This. Exactly this. I remember one day, it was winter, sun was shinning, -15C, snow up to my knees, I was walking up the hill to post office to pick up my ordered game, it was Innocent Until Caught, PC adventure point&click game, on 8 floppy discs IIRC. I was so happy when I finally got it in my hands, I was walking back home and shaking the box a little to listen to the sound of rattling discs At home, I prepared a wee bowl of my favor crisps, glass of pepsi and opened the box. Spent some time on reading, playing with all the bits I found in the box, when game was installing on my 386SX 40MHz PC I kept the box on my desk till I finished the game days after. 20 years later, I'm fat (after all those crisps and downloading games from Steam...
I do know what you mean! Something is definitely lost, however I don't regret the lack of landfill-fodder. Me and a friend were thinking that a virtual literal games library, with virtual boxes and manuals etc might be a nice application for VR.
I used to play Battletech campaigns with really harsh resupply limits between battles. Energy boats were the easy answer The last big box game I bought was Space Marine Collectors Edition - now there's a bigbox!
Maybe reason why you don't understand is that you never experienced this feeling. In 80s/90s games looked different and the whole buying a game "process" was different. It felt differently, it was a more "unique" feeling. Nowadays you can just go on Steam and after few clicks digital copy is ready to download. I'm not talking about playing a game, I'm talking about the whole aura around games, there was less games published those days and most of the time you only heard about the games from your friends or from paper magazines. There was no internet, it was all ..different.
Let's be honest: there were just as many games published 'back then' as now, but we don't remember the hordes of crapware the farther back we recall.
No, there were not as many as today. There was less publishers than now. 90s is when it all started to spread. People started to buy Commodore, Amiga, first PCs like 286, 386...
Wait! I DO, I said I DO know what you mean. ( I grew up playing an Atari 2600 whilst our youth club got a table-type Space Invaders, eventually learning to code on a Sinclair Spectrum. )
My apologies, I've read it as do not I was too drunk I guess when reading it Working from home advantages - glass of Johnnie on my desk
Yea... no. The video game revolution happened in the 1980s, crashed, then started to recover in the 90s. Let's put it this way: there were more Commodore 64s sold than Amiga 500s. There are far, far fewer publishers around these days than there were in the 80s - mostly 'cos they've all either gone bust or have been acquired by giants like Ubisoft or EA. Back in the 80s, any given 'publisher' was usually just one dude. Sure, you had your big names like Ocean, but you also had a million and one one-man-band outfits. It's only in the last few years with the birth of mobile gaming and digital distribution that we've started to see one-man-bands get back into the game. Heck, back in the day you had blockbusters being published by people as diverse as Robert Maxwell (Mirrorsoft), BT (Firebird), and Richard Branson (Virgin Games.) Pulling up the January-February 1986 issue of Computer Gaming World, you had adverts from publishers including Avalon Hill, Accolade, Balboa Game Co., Berserker Works, Big Ben Games, Brøderbund, Cygnus, Earthware, EA, Gamesmanship, Lance Haffner Games, Infinity Systems, Krentek Software, Mars Merchandising, MicroProse, Mid-Eastern Software, Motivated Software, Noble Screen, Ram-Tek, Reality Simulations, Rubatino Engineering, Simulations Canada, Spectrum HoloByte, Strategic Simulations, Strategic Studies Group, and Tevex. Who's still going out of that lot? EA, sure. Avalon Hill, but I don't think they make any computer games these days. Spectrum HoloByte bought MicroProse but most of the decent staff left to form Firaxis; Spectrum HoloByte itself was shut down in 1998 when Hasbro bought its corpse, then Hasbro sold what was left to Infogrames (which used the Atari name it got as part of the deal to ditch its old name.) TL;DR: There were far more publishers in the 80s than there are today, but the big ones were a lot smaller.
Hahaha. Look at my profile picture, you have no excuse! (Unless you don't recognise what's going on there, in which case you are completely excused, youngling. ) Anyone remember Deus Ex Machina? That was a big box game. I got that are a ZX Micro Fair. (Well, okay, my Dad helped me a bit.) I loved that game! Deus Ex Machina 2 is AWFUL but the 30th anniversary remake (that came with the Deus Ex Machina bundle) was *perfect*. Tell me someone else remembers Automata? PS I was one of those introverted kid coders (I was terribly ill throughout my childhood so computers were a godsend!) For my sins I ended up with a cheque for £1000 from BT at one point! PPS I know/knew Benn "Last Ninja" Daglish. Squeeee! PPPS Actually, being ill again is, I guess, why I'm computing again, interestingly. Now I've not been up for volunteering the need to make, fix, and have intellectual stimulation has pushed me the same direction again. Do need to get back to volunteering and job hunting again though when I can, missing having a sense of value and purpose.
^^ this! exactly this! I had a paper copy of a PC gaming magazine and saw these amazing looking screenshots of Homeworld, the experience of waiting to get paid, having read the review several times, then going to a physical store (either after work/college or at the weekend), to a shop where they knew you by name and would talk with you before you even bought it, in a shop full of exciting big boxes. There was something more palpable to the experience. Much less of this pre-order hype and a game was a game, everyone got the same content, not a game hacked to bits based on when you pre-order and how much you paid. It was glorious!
You jogged my memories: old, hazy ones, but that Google was able to confirm. One of my local computer games stores, early to mid 80s, was also a games publisher too, Anco Software in Dartford (most famous for the Kick Off games, Google etc tells me.) Think it started off with a different name though.
Enjoyed this thread but I must admit it's made me a little sad that I was recently convinced to get rid of my big box games (SimCity 2000, Alien Trilogy, Dark Forces, Worms United, etc.......) - May they rest in pieces!
