Gaming Issues of the Past

[Hatta]

Floppies were a pain the later PC years too. They were prone to failure, and some games came on as many as a dozen 1.44MB floppies.

DRM back in the day often consisted of asking the user for a code from the manual or a codesheet included in the game. If you lost it, you were stuck.

[Ivo]

Floppies were a pain the later PC years too. They were prone to failure, and some games came on as many as a dozen 1.44MB floppies.

The worse I had with floppies was, on games, Realms of Arkania on the Amiga (no HDD) and 7 floppies I think, plus the "data floppy" with character info and saves. Way too much floppy swapping, that game was meant to be installed to HDD. The Amiga drive was DD, so around half the capacity of the 1.44 MB floppies.

I also had Master of Magic on the PC, I think also with 7 floppies, but at least after you installed that was it.

It is not gaming related, but I think the very most I handled was over 30 floppies (31 I think) for an install of MS Office (if memory serves me it was version 4.something, still on Windows 3.1).

Thank goodness for the rise of CDs and optical media. I think CDs were somewhat of a special case, although there were ZIP drives they never really took off for regular consumers, and perhaps due to the shift of media that were writeable to one that mostly wasn't delayed things a bit.

I think you don't have nearly as many stories of people installing mass-market stuff with 10 or 30 CDs (Baldur's Gate and Diablo had 4 I think, that is the maximum I personally remember experiencing).

The jump from 1 MB to over 600 MB was quite a big one. There weren't other jumps with 2 orders of magnitude since. It was really something I would say. Think about it now: you could have one CD with the data of hundreds of floppies... That could be quite a wonder back in the day. A DVD has less than 10 CDs and a Blu-ray (started with 25 GB) less than 10 DVDs*.

* There are now BRs with 50 GB and 100 GB, although possibly not in common usage.

Ivo.

[Erik_Twice]

There have been many. From the top of my head....

Satanism scare surrounding Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering and any other fantasy game, or, dare I say, book. (From the 80s to well into the 90s)

Arcade bannings in the US.

Nintendo's monopolistic practises with the Nintendo Entertainment System, specially in the US.

Videogame Nasties: After the 1993 release of Night Trap and fueled by the popularity of Mortal Kombat there was a wave of protests and attempts to ban "violent videogames". In the US Night Trap was taken to congress as an example, with politicians saying the game was about killing women and Nintendo as a neutral expert against the Sega game.

There was also a "sexism" controversy with the same game but it's more of a footnote.

The RPG Killer: Some time after FFVII was released, some crazy Spanish guy killed his parents with a katana. The media jumped on it, saying that he loved roleplaying games and thus, went crazy. Even though the scare was blatanty stupid on several levels and FFVII was not a pen and paper roleplaying game the hysteria would affect those games mainly. This is basically a replication of the earlier satanist scare surrounding D&D but in the late 90s.

Columbine Massacre: The killer apparently liked Doom. That means he killed people because of a violent videogame. See above.


Most of these controversies started in the US and propagated to Europe some years later.

[CRTGAMER]

PCs games have always had system requirement and compatibility issues.

Oh, yeah PC's I don't think will ever escape becoming obsolete as games grow more advanced.

This. I guess this is where a game console might have an edge, the software coding does not have to be compromised in order to support all the different hardware setups. Although PC setup configuration is not a pain as in the past.

Speaking of requirements, remember the DOS days where the games would require a specific memory bootup? HIMEM, EMS and even no memory management boot depending on the game. I labeled any game in the Menu that would need EMS or Clean Boot.

[Snowman Death Droid]

There have been many. From the top of my head....

Satanism scare surrounding Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering and any other fantasy game, or, dare I say, book. (From the 80s to well into the 90s)

Arcade bannings in the US.

Nintendo's monopolistic practises with the Nintendo Entertainment System, specially in the US.

The RPG Killer: Some time after FFVII was released, some crazy Spanish guy killed his parents with a katana. The media jumped on it, saying that he loved roleplaying games and thus, went crazy. Even though the scare was blatanty stupid on several levels and FFVII was not a pen and paper roleplaying game the hysteria would affect those games mainly. This is basically a replication of the earlier satanist scare surrounding D&D but in the late 90s.

These are the ones I never knew about. Were the Arcade Bannings due to the violent video game controversy? Or some other reason?

Also, people thought D&D was satanic? Did that many people really believe that?

[BoneSnapDeez]

Yeah, disk/disc swapping was annoying.

I remember the transition from the 4th (SNES/Genesis/TurboGrafx-16) to 5th (N64/Saturn/PSX) generation to be especially jarring. Suddenly I had to insert multiple discs to play through games, save on memory cards instead of carts themselves, and had to sit through lengthy load times. The graphics during the beginning of the 3D era were ugly as sin too, glad we're past that.

[fastbilly1]

Also, people thought D&D was satanic? Did that many people really believe that?

They still do.

[irixith]

The C64 floppy drive had it's own CPU and developers could write instructions specifically to it to have the read head move and IIRC it was possible to have it move fast and abrubtly enough to knock itself out of alignment.

Holy crap! Glad that practice died out. It's hard to imagine a developer sabotaging someone's hardware in today's market.

They should still do it, IMO. That shit would be AWESOME.

[Hobie-wan]

Also, people thought D&D was satanic? Did that many people really believe that?

They still do.

Indeed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_% ... troversies

There were religious intervention camps back in the day that D&D player's families would take them for 'de-brainwashing' and such.

[Erik_Twice]

Were the Arcade Bannings due to the violent video game controversy? Or some other reason?

No, no, the arcade bannings were mainly during the arcade boom. Basically uptight people wouldn't have arcades in their tranquil midwest town or touristic city.

It was similar to other bannings on other places young people gathered in a sense. Some American cities still have bannings on arcades.

Also, people thought D&D was satanic? Did that many people really believe that?

Yes, yes, they did! Big controversy too, with several deaths and crimes being blamed on D&D and with lots of films fueling the outrage. Here's a sample:

http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.ASP