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6/27/2025, 4:18:24 PM
>>713799480
I only spent my early childhood completely without steam since I played Half-Life 2 sometime in middle school, 2005 iirc. Most of the stuff I played in windows 95/98 was edutainment and "activity center" junk, and the games I played on XP before steam were mostly Blizzard games, Age of Empires, The Sims, etc. normie stuff. I was hype for Spore lol
Even before I used Steam, I bought a few games from direct2drive, used GameTap once or twice and already knew how to emulate old console games and pirate pc games. I became a pretty regular Steam user once the Orange Box came out.
So, most of my memory of what PC gaming was like before Steam was getting dragged along to Circuit City or Best Buy and looking at long aisles full of big box games I couldn't buy for a couple of years, getting replaced by thick DVD-style boxes and eventually cases for about five years until the 2010s rolled around.
I remember GameStop also stocking a lot of PC games before then. The video store in town didn't, but had a shitload of anime and video games for sale and rent back when that place was still open.
The few games that I remember getting as gifts in the late 90s and 2000s all came with nice manuals, a lot of full color ones. The boxes are nice. Physical PC games are very nice.
Between the glut of games I remember seeing on shelves and stuff I would read about in magazines as a kid, it seemed like it was pretty livable without adware, i.e., Steam.
I wasn't paying for PC parts myself until like 2011, but from what I understand the worst thing about PC gaming in the 90s and early 2000s was that parts would quickly become obsolete to an extent very quickly back then, and that they weren't terribly cheap. The insides of most PC cases also didn't have rounded off edges back then, very annoying.
I only spent my early childhood completely without steam since I played Half-Life 2 sometime in middle school, 2005 iirc. Most of the stuff I played in windows 95/98 was edutainment and "activity center" junk, and the games I played on XP before steam were mostly Blizzard games, Age of Empires, The Sims, etc. normie stuff. I was hype for Spore lol
Even before I used Steam, I bought a few games from direct2drive, used GameTap once or twice and already knew how to emulate old console games and pirate pc games. I became a pretty regular Steam user once the Orange Box came out.
So, most of my memory of what PC gaming was like before Steam was getting dragged along to Circuit City or Best Buy and looking at long aisles full of big box games I couldn't buy for a couple of years, getting replaced by thick DVD-style boxes and eventually cases for about five years until the 2010s rolled around.
I remember GameStop also stocking a lot of PC games before then. The video store in town didn't, but had a shitload of anime and video games for sale and rent back when that place was still open.
The few games that I remember getting as gifts in the late 90s and 2000s all came with nice manuals, a lot of full color ones. The boxes are nice. Physical PC games are very nice.
Between the glut of games I remember seeing on shelves and stuff I would read about in magazines as a kid, it seemed like it was pretty livable without adware, i.e., Steam.
I wasn't paying for PC parts myself until like 2011, but from what I understand the worst thing about PC gaming in the 90s and early 2000s was that parts would quickly become obsolete to an extent very quickly back then, and that they weren't terribly cheap. The insides of most PC cases also didn't have rounded off edges back then, very annoying.
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