Huge size of GOG games

[RCBH928]

having the emulator packed in makes a lot of sense...its understandable now..

but seriously I am amazed that back in 99 there were 1GB games, i remember it took something like 40min to download a 5min mp3 song. of course you can dream of watching online video.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

having the emulator packed in makes a lot of sense...its understandable now..

but seriously I am amazed that back in 99 there were 1GB games, i remember it took something like 40min to download a 5min mp3 song. of course you can dream of watching online video.

I remember all my The Sims games took about 1.5gb of my then 20gb hard drive. Flight Simulator 2000 took something like 1.3gb for the full install.

[Pulsar_t]

having the emulator packed in makes a lot of sense...its understandable now..

but seriously I am amazed that back in 99 there were 1GB games, i remember it took something like 40min to download a 5min mp3 song. of course you can dream of watching online video.

Dial-up internet was the common infrastructure back then for most of the world. During the days of Dreamcast broadband adoption picked up noticeably, but it didn't really amount to much.

People back then had to either buy the genuine article (ie the CD-ROM box) or seek a shady retailer for pirated copies, which were mostly imported from the Far East. CD burners also cost about as much as a laptop does now, so the extent of piracy was limited, but the market for videogames was also visibly smaller.

[RCBH928]

having the emulator packed in makes a lot of sense...its understandable now..

but seriously I am amazed that back in 99 there were 1GB games, i remember it took something like 40min to download a 5min mp3 song. of course you can dream of watching online video.

Dial-up internet was the common infrastructure back then for most of the world. During the days of Dreamcast broadband adoption picked up noticeably, but it didn't really amount to much.

People back then had to either buy the genuine article (ie the CD-ROM box) or seek a shady retailer for pirated copies, which were mostly imported from the Far East. CD burners also cost about as much as a laptop does now, so the extent of piracy was limited, but the market for videogames was also visibly smaller.

I remember exactly what you are saying to be true...
but am not sure if a CD burner was as expensive as a laptop now, I think i got one around 99-2000 for around $300... I think that is the price of bluray burners today, how ironic

[isiolia]

I remember exactly what you are saying to be true...
but am not sure if a CD burner was as expensive as a laptop now, I think i got one around 99-2000 for around $300... I think that is the price of bluray burners today, how ironic

Blu-ray burners start at around $70, so, bit cheaper. If I recall, CD burners were definitely affordable enough by 99-2000, if not DVD burners (if not then, soon after). Then again, you can buy a laptop for $350-400 these days (not a good one per se, but, not a netbook).
Not everyone was stuck on a modem at that point either.

Roll it back a few years earlier though, and burners were far rarer due to expense. We were all rocking Zip drives and such.

It really wasn't uncommon for games to take up multiple CDs even in the early or mid 90s though. As mentioned, developers were happy to fill up discs with audio and video that they didn't have the means to compress nearly as well as we can now. The storage offered by optical discs was relatively vast compared to HDD space.
For example, my first Pentium machine came with a 1.2GB HDD, not even a couple full CDs worth of data. From that time period, Wing Commander IV and Gabriel Knight II both came on six CDs apiece. Obviously, they were not designed to require you to install all of it, but they had gigabytes worth of data all the same.

[RCBH928]

I remember exactly what you are saying to be true...
but am not sure if a CD burner was as expensive as a laptop now, I think i got one around 99-2000 for around $300... I think that is the price of bluray burners today, how ironic

Blu-ray burners start at around $70, so, bit cheaper. If I recall, CD burners were definitely affordable enough by 99-2000, if not DVD burners (if not then, soon after). Then again, you can buy a laptop for $350-400 these days (not a good one per se, but, not a netbook).
Not everyone was stuck on a modem at that point either.

Roll it back a few years earlier though, and burners were far rarer due to expense. We were all rocking Zip drives and such.

It really wasn't uncommon for games to take up multiple CDs even in the early or mid 90s though. As mentioned, developers were happy to fill up discs with audio and video that they didn't have the means to compress nearly as well as we can now. The storage offered by optical discs was relatively vast compared to HDD space.
For example, my first Pentium machine came with a 1.2GB HDD, not even a couple full CDs worth of data. From that time period, Wing Commander IV and Gabriel Knight II both came on six CDs apiece. Obviously, they were not designed to require you to install all of it, but they had gigabytes worth of data all the same.

1)Really? Bluray burners are $70? Thats not bad at all. I must also say this must be the quickest media type+burner to drop in price ever. 2007 so expensive->2012 very affordable, just as much as DVD.

2) I dont count Audio and Video as part of the game, if they fill CDs with them thats ok, but its not part of the game ....unless its FMV game. Today you can have 0 video and the game still is few GBs in size.

Now that you mentioned that your HDD 1.2GB in size but a couple of CDs were 1.4GB in size, makes me realize how CDs must have been awesome back then, I bet it was like current day bluray or even more, since a couple of Blurays does not match the size of an HDD.

I remember my first computer was around maybe 500mb in size in 1995 and it costed me I believe $2,122 . When did you get your computer, its more than double the size of my HDD :p

[isiolia]

1)Really? Bluray burners are $70? Thats not bad at all. I must also say this must be the quickest media type+burner to drop in price ever. 2007 so expensive->2012 very affordable, just as much as DVD.

Yeah, they're that cheap already. A decent DVD burner is $20-25 though, so, still relatively expensive

I think a lot of it has to do with how optical media is falling out of favor for the PC. Blu-ray as a storage format never really caught on. It took DVD a while to start being the standard distribution medium, but I honestly don't think that will ever happen with Blu-ray.

2) I dont count Audio and Video as part of the game, if they fill CDs with them thats ok, but its not part of the game ....unless its FMV game. Today you can have 0 video and the game still is few GBs in size.

Now that you mentioned that your HDD 1.2GB in size but a couple of CDs were 1.4GB in size, makes me realize how CDs must have been awesome back then, I bet it was like current day bluray or even more, since a couple of Blurays does not match the size of an HDD.

I remember my first computer was around maybe 500mb in size in 1995 and it costed me I believe $2,122 . When did you get your computer, its more than double the size of my HDD :p

I think if it's something superfluous, such as an intro video, then it's fair to discount it as not really part of the game. With some games though, they were taking advantage of the capability to try stuff that was simply not feasible without the space afforded by CD-ROM. The FMV-infused style that some of those games had wasn't something they could have done on floppy disks, so to me it's inherently part of the game.

Like you said though, at the time, the storage they had to work with was awesome. While FMV titles and all seem largely silly now, back then it was really pretty cool to see.

The PC in question I got in early or mid '96 I think. Either way, I worked at the store and the typical HDD size for machines at the time was 1.2-1.6GB. It wasn't a particularly expensive machine, around $1500-1600 I think, back when a PC costing $2000+ wasn't uncommon and a 17" monitor could easily run $600-700...computers are so cheap now.

[Breetai]

King, are you confusing the year 1999 for the year 1994? Plenty of games were well over a gig in 1999 (heck, some well known games were in 1994). My PC I bought in autumn 1999 had a 40GB hard drive. I was heavily into MP3s (Napster and Audio Galaxy) and most people I knew then had cable internet (in Canada/USA). Downloading music and videos then really wasn't a big deal.

[RCBH928]

@isiolla

I am not sure why Bluray wont pick up as storage medium, considering how cheap HDDs are now I think they are not as reliable. It will be great to have a physical back up. Imagine the stuff you can back up with a 100GB bluray(those do exist right?) . Others will tell you they will store it in the "cloud" . Well the cloud is good except for:
1)You need internet connection
2) You need an ultra fast connection, to upload backups and download files back again
3)Consider me paranoid, but I feel like somebody is snooping on my files. Not private. I wont store family photos for example.

I also remember when 17" used something to drool all over, such a huge screen None the less, I believe quality 22-24" screens still run up to $500 or so today.

@Bretai

I am just having a hard time believing this. This is the reason

Your hard drive in '99 was 40GB. My 2008 macbook was 160GB. That means that during 10 years the hard-drive size tripled in size. Yet the lowest spec macbook today(only 4 years later) is 500GB . Basically, you want to tell me that in the past 4 years , hard drive tripled , and in 10 years earlier the hard drive tripled too?

it also does not make sense, because my iMac in 2002 was 80GB. By that time we already had the Xbox/ps2 games which were several GBs big. but back in '99 , The most advanced thing was the Dreamcast which was a gig in size or so.

I am not saying that several Gigabytes games did not exist in '99, I am just saying they were uncommon. Remember, those who made games in '99 , had targeting PC purchasers of '96,'97,'98 in mind. So yeah, your game should meet the specs of a '96 machine most likely.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

Your hard drive in '99 was 40GB. My 2008 macbook was 160GB. That means that during 10 years the hard-drive size tripled in size. Yet the lowest spec macbook today(only 4 years later) is 500GB . Basically, you want to tell me that in the past 4 years , hard drive tripled , and in 10 years earlier the hard drive tripled too?

This is a bit of a poor argument. You're comparing laptop drives to desktop drives, and based only in experience. By that same logic. I had a 120gb hard drive in 2003ish. I had a 500gb drive in 06. And a 1tb drive now.

MacBooks, and Apple computers in general, have never come with big drives, and Apple charges an unbelievable amount of money to upgrade. Not to mention laptop hard drive sizes are always behind desktops.

In '99, DVDs existed but weren't all that common, plenty of games hit over the 1gb mark.