>>725289243 (OP)
You know when you try to get an old PC game running today and there's a good chance you'll have crashes and compatibility issues that can take some effort to solve? That was actually common back then. There were a lot more GPU (and sound cards which were more of a thing) manufacturers all with their custom renderers, and the gaming/PC hardware industries were not that old and experienced, so lots of weird bugs and oversights. Windows 95 was a bitch that had frequent blue screen events. DirectX versions switched frequently and I recall DX6 being very annoying for some reason.
Gaming magazines were a thing, they'd have articles about exciting games in development, walkthroughs and lists of cheat codes. Some of them came with CDs that had full games and demos. I had a lot of those CDs from mags, half the time the games wouldn't even boot or would crash in the menu, kek. Especially the ones that came with like 350 shitty shovelware titles each weighing like 200kb. But some of them were awesome though, like you'd get amazing full games a few years after launch for a VERY reasonable price, it was comparable to Steam sales kinda.
I remember discovering mods and user made content once, and a whole new world appeared. I'd leave my shitty 56kbps connection downloading mods and maps overnight to play UT99 with bots and a million fucktarded combinations of crazy mods and mutators.
Forums were also interesting, I lurked in a few. It was funny to see all those older adults taking them so seriously and putting a lot of effort into their online personas with avatars, signatures and caring a lot about post count and seniority. Saw some drama and bans.
But yeah, as I said, software and hardware was a LOT less stable back then. I had CRT monitors break and GPUs die when I was a kid back then, and none of the GPUs and monitors I bought as an adult ever failed. Admittedly, this is anecdotal and down to luck, but it was clearly worse back then.
