics in NES games are just bugs. There are a couple of great Youtube channels that just break these down and tweak them. In fairness, they didn't have development tools as much as a notepad and a pencil, but still.

"Then" is just indie today.

Games back then : created by 1 to 4 people with autism because they wanted to have fun on a computer

Games now : driven by dickheads that just left business school at the whims of billionaire conglomoration funds.

To be fair, game devs did the hackiest shit to deal with the constraints of the time. They did things that no programmer would do today because they're bad practices when you're not worried about tiny amounts of RAM or storage.

Problems with game developers might better be understood as problems with capitalism, to paraphrase Ted Chiang

So we're just gonna conveniently forget all the shovelware from that time period?

You realize it's not devs that make those decisions, right? It's publishers and execs. You know, the guys who make the actual money in all this. Stop blaming devs for stupid exec decisions.

What a horrible take. Game devs were so bad at one point in the past they almost killed the entire market. Classic survivorship bias here.

I’ve written software professionally for two decades and I’m still in awe of the people who used to wring every last drop out of 512kb of memory, a floppy drive and 16 colours on the Amiga 500.

"WHY ARE YOU PIRATING OUR GAMES???"

Very rose tinted glasses. I remember horrifying cache corruption bugs that locked you out of certain game areas permanently on that save, random illegal operation exceptions crashing games (no autosave btw), the whole system regularly freezing and needing to be completely restarted, games just inexplicably not working to begin with on a regular basis because of some hardware incompatibility and the internet sucked for finding fixes then and patches weren't a thing so you were just screwed.

I would say that games not all being written in C and assembly trying to squeeze out every possible performance efficiency with nothing but dev machismo as safeguards is in fact a good thing.

Not just games . I download one of the trendy note pad apps. It’s 500mb.

For those that are unaware, the second chad is most likely referring to .kkrieger. Not a full game, but a demo (from a demoscene) whose purpose was to make a fully playable game with a max size of 96kb. Even going very slow, you won't need more than 5 minutes to finish it.

The startup is very CPU heavy and takes a while, even on modern systems, because it generates all the geometry, textures, lighting and whatnot from stored procedures.

Fuck the haters. 80s game devs were creating beauty out of nothing.

I see stuff like this and I don't blame developers/coders for all the shit that's happening. If you objectively look at gameplay and such, most games are actually pretty decent on their own. The graphics are usually really nice and the story is adequate, if not quite good, the controls are sensible and responsive...

A lot of the major complaints about modern games isn't necessarily what the devs are making, it's more about what the garbage company demands is done as part of the whole thing. Online only single player is entirely about control, keeping you from pirating the game (or at least trying to) plus supplying on you and serving you ads and such... Bad releases are because stuff gets pushed out the door before it's ready because the company needs more numbers for their profit reports, so things that haven't been given enough time and need more work get pushed onto paying customers. Day one patches are normal because between the time they seed the game to distributors like valve and Microsoft and stuff, and the time the game unlocks for launch day, stuff is still being actively worked on and fixed.

The large game studios have turned the whole thing into a meat grinder to just pump money out of their customers as much as possible and as often as possible, and they've basically ruined a lot of the simple expectations for game releases, like having a game that works and that performs adequately and doesn't crash or need huge extras (like updates) to work on day 1....

Developers themselves aren't the problem. Studios are the problem and they keep consolidating into a horrible mass of consumer hostile policies.

I never thought game patches would become such a terrible thing. But the state some games have released in has been crazy.

"The inverse square root function in the C math library isn't fast enough. That's okay, I'll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster."

DAE games bad now??

...Is the breast milk thing inspired by reality? Wait, I don't know if I really want to know.

it's not devs fault, is the company

those always online "single-player" games aren't what you think.

your ads and tracking friends are always interested in playing with you.

This is so true. Also let's not forget where game is almost unplayable and constantly crashing on release.