Let's look at PC Games Magazine Issue from June 1996

Oh man, what a day. What am I going to tell my wife? Oh, hey, that's uh that's, you know, Fantasmagoria. I'm looking at a new issue of PC games, classic gaming magazines from the '9s. Here to teach you about PC gaming because I study Steam and what's going on. This is not an endorsement from Steam. Ste did not pay for this location here. Uh Valve doesn't need my money. Uh, I got this from GDC cuz sometimes they do these like talks and stuff and they give away shirts and I just picked this up and we were like, all the developers and I were like, "What the heck? Why is it a bird? I don't get it." And they're like, "I don't know. It's funny. It looks like a bird eye." And we're like, "Kind of. It's kind of funny, but I don't know." But it just says video games and then it says Steam partner. I'm not a I'm not a Steam partner, but it just says on the shirt. But anyway, it's kind of cool shirt. I got It's about three years old. This is not an endorsement of Valve. I'm just I just look at the charts. Not a Steam expert. Don't believe him or a guru. I just I just like to look at

spreadsheets about Steam. Anyway, where am I going? I like to look at old magazines because I think here's my general thesis is a lot of people make games for Steam and they h they don't have the legacy of what PC gaming is and they don't understand. My thesis is that Steam comes straight out of the lineage of PC gaming. It's like just how we came from Neanderls or we co or you know we we can't we had the same lineage. That's what PC gaming from the '9s and beyond were and so is Steam. And I think a lot of trouble where people like God I can't sell my game on Steam. It's so hard. I don't know why people don't like my game. They usually are console gamers and they're trying to make a game. They have that legacy of console and they're coming into the world of Steam. And so I'm here to explain to you what PC gaming is all about and not being console baby. I say that, but I have every single Nintendo console and half of the Sony consoles. Well, like a third of the consoles from Sony. I I got

some PC cred, but I mean, I have some um console cred, but I'm mostly at my heart, I'm a PC gamer. So, um we're going to look at this magazine uh from 1996. That's a timeline. I'm giving you the context so that when we go through this, you're like, why aren't you talking about this game? So, you know what games were releasing at the time. So, this issue is from July 1996. They're talking about Fantasmagoria, which released at this time basically. Um, and I want to kind of give you the context. The last video, if you watched it was from 1993, the PC uh computer gaming world issue 1993. So, a lot's changed since our last episode timelinewise. Um, so we'll just kind of go through. So, in July 1996, here's the world. Sony PlayStation came out about a year before. Lot of popular games in 96 from um from the PlayStation. So, we got like Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, Resident Evil, and Tekken. And uh the uh the Nintendo 64 is coming

out just in a few months after this, September. This issue is in July. No mention. This is a PC magazine. This is PC game. So, they make no mention of N64 in any regard. I'm just giving you the context of what was going on in a console world and the popular games of 96 on Super Nintendo. I didn't put the console picture, but Nintendo was still kicking it until this and then N64 kind of like they really shifted focus. So, uh, we got Donkey Kong Country 3, Mega Man, and, um, Mario RPG. Again, here's the thing, folks. A lot of people try and make these type of games for PC, and I want to show you at the same time, this stuff wasn't quite happening. Now, Tomb Raider, yes, they made Tomb Raider, and they published on PC. Um, but a lot of the like Kash Bandicoot, these kind of like character focused um, platformers just didn't translate on the PC. And I was talking about this in the last one in 1993. People are like, "Yeah, but what about Jill of the Jungle? It's a platformer. What about what about Commander Keen?" Okay, look that Jill of the Jungle came out in '92.

In 1990, we got a long time. That was a long time before. And my my basic argument is the console games of platformers and characterbased and where you're controlling the main character. Even Resident Evil, we'll talk about Resident Evil a little bit in the video, uh just didn't uh have Yes, it's a horror game, but that kind of you're controlling the main character is a much different type of game on the PC side. And so what my argument is is a lot of the games that we all know and love on consoles just don't have a coralary on PC. And my general thesis about why um platformers just don't work on Steam as well, and I'll show you the numbers if you ever ask me, um is they don't have that legacy. And so there's a lot harder jump from this. So if you kind of grew up with these games, I'm not saying you can't ever, but you got to adjust your brain because at the same time, roughly at the same, this is not to scale, I just couldn't fit all the icons in. Um these are the games were hot at the same time on the PC side. I just did a little search like top games in 1996. So, we

got Command and Conquer 95 96 some really good uh first-person shooters like Duke Nukem 3D, Crucial, Quake, June 1996. Let me tell you little history lesson to Zukowski, Mr. Zukowski here, uh Chris, I learned to drive in '96. That's when I could drive myself. And Quake was the first game that I ever bought with my own money that I drove myself to the store. And I had the 9-in Nails soundtrack and I really wasn't allowed to watch MTV or anything. So, I was kind of like out of the loop of music. I was like, my mom would be if my mom found like a 9-in nails like CD, she would I would have been in trouble. She just been like, "What are you doing with your life?" It wasn't that bad. And then I was like, "Oh yeah, cuz if you take the Quake uh CD to install Quake and you put it in a CD player, you can listen to Trent Resnner's soundtrack for Quake." And I like put on the headphones and I was like in my room listening to this Trent Resnner soundtrack for Quake. I was like, "Mom, I'm just buying this violent video game." She was like, "Oh, okay. Go ahead." But I was like, "But it's got 9-in nails on it." So I was listening to 9inch Nails soundtrack for

Quake. Total let down. I mean, it's just like it's just like Trent Resner rattling some chains and then him like eating a a cassava melon like into the microphone. It's a lot of like It's just an ambient soundtrack. It's really not like a 9-in nail soundtrack. And I was like so disappointed. and I was like I was but I loved Quake anyway. So that's the history. First Quake is the first video game that I ever bought on my own by driving myself to the store but also Civilization 2. So really these are and my my other argument is that genres don't change too much. Every time I'm like hey this game is popular on Steam like well for now in a month it's not going to be popular because genres change all the time. strategy, strategy games, firstperson shooter games, dungeon crawlers, first-person shooter are still popular and they were popular back in 96. Uh, it's just it's not that it's changing. Whenever I say the genre is popular, I'm just trying to tell you the culture. I'm not saying this is a moment in time. I'm saying these are I'm trying to teach you

the culture [laughter] of PC. It's not that con, you know, back in the 90s platformers were popular on console, not so much on Steam. And yes, I know about Commander Keen and Jill Jungle. Kids, don't make your own capsule art. Jill the Jungle Capsule. Anyway, so um just just telling you that's where 96 is. And then uh Diablo, we'll see a couple ads in the video of me going through the magazine. Uh but Diablo uh came out just after this. So they you'll see a lot of ads. They were really uh hyping it. They knew it was going to be big. Uh dungeon crawler type of game. Halfife would get 98 with Valve. Um and then Gabriel Knight 3. I put this in here because this is if you read Old Man Murray, this was the death of uh point andclick adventures. So, we'll still see point andclick adventures somewhat. They kind of I really think it was Doom and Mist that killed um uh point andclick adventures not killed. I know you fans that like them. It's just they changed and we'll see even in here there are some narrative games that are somewhat like point andclick adventures but there

was the FMV world um Sillywood 96 is when Toy Story came out and that really was I think like a shock to the Sillywood people cuz they thought these FMV games were going to be big but then I think Pixar just like ate their lunch. So this is the timeline. This is what it is. But yeah, you could just kind of see just if you squint your eyes, it's just so bubble gummy bright colors on the Nintendo side. Bright and cheerful with characters. And then on the PC side, it's like a desaturated guy that's just like, "Yeah, let's die. Let's kill stuff." And like Quake is so desaturated. Voodoo, yes. But it's all this like dark and grungy and then it's like, "Come on, kids. Let's play some platformers." So, I just say this not to make fun of our our our friends on the console side. It's just it's a different type of just world. And if you're making a game for Steam or you're like thinking of some ideas like I'm going to make a Steam game and I'm going to make this type of game, do your PC history. Do

your PC history. And I'm going to do that today. The other thing I I kind of want, this is not game related, but I mentioned it a couple times. The graphic design on this mag, this issue specifically was really awesome. Super '9s. And if you know anything about graphic design, Ray Gun magazine came out in 1994. Super influential. The the Dingbats episode uh very influential uh in the '9s, like '90s graphic design is basically Ray Gun magazine. Uh most influential or issue was this one where this interview was really boring with this British rockstar. So the the writer or the designers just turned the whole issue into dingbats and then just they just published this article and it's entirely unreadable because it's using basically Wingings font. But just fun history of graphic design. But like the '9s were so cool graphically. Uh and you'll see it in this issue. So without further ado, let's transition to the magic screen. Thank you so much for looking at the timeline. We're going to transition. We're going to look at PC Games magazine from July 1996. Let's do

this. We're going to be going through PC Games Magazine, the complete guide to computer gaming. Even though I looked it up and it's not complete, they only have 21 reviews. I mean, PC gaming, not PC games, PC Gaming Magazine always had many more. So, uh, we've got the cover story of Fantasmagoria, Puzzle of Flesh 9, which we'll talk about, too. This is from July 1996. Cost $6.99. Lots of other reviews. I always thought the uh cover story Fantasmagoria I always thought Fantasmagoria the expression on his face like what the heck what what am I doing? This is so bizarre. God, what am I doing to myself here? I It didn't look horrid to me. It just felt like uh it's like when you uh peel back a rock and you see something cool under there. All right. Uh the first big ad here, Double Truck, as they I think they call it. Um, Diablo, what a revelation that game was. Super PC related. I mean, this was the

most PCS game. Double spread. I think the last re the last magazine I went through, the 1994 one. Uh, we the we saw Blizzard's first game, which was um um a 2D puzzle platformer uh called um uh The Lost Vikings. Lost Vikings. I know that. and they've never gone back to platformers. Well, I guess I did uh Blackstone and uh a couple other things, but they are so PC related. So PC. Okay, here's our contents. Um, you know, classic uh '9s layouts here. This is why I like this magazine. So, I I looked it up. What? What's the deal with PC games? Like, where did it fit in the Pantheon? And it's just like the most downthe-middle like average, boring vanilla magazine. It wasn't as as exuberant as like PC gaming. It wasn't as mature as like CGW. And there was another one called like Attitude or something. I think that's

the I don't know. I'll look it up. I had to look it up, but it was like for younger kids. This one's like the middle of everything. So, it's for nobody. But the one thing is the graphic design is actually a little bit more professional than the last magazine that I went through the last issues. Um, this graphic design is very of its time. It's kind of that uh what that what's kind of become funny. People like it uh to go back to its I think they call it uh global village. It's this very uh kind of woodblock looking kind of crazy stuff. Very very 90s inside. Um if you look um this was also a demo disc. So uh just to give you the context of where this fits like I said this is the most vanilla magazine. I just asked ChattyPT. I was like what's the deal with PC Games magazine? What's its history? Where did it fit in? And it was like a a B tier magazine that was nobody really subscribed to it. It was it came with demo discs. And so it was basically like your dad's like at the grocery store. I

was like, I got to bring something home for the kids. And he'd pick it out off off the magazine rack at the grocery store. So nobody loved this magazine. It didn't break any ground. It was just solid there. And like always, uh my thesis is that PC gaming did not change very much in the world of Steam that we see now. actually has so much to do with the roots of the culture from way back in the '9s. And I think my general thesis, and people yelled at me for just hammering my point home, was Steam culture is very similar to PC gaming culture. And it's not console culture. Console games, video games, as they used to call back in the '90s, was very different. And I think a lot of the problems that indies face is when the indies grew up playing console games, they have that culture. They've indoctrinated themselves into that culture, then they come into the world of PC and they just think, "Oh, it's Steam. I can just publish my Nintendo Nintendo game on here and I'll sell it." But my thesis is that Steam comes from

this and the type of games that do well back in the day do well now on on Steam. Um, and people don't understand that culture and they're like, "Oh, PC games are so hard and so hard to sell on Steam." Uh, genres change all the time. My my comments, my thoughts, folks, is they do not change. No, no, no, no. Genres do not change very much. The same genres that are popular back now, back in 1996, July 1996, are still, for the most part, still popular today on Steam. So, um uh this magazine issue uh advertise advertised itself as having 21 reviews and then I went into uh the um the thing and I counted them and there were only 20. But then I saw they put Hexon and Heretic on the same line as the Salt Rigs. And so, uh being a good scientist of data, I went through and I was like, well, what's 20 21 reviews? Like I said in that in the preview, I I I broke it down. it is overwhelmingly

kind of these narrative which now they're narrative uh like what I call narrative um you know like point andclick adventure yes but also like uh you know visual novel type of thing so that's what adventure is back in the day and that and really I think adventure half of it went to narrative games the other half went to like AAA style games like Ubisoft stuff you know like big production AAA that's what adventure games turned out to that was the lineage so narrative games are the most popular genres on Steam as if you count how many games reached real steam top of the line, it's always narrative games. A lot of shooters like firstperson shooters like Duke Nukem, uh, The Heretic, this they kind of they just didn't know how to break these things down back in the day. There was no first-person shooter category. They just called them action. Um, no platformers in this list. No platformers. I'm not doing that. I'm not trying to hammer on this super hard, but I'm just trying to tell you there were no puzzle games. Now, you could argue, well, Chris, there's puzzle games in here. But I mean like a puzzle platformer where you had to like put the

weighted block on the platform and then it sunk down. There were no puzzle games other than this adventure thing. Um and then racing games are still big today. We had big red racing which we'll talk about and stuff like that. And then the big category is strategy. So, I think the popular genres, if I if I remember right from my presentation I showed you just a second ago, um it was narrative adventure games were number one, followed by strategy games, followed by action, like first-person shooter type shooter shooters, and then uh then racing, then sports, and simulation was in there, too. So, simulation was only two. There's only two that I classify as simulation. I'm glad they broke Savage down as simulation because when we get to it, it's like, what the hell type of game is Savage? But, we'll look at that in a second. But anyway, that's the um the table of contents. Let's move on here. All right, we got a nice boring editorial. This editorial is so boring, I don't even want to read it to you. Really, this is like the most generic guy. I mean, back in the day, they didn't have AI, but I would say this they just AI generated like the most

boring man you've ever seen. Uh so, it's just this magazine is so just boring. Okay. Um we are going to look at this one. I put these little tabs. You'll see these little tabs. just so I don't forget to tell you something that I saw that I thought was interesting. Um, informality. Uh, just like I didn't know, I kind of watched what this game was. I think it's kind of like a point-and-click adventure kind of there. They just it's a genre that doesn't exist, but the guy is five. They put the guy Mr. Normality. 5'9, 157 pounds. That's basically me. I'm an inch taller and about three lbs lighter. give me depending on whether I ate dinner or not. All right, next page. Um, we're going to look here. Now, the interesting thing here is that uh mist has happened and mist was such a big deal back in the day, you know. Um that was 94 as I I said in my presentation very critical crucial crucial crucial that 1994

um had missed and all of a sudden we brought in Sillywood which was the the time where they got big stars like Dorne uh you know Warf from Star Trek. they'd get big stars to show up in these um full motion video uh CDROM games and that was the big thing and they thought oh man so you're going to see a lot of like big stars and they really thought Sillywood was going to happen and uh Steve Jobs has this famous quote where he said that um Pixar is the only actual good thing to come out of Sillywood. Everything else just flamed out and it was terrible. All stuff was crap that came out of basically Silicon Valley and acting. You just can't get computer scientists and people from Silicon Valley to to do anything that's, you know, theatrical and fun. Uh, they're just terrible. So, this is Sillywood. You're going to see a lot of stars. They really thought that if they put the star power, they put these basic FMV games in. Nobody. I don't think anybody remembers this game. I don't. All right. So, like I said, um, it's all about the disc. This was the era of CDROMs. We're

deep into it. Um, and what would happen is they would just have a cool CDROM full of demos and then your dad would pick it up on his way home from work. You he probably pick up some diapers and some beer and then he was like, "I need something for the kids." So he would pick up PC games and demo on disc and and bring it home. So that's how these magazines would really do. Um, that's what they do. They're they're basically a demo disc with a magazine attached to it and then they could justify buying this. But nobody really subscribed to this magazine. We got Zor Nemesis again deep in the um first person or I mean the FMV I should say um era here. So everybody was going crazy over that stuff. All right, let's talk about this. I love the letters because you get the PC culture of the day. Uh the letters from the fans. This one here is like this guy complaining here. What's he complaining about? Uh he's like gameplay not pictures. I'm uh getting tired of playing dull, boring games with great graphics. See, this complaint has

happened forever. They're like, "Games used to be about gameplay. Not anymore. Now they're just about graphics." Well, this is 1996. This is anytime somebody's like, "Games used to be about gameplay." They're referring back to 1996, like, "Oh yeah, games from the '90s had gameplay first." Here's a guy also complaining about how games are just taken over by graphics. Let me tell you folks, the same stuff has been going on forever. So, stop complaining because you know what? That's the way it's always been. Every time I I you like complain too much about stuff, you're like, "It's always been that way." Anyway, so I mean, it's okay to complain, but just don't think you're the smartest person in the world. That's all I'm saying. I mean, this is this is Reddit right here. This is what we did before we had Reddit children. Um, this is this is our Reddit. Um, I highlighted this. Um, not because uh he said anything interesting. I mean, it was kind of boring, but look, he's he just emailed them from his Senate uh email address secate.gov just like the this assistant aid for

some senator just started like emailing PC magazines his thoughts on network play and stuff like that and command and conquer from the Senate just he had no nobody cared if you just emailed from your work email address because that's all he had. Nobody cared. Uh I tried to look at this guy like what he did in politics. I couldn't find him. It was kind of just a generic name, but uh yeah, he was really in a command to conquer. So, uh somebody from the government. I I don't know who he what senator he was working for or anything. I don't know what secate.gov was. I tried to look if anybody knows if you used to work in the government or something. Go down below and comment where where this came from. But I just like the idea of our good federal tax dollars paying for this guy to work and then uh he's just emailing gaming magazines here. All right, let's continue on here. Oh, wait. Oh, before I go, um, final Doom. Uh, more Doom just DLC. So popular. Uh, you got the ID logo and everything. But,

uh, yep, Doom. This is so The graphic design. That's the other thing I like about this edition. This 1996 graphic design is so good. You got the the rusty typewriter plus the blurry plus just this like just mismatch of fonts and everything. Uh this comes from that Ray Gun magazine was very influential on just graphic design at the time and the gritty grim dark. This is so 90s starting to get into that grunge, you know, coming in and out of grunge. H just so and a screaming man. And you always had to have a screaming guy in graphic design if it was something hardcore. Uh but yeah, Doom. This is graphic design's just stepped itself up. Okay. Game news previews. Viacom. The interesting thing is it's like uh Viacom is um um making games in several different platforms here. Um and uh PC and PlayStation. See, they mention it here. U better suited for the

PlayStation than P PC. Okay. So, look at this. Here's what we're gonna do. Look at that. Uh Steam Scope. Is that Steamcape? It's kind of like a platformer shooter 3D thing. They're like, "This is not a PC game. This is better for PlayStation uh than than PC." And you start to see these like platformer things. There actually is the mention platformer. A mech style Enemies Within is a mech style platform game. That's what they called platformers back then. You look it up and nobody remembers it. It was an awful game. Um I think it's right over here. the the enemies within features mixed style robots and they go platforming. Okay. Um it's it's platforming and like these kind of adventure third person games just weren't on PC and and uh you just kind of see it and PC players and like these editors who are PC gamers are just like what the hell. Um, a couple other things. This is just interesting for history reasons, not for anything piecing in, but here's salaries in 1996

right there. Look at that. The the highest pri you could do the the math on it, but look look at how uh high paid comparatively like you had programmers capping out at 80,000. Look who really sung the songs here. um art directors, creative directors, and then the SGI, CGI is what they eventually would be called, but the animators, I think 3D graphics were so hot uh back in the day that they got paid very well for the time. Okay. Uh we got this uh I think I maybe I may have done it because of this so ' 90s graphic style. Like it's just so like you got these lines coming out and everything's scratchy. There's just such graphic design from the ' 90s. I just appreciate some good '90s graphic design. But anyway, the reason I think I highlighted this um is interesting at the time of the market uh PC games were declining. It says overall, this is just an article

about the his the industry. It was like uh PC gaming industry uh seems to have hit a lull here. Overall home computer sales growth is declining and only a small uh minority of home computer buyers play games. Um, so it that's the thing is PC gaming it's really hot right now and and with Steam. Uh, but that was it's it's a rare thing. So I think this is a lot of the confusion and they they actually used the word newbies. I didn't know they used the word newbies back in the 90s. Uh, and then eventually shortened to noobs. Uh but anyway, um it's just basically that this is the industry and it's uh it was very small and I think a lot of people who make games now as indies came out of uh consoles. And so there um here's the leaderboard of top sales. Here's the other thing that I always find interesting is some of this hardcore sales data so that we can't over interpret this. Um just just going to point out I know you hate it when I point it out, but there's no platformers

on here. Uh, the top games are uh, Warcraft 2, strategy, Civilization 2, strategy, Mist, narrative, point-and-click adventure, Doom, first-person shooter, Wing Commander, flight shooter. We can debate whether it's arcade shooter or flight sim type of things. CNC is strategy game, command and conquer, uh, they're both command and conquers. um both strategy mecharrior uh shooter but you know kind of deeper shooter type of PC thing flight sim simulator and then a sports game sports simulator so again strategy simulation um first-person shooter we've now established oh where's first person shooter um descent well descent 2 did I say that one descent also a shooter type of thing but just um you know the the type of games that sell well are still pretty much all of these does it sell very well other than like mist thing but uh we we can kind of say it's a narrative game but that's the only other things um and then editor recommendations we got Duke Nukem these

are from the editorial board we got a shooter a simulation a first-p person shooter um again another simulation noa I don't remember what that one is I didn't look that one up I think that might be a simulation game or like a strategy and then we got um conqueror of the new world a strategy game so again very strategy simulation I'm not making this up, folks. And I know you hate it when I belor strategy simulation, but it really is what what um PC players are. We've got more Sillywood stuff. Again, they'd always lead with a star, Dennis Weaver. My favorite movie of his is Duel. Steven Spielberg's first kind of directorial fulltime full movie. It was TV movie except in Europe where it was broadcast, but Dennis Weaver was the star of Duel. If you haven't seen the movie Duel, very good. And Dennis Weaver is very good on it. So, they would just interview movie stars. That was like the big thing. Oh my gosh. Uh we can interview movie stars now. Um I don't know. Uh we got Phillips. Let's see. Don't quit your day job. Uh we got Comedy Central bringing in stuff here.

Phillips. I mean, it was just like they didn't know what to do, so they just put FMV stories and stuff like that. They really thought that Hollywood Entertainment was going to come to um PC gaming and it kind of moved on. Um Inscape gets normal. And I think the reason I pulled this out because they actually used the word first-person shooter here. They talked about first-person shooter. I think that's why I talked about this. I always thought there there was a joke that I heard a while ago was like everything was a Doom clone until HalfLife came out. But this predates HalfLife and they said everything was a Doom clone until Halflife came out and then they started using the term first-person shooter. But here's evidence from 1996 July of using the term first person shooter. Um, so I think that's why um that's why I pulled that one up. But uh yeah, uh here's an ad for Spycraft. I really wanted this for Christmas in 1996 and I didn't get it. And then by the time I could have just bought it, uh the FMV market had

gone on and I watched like a documentary YouTube video about Spycraft. It looked kind of cool, but um I never got this game and I moved on my gaming tastes and so I'll probably never play that game. Um, here we've got uh sports games that do well. Let's just see why I highlighted this. Um, sports games do well. And one thing that I thought was here, um, sports games, says, uh, Fischer, account for up to 30% of total PC game sales, second only to action games. Action games are what they used to call anything where you could control the main character. So, um um I didn't realize this at the time because I don't really like sports games, but PC market was very sports game oriented and they and sports games do still well on Steam. Uh but because of licensing and stuff, uh only the big boys can really do sports games, but there is a market for it. Oh, here's uh here's the other platformer. This is the one that I I really found. Comics Crossover. It was a preview. They didn't actually write it. It's called Exo

Manpower and Heavy Metal. And so, um, and the keyword here is the PC version of this sidescroller is due in June. There's a only word platformer I could find in this whole magazine was that. All right. Um, and also I looked up this game and it did terribly everywhere. Just not not just uh not just PC, but everywhere. Heroes of Might Magic. Again, very PC game. Very very PC game. Um, here's a guy writing a very long story about how he's complaining about how there's not manuals anymore because of the CDROM. And that was a losing argument. Mr. Steve Klet, sorry, dude. You never got your manuals. Imagine the stuff people complain about that. I don't know. Does anybody complain about manuals anymore? No. I mean, they were cool, but I don't really care. Like just like I really wanted a users guide. Now it's like, oh, tutorials, all kinds of stuff. Got your

Duke Nukem. full page ad. We'll talk about Duke Nukem. It's all over this magazine coming up. Um here we have uh this guy and this interesting thing down here is an article about um multiplayer, how to play multiplayer. and he he was so amazed that he could play against somebody in Australia and like what this was a whole article about all this really complicated system that you had to do and the service that you signed up just to play against somebody. I think we should all just sit back and and just be amazed at how easy it is to play multiplayer games now. Just it is so interesting how and this whole article is all about just the trouble it takes to to play. And this guy's just he just wrote an article that it's like this is amazing. I can play against somebody in Australia. Now we just take it for granted. I I just we should all just just appreciate how awesome games are

now and how just it is cool that you can play against so many in the the old world and around the world and this is just just the old way it was. It is crazy. Um Hyperblade Activision I don't I think I remember seeing that in the SNES uh Sillywood stuff. Okay, now this is just interesting from a history standpoint. Um, these are just uh an old article about various um websites. It was just like a list of websites. Like here's some websites. The thing I wanted to point out was this right here. It says uh one thing you can find free demos. Most of the latest games is uh several months before they completed version reached the stores. You can't find those really big 20 megabyte demos. For that, you'll need the PC game CDROM. 20 megabytes is really big. Uh there's a let me go back to that meme. Pull it up right here. Wasn't that so funny that the that meme was like, "Oh yeah, we we can fit everything in such a small file." Now everybody was complaining about how big files are forever and ever and ever. But uh just complaining about 20 20

megabytes. What an amazing time we live in now. Um let's uh continue on here. Uh let's look at this. A nice just some cool websites. Here's the thing, folks. You used to just make websites. There was no social media. So, if you had to express yourself, you used to have to build a website. And I think this is the biggest crime that has befallen the internet. It was so cool. You used to be able to just find websites that were run by a dude. Like here's a dude and he gets himself in a magazine because he just has this cool Doom site and it's just like look at this cool website and it's got like all these bars and they they critique and all these articles about how the layouts are. It's like oh they've got scrolling panels. This was the big thing in the '9s and stuff. Like you you would go to a website and every single little fragment would independently scroll. It

it that was considered good usability and it's awful in like it was so hard to control these websites because everything scrolls separately. PES I think they were called um in HTML. Let me tell you folks, you can just make a website. The next time you're going to write like a long rant in the comment section down below, take that energy and just build a freaking website. I am able to do this for a full-time living because I built how tomarketagame.com. I wish like all these are just all these websites are dead, okay? But these were just built by people. Like people used to build websites and you'd go to a dude's website that this guy built and it's just amazing. I mean, look at this. Look at this. This is gaming cheating page. Like this guy just had a web page of cheats. That is so cool. Like you used to be able to just find stuff where a dude made a cheating website and I just think it's s such a shame. And people have this learned

helplessness. Like anytime I go on Reddit and somebody's complaining about something, they're like, "Then start a website." And they're like, "Well, you can't create a website anymore because Google search and they just complain about how you can't create a website." Let me tell you folks, I make a full-time living off my website. Okay? you can make a website and it's so fun and it's so cool and I wish we had this where you could just find dudes websites. This is so cool. And so the next time you're going to leave a long Reddit comment that's like multiple paragraphs and multiple comments in YouTube, if you leave me a long comment telling me how wrong I am and it's like multi paragraphs, I'm just going to say, "Dude, start a website. You should not be spending all this time writing super long detailed comments on a site you don't own. What I'd recommend, it's okay if you leave super long reviews about how I'm wrong. I just wish you would do it on something that lasts longer than a YouTube comment. And I know all these sites are probably dead, but they last so much longer than

a comment on a YouTube video that just evaporates as soon as you write it. So, all that brain power you're spending writing long comments on Reddit or posting comments on YouTube could be going to an actual website that exists and has a theme. Like, god damn, guys. Just make a website. It's so fun. Just write a blog, post it. It does work. People are always like, "You can't write blogs anymore. Nobody reads blogs." They do. They really do. Okay, here's some cool stuff. Um, this is just what menus used to look like. They'd always make this cool scene and you would click on this to see this or that. It was so cool the way uh CDROMs used to look. I just love that stuff. Interstate 76. This is the first time I really saw art direction in a game and I was like, "Holy crap, that is a well art directed thing." I was 16 and I saw Interstate 16. I or 76 I should say. And I I never I only played the demo. I was like, "This is so stylish." So stylish. And games actually had art direction back

then. I mean, not back, not that they don't now, but that back then they started with that. I'm not bemoning art direction now. A lot of cool looking games. Um, here's uh the only fighter fighting game you're going to see on PC right now by Apogee. Apogee would always kind of take I think they would look at Nintendo games and then they'd make kind of like a PC version of them and they never really sold as well. And then they did Duke Nukem and they just made a lot ton of money from all that. So, but um yeah, this is an awful. [laughter] Look at that thing. That thing looks so derpy. All look at that guy. That guy looks so derpy. They're like, "Oh yeah, Street Fighter 2 is popular. Let's bring it over here." And it didn't. Nobody remembers Xenopage Alien Blood Sport. It's just these these games don't. By the way, look at this graphic design on this CNET website. Oh man, that just brings me so bad. I love the graphic design of this. But look at this. Just an article about web pages. What a great time. What a great time. Everybody, just stop commenting on these billionaires websites like X and YouTube and Reddit

and make your own website that you own, please. And don't complain that you can't do it because I know you can. That's just learned helplessness. You can totally make your own website and leave very detailed rants and I and you can rant and I won't yell at you. But if you leave a detailed rant in YouTube, I'm going to yell at you and say, "Dude, this should be on a website." Anyway, um here's a game. Um, uh, it's a puzzle point-and-click adventure that just looks gorgeous. I didn't know about this game. I know somebody is probably like, "Oh, yeah. I love that game." Um, I found it right here. It's nine. It's just so good looking. It still looks good. Um, here's a I'm going to There's more to see on the other side. They didn't, if I were laying this magazine out, I put a big graphic here. Watch this graphic. I don't know why they didn't put this graphic here and the article here. I don't know why they did that. But this has this card where you can subscribe. Nobody subscribed to according to Chad GPT. They nobody subscribed to this magazine. It was just like nobody cared about this magazine because it was it's it's kind of a boring magazine. I'll tell you. I'll just tell you. I just the only reason

I'm looking at it is because of uh just seeing what the culture was like back then and that it hasn't changed that much. But beautiful. This is just such cool looking graphics. I mean, look at this guitar leggy lady. And then they they even broke down how they made the graphics. sense really. This is actually this is the the the best article in the whole magazine is right here on this thing. I should look at this. I think I looked it up and it is on Steam. I think you can buy it on Steam. Um here's time lapse. Ancient civilization. Look at this. Uh one made in Carl's bad, California. I love Carl'sb. I think Carl's bed, California is probably my favorite city in the world. I love Carl'sbad. Uh but it was made there. Nothing else is made in Carl'sbad anymore. San Diego, yes, but nowhere else. Um and they always call this mist. Is this a mist killer? See, this is how back in the 90s we were fighters. We didn't say, "Oh, is this a mist clone?" We're like, "Is this a mist killer?" Nowadays, if you see another game, they're like, "Oh, is that just a mist clone?" No. Back in the 90s, we were we were strong. We were empowered. We said, "This is a mist killer." So, next time somebody says your game is a a Silk Song

clone, you say, "No, it's a Silk Song killer." Okay. But again, FMV land, everything was like you would just see like talking actors like talking at the screen. Um, oh yeah, it looks this looks so 90s. Oh god, it looks like Enya should just be playing on some of these. Look at that. Sail away. Sail away. Sail away. Oh, sail away. Let's get going. Uh, here's Fantasmagoria, the first review in this magazine. Look at the headline. I like the headline. Scarier, sexier, bloodier than the better. Is it better? Mark. Uh, I mean, this is the thing is, uh, horror and sex, people always are like, "Oh, what's that doing on Steam?" And I feel like those are the two like some of the most popular genres on Steam as not safe for work games. Look at that. Look at that. Just put the chains right there on on this magazine. Um, on Steam and people are like, "What are

these games doing here?" And they they're kind of like the underbelly. this has always been the way Steam has been is horror and sex just right up front. Um so um that's what it is and and so don't don't be offended by that. I think it's it's kind of offensive to people who came from console games that come like Nintendo would never allow this or even PlayStation would never was never quite like this. Like PlayStation was always like oh Lord Crush got big boobs. They weren't like it's kind of dark. Yeah. The Fantasmic Goria games uh they weren't that bad. Not compared to what stuff you can find on Steam, but you know. Um, let's see. Why did I highlight this somewhere over here? Um, I think it was just puzzle game, psychological horror story, madness, murder, you know, it's just the genre, you know, horror. So, yep. I I that's why I think horror people always and the reason I point this out is I'm always like horror games are very popular on

Steam and they're like yeah but is it still going to be popular? That was last year that you wrote horror games are big. Let me tell you folks 1996 this is a really big game uh horror game. It's it was popular. People like to be scared and it seems strange. You're like if you came from consoles and you came in here and you're like what's all these horror games? Why Indy's always about horror games? Look at this dude. Um, what's the deal? They've always been. So, a lot of people come new to PC and I'm like, "Horror games are big." And they're like, "Not when I was a kid." Yep, they were. 1996, horror games were hot. People love horror games forever and ever, and they always will. Forever and ever. In the future, horror games are going to be big on PC. It doesn't change, folks. It doesn't change that much. All right. Uh, nice. I loved Flight on the I thought this was the best looking game. Look at these graphics. It really like even in this screenshet. I mean, imagine if I watched it now, the the pixels are like as big as my head. But I thought this I played this game at my friend John's house who loved flight sims. And I actually like this one. This is a fun game. It really

had this um cool feel of like small regional airports. And I went one time my father-in-law got my wife and I a glider ride. And it was a regional airport in Tmacula, California, just north of Carlsbad. And it was it felt like Flight Unlimited, like just a lazy couch. I think when in the main menu of Flight Unlimited is like some couch and you have to like sign the flight log. It really feels like you're in some dusty regional airport. Really cool vibe with that. Then we have Duke Nukem 3D. I love this game. One of my This is a crucial crucial game to my upbringing and as a game designer. Um uh I'm a terrible game designer, but I I I knew I wanted to be involved in games when I played this cuz the build engine I tried to make levels for Doom and it was so hard. The Doom editor was terrible. The build engine was so good. It was so easy to use. You could, it was kind of wizzywig where you could edit it while you were playing it a little bit and you could wander and change walls while you're wandering. It was so cool. And you could The thing that was cool about Duke Nukem 3D is you

could place these little props like little bottles and stuff and it just made the world feel so alive and the textures felt like lived environments like houses and stuff whereas Doom felt like you're in hell, you're in Mars hell. Whereas this is like a bar. There was like a there's a level in Duke Nukem 3D. I think it was that or maybe it was the Shadow spin-off build engine game where they had a sushi restaurant where they could turn the build engine into a a rotating sushi carousel. You know those uh sushi um conveyor belt things. Um I I want to get conveyor belt sushi tonight. I should. Uh here's a top down schmup. This is one of the few schmups you're going to see in here. I love this contest. This seems like a scam. You could win every single gaming thing from 1996, including right here, Virtual Boy. You could actually win a a PlayStation and a Virtual Boy and a Jaguar. This is like so 90s. Like, this is something that you would see a a gaming YouTuber

who has like the epic basement. This is what his basement looks like, you know? He's got Jaguar, 3Dio, Sega Saturn. This is like, yeah, this is my thing. like uh Retro Jesus or whatever that guy's name. Gaming Jesus or whatever. This seems like Gaming Jesus is like you could do a whole YouTube video just on this stuff. Um just uh I looked this game up. Star Quest in the first century. Just like a shooter. Space Dude. I looked this game up on YouTube. It looks like a game made by somebody who's never played a video game before. It seems like some a game made by somebody who heard from somebody else what a video game is. Look at this. And this is that hobo font. This this looks like a capsule that somebody would submit to me for a Steam page review. And they're like, I don't know why I'm not getting wish lists. And I'm like, okay, I can I have some ideas, but I don't want to be mean. But God, don't make your own capsules, everybody. Don't make your own capsules. All right. Um, just more games of the review. I

just like to look at them. You got your first person shooters. Doom and hectic heretic. The Doom engine's Last Castle. Look at how mean they were. I mean, Doom, it's 1996 and everything, so u I thought it was I I like these games. Uh I I Hexon and Heretic. I they're fun. Uh here's another mech shooter and stuff. Okay, here we are. Uh just again reminding you about you, reminding you all that sex was not in invented um in the year 2000 or whenever you were born. Um before you were born, people had sex. And here it is, Phillips. It's called Voyer 2. And look at this. Um, and people are like, "Oh my god, why is Steam so full of porn?" It just This is uh PC gaming is for an adult audience, an an upper, you know, somebody who's who's been around. It's not kids console games. Consoles are for kids, okay? Not this. This is some real stuff. Okay. Um, Harvester. Um, point

andclick adventure. Um, looks kind of hory. Horrory. Um, look, they called it Harvester, an adult adventure without being an adult adventure. See what I mean? People are always aware of this stuff. They're like, "Well, we got some we got some porn games on on uh PC." And because PC is private, kids don't play it. So, you can uh you can get a little naughty. And that's again, folks, don't freak out about not safe for work stuff that you see on the front page of Steam. Just it's just the culture. Okay, Azrael's tier. I highlighted this for some reason. Let's see. Oh, I think it was this. Now, here we have an instant classic for the game that nobody has ever remembered. [laughter] A got an A, though. Instant classic. And we all talk about the influence that Ezreal's tier had on us all, don't we? Um, don't just beat your opponents. Suck the brain out. This is a whole full page ad for a uh serial cable. Uh, so you can

link two games together. This is not this specific cable, but my friend got a serial cable and I brought my PC over to his house and that was the first time we played Doom over serial cable, and that was the first time I ever played a multiplayer game, you know, against somebody else, first-person shooter. John, the same guy who liked Flight Unlimited, threw a serial cable and it blew my mind. We didn't even shoot each other at first. We just looked at each other and it was like, "John, I'm moving left." And I could see my character moving and I'm like, and we could see each other moving. We just stared and looked at each other's like pixelated 16bit sprite moving back and forth on our respective computers and we're like, "Oh my god." Let me tell you folks, you probably if you're old, if you're over the age of if you're under the age of 30, you do not realize how revolutionary is to play a multiplayer game. It just it was just like blowing your mind. Okay, we got just another point and click adventure magic ad on the PC. Magic every

micropose magic. Um, Voyer 2. Here's the here's one. Love this headline here for those who like to watch. I'm telling you, it's it's adult. It's an adult audience here. We got a little smooching. Uh here's Dennis Weaver. Um you know, go watch Duel tonight. It's a good movie. Watch Duel. It's really good. It's short and it's um Steven Spielberg film that you probably haven't seen. It's really good. Um uh Philip Marlo's Private Eye. I like this one cuz um this is point-and-click adventure, but nowadays if you're going to make a narrative game, here's the thing, folks. Um, so many people have tried to make narrative games that you know that are trying to be serious narrative games, but narrative games, a very important subgenre of narrative games are detective games like Phoenix Wright was very important in this. And you can see this influence from way back when, not that this game influenced anybody, but that desire to have a deliberate um kind of narrative game that's a detective mystery is very crucial to PC gaming. And so those do

well. So, if you're like, I'm going to make a narrative game about, you know, I don't know, something stupid. Um, make one. You could still do your narrative whatever you want, but make it a mystery. Those do very well. If you're a a fan of narrative stuff, I they're very hard to make and you really need to be a good writer. But if you're a good writer and like, I want to make a narrative game, make it a mystery. Make it a mystery. Here's a here's a good quote. Uh my biggest complaint about private eye is that while the conversations are engaging, the number of times you're choosing between events, not just listening, should have been a bigger piece of the action. That is still the complaint of narrative games. This is still the complaint. And this is where I folks nothing has changed. People keep saying like, "Oh, games are changing all the time." If you look at um poorly reviewed narrative games, we could literally just see the same sentence. People who make narrative games, you have to do what they call choices matter. That's why there's a tag on there called choices matter. It's the

exact same thing. And you either learn it now or you're going to get reviews like that. You just have to. Um here's something. What is this thing? U I don't want to read the manual. The game doctor never use a boot disc again. It's very hard to um uh read and use video games again. Let's pull that meme up about how good PC gaming used to be. No, PC games always sucked. I just mean the fact that it's like it's been hard. You got to use boot discs and it was very hard to configure games and get them running. Uh mode again another full uh FP uh FMV narrative game, but it it takes place in Ottawa. It's a classic nightclub from Ottawa, Canada. I just no offense to Ottawa, but I don't it's just never exciting to be in Ottawa. Uh I love I love Canada. I love you, Canada. I I wish we could be friends again. I I hope our country has become friends again, but um um this uh this game, not I didn't pick

this to rag on Ottawa. I picked this because this looks like a Barlo game. Doesn't this look like her story? I wonder if he knew about her this game in her story. And if you just read what type of game mode is, it sounds very much like an artsy fartsy FMV games that are being made right now by like Barlo and um some of those other people that are making cool smart people FMV games for Steam. I bet this game is either very influential or people are going to rediscover it and say, "Oh, this is really uh actually a precursor of a lot of stuff." So, if you're making a narrative game, go play this game mode. Sounds pretty good. also one of the only female writers I saw in this magazine. So again, stuff hasn't changed. Uh narrative games have a very uh female audience and so I don't know, it just this just looks like it's a very contemporary game for what's going on right now. If Melrose plays for a game so 90s, I just love how 90s this stuff is. Um I think I just No, I don't have

anything to say about that. Okay, Big Red Racing. I loved Big Red Racing. My friend got it and I just Oh, I bought it. I think I bought Red Racing. Uh, Big Red Racing. Uh, I love this game. This game is so fun. Has the funniest joke in all of video games in my mind. My favorite joke in video games is if you went to the profile pages for all the people they had, they had very funny profiles for all the different characters you could race as. And one of the my favorite joke in all the video games was there was one guy and it was like, you know, it' be like status like favorite hobbies and it would be like shredding metal. And then one of the one of the things was um favorite limb and then the guy wrote leg parenthesis right. I don't know why that's my favorite joke in video games was in this game. Big red racing. Uh it's a fun game. It's a racing game. People on Steam like racing games. Still popular. Racing game still popular. This one's a little wackier. Um and early 3D graphics. I thought it was really good. Simulation flying game.

Savage. This game is got terrible reviews. I don't even know what type of games this I'm glad they wrote a simulation. I This is just a terrible game. But again, strategy game. Um, just because you make a strategy game, it still has to be a good game. You still have to make a good game. So, even if you make the right genres for an audience doesn't Okay, sports. I don't I don't know anything about sports, but that uh Randy Johnson before he pitched for the um Arizona Diamondbacks and helped us win the World Series in uh when was it 19 or 2002, beat the Yankees when everybody wanted the Yankees to win because of 911, but we beat them even though they probably should have thematically won because of 911. U it was a big rah rahr. Everybody was chained for the Yankees because of it happened. Can't remember if it was 2001 or 2002 World Series. 911 happened and then everybody wanted the Yankees to win for America and the Diamondbacks beat um

the Yankees to win it. Okay, now we're in the strategy session where this is where I say crafty build strategy simulation. People just love strategy games on PC. And I'm not going to point out every single one because people hate it when I rub it in that strategy games are very very popular on Steam and indies don't make enough strategy games and they don't think in the right way. They keep trying to make platformers for Nintendo games, but uh PC players don't like platformers. They like strategy simulation-y. So, I'm only going to point it out one time so you don't complain that I pointed out too much and rubbing in that I'm right all the time. Uh but here's strategy game. Strategy game. Trivia sci-fi game. The Cher strategy. I mean strategy. Um these quiz games. Hey, it's just like uh what's it called? That um you don't know Jack. Those are those have been popular. Trivia games are are the only lone um um uh puzzle game that does really really well, but there aren't many of them that do that. You got strategy is a

classic. Look at this nice complicated UIs. See, and but the thing is like if you just look at screenshots like, oh, this is going to be good. But got a D+ again. Just because you make a game in the right genre, it still has to be a good game. Love these. Love these icons. Those look so good. That is such cool icons. I love them. This is so 90s. Um, but anyway, uh, I digress. You still you still got to make a good game. Um, and then again, multiplayer was so big and they're all trying to pitch it, but look at what games they advertise. Strategy simulationy strategy games. That's how it worked. Okay. More sellers 2. This is a very important game. I didn't play sellers 2. I think I played the demo back in the day and I just it just bounced off of me. But it looks cool. I I like it. Uh Warhammer still games were still very popular. One of the most popular tags on Steam. I thought this was was this Ric Flair? Doesn't it look like Ric Flair? I

bet somebody just grabbed a picture of Ric Flair and they were like, "Oh, let's make a capsule here." Um Warhammer's big. They make so many different types of games that I I got to do a study on just different types of Warhammer games. uh poorly rated uh strategy game, but look at this. Um I like this quote here. It's like, "How can a traditional computer war simulation-y game um simulation stand out from the crowd?" People are always complaining. Anytime there's like a game that follows the genre, like, "How's it going to stand out from the crowd?" That's a common comment all the time. Same comment. Everybody's like, "It's going to stand out." So many of them. Um here's another private eye game. again, these kind of like mystery um narrative games with a little, you know, uh just it's always it's just a popular thing people like. So, I do think if you're making a narrative game, you got to there the com narrative games. There's dating,

mystery solving, and monsters. Those are like the like monsters going to high school. Those are the type of narrative games that do well. I see too many people trying to do narrative games about like I don't know like their first boyfriend in college and stuff and they just don't do well. But if you did a story that where you're a monster dating your first vampire in monster school that actually does okay. Or if you want to talk about the trauma of boys in high school or something, make it a murder mystery or something. You see, you've got to like these narrative narrative games always follow these big trends all and you're like, is it going to change? Chris, you said it. So, that means everybody's going to make one. It's been been popular since 96 and even before. So, that's what we got going. Stuff doesn't change very much, folks. I mean, yeah, things come and go. Some little trends here and there, but stuff's very the same. Um, here's uh a whole section about how bad the puzzles of World of

Zork. They used to have to write a whole article because uh people got stuck in the puzzles and they're like if you're having trouble getting past the first puzzle, the first puzzle was hard. Games sucked, folks. Puzzle games suck because you could get stuck on the first puzzle and you're like, "God, this magazine had to help me out." So, it's there. This is such a 90s ad. Look at this graphic design. The mix match text. And this guy is like Photoshop. This is like early Photoshop. So, people went crazy with it and started doing stuff. The interesting reason I flagged this was look at this. I'm going to zoom in here. Look at that. Early Nvidia logo. Look at that thing. It was just a a render shaded sphere with the envy on it. Who would have thought? Here's this game on this giant ad, little tiny logo for Nvidia. Would be like the most valuable company crucial to world politics. This little silly company on a stupid ad for being 3D jazz multimedia. Who would have

thought this little stupid logo [snorts] on top of Sega PC wouldn't be so crucial? It's It's weird how stuff works out. More stuff on strategy tips on Duke Nukem 3D. Um, Feel the Force. I I only pull this up because it just gives me nostalgia vibes. I never played I've never played collectible card games like Magic. I know it's like my big blind spot. I always I was I was not a cool kid in school, but I wasn't the nerdiest. And when the nerdy nerdy kids were playing Magic, I was like, "Oh, I know that's way too nerdy." really wanted to play it and I wanted to learn, but I was like, I do not have enough cultural cache in the school to be able to play this game. I'm just not cool enough to like this nerdy thing. There was another guy, his name was Anthony, and he was so cool. He was such a good-looking guy. The girls would just go crazy for Anthony. And he played Magic the Gathering in the library. And I was like, [sighs] Anthony can do it because he's just like, "That dude is so good-looking and how is he so cool and he can play magic?" And it was like, it was him and

the biggest dorks in our school were playing magic. And I just like, man, what are you doing, Anthony? What are you doing over there? But you're so like, I'm just not cool enough to be able to do that. I'm just not that cool. So that's that's the story. That's that's school for you. That was the 90s, folks. Uh but anyway, uh but this is this is a collectible card game for Star Wars. And my friend John's little brother used to play this all the time. And I I was also I was like, h I think I'm too cool for Star Wars. I never I like Star Wars, but I don't want to admit that I like it cuz even back in the day, liking Star Wars was still super nerdy. Uh, but I used to thumb through his uh collectible card game and it was stuff like this and I was like, "Oh, that's kind of cool actually." But uh I'm just not cool enough to like this. Um, here's uh just codes, just a whole section. I like codes. I wish more games had just coat codes where you type it in. This this cheat code is just you just hit A three times. Love it. Um,

Pteranova. This is that platformer. No, this is a mech. A mech game with I always like it's uh a mech with you got to put that FMV. You have to have actors acting in between your uh battle sessions here. Um here's a uh a uh ad for this crazy contraption where you could hook people up with like phone wires and do local LAN with just this adapter. But this local adapter cost $149, which I looked it up in today's dollars. I did the uh calculation for currency conversion for inflation conversion. And that's the equivalent of $300. Um, and you could network two PCs if you wanted to play multiplayer games locally. No, I think I think you could do it over the phone. It would cost you $300 just to play with your friends every time. Let me pull this meme. That meme right there where they're like, "Oh, everything was so good. You used to pay $300 if you just wanted to play the most basic basic multiplayer game." And if you look at the reviews, they're like, "It doesn't actually work very well." And if

we played like if three people played together on this thing, the frame rate would just lock cuz I think it was like everybody was locked to a single frame. Like it would pass the same frame between the three computers, it was doing some hack to make it work. And so if you had like three people on you, you you would have like five FPS. Let me tell you folks, anybody who posts a nostalgic meme about how gaming used to be, it sucked. Okay? I mean, gaming was fun, but it wasn't like all roses and everything was good and now everything sucks. Gaming has always been hit or miss. Sometimes it's good, sometimes bad. Here's back issues. I just like this one just to look back because people say I cherrypick information about how um Oh, Chris actually were platformers back then. You know, Jill the Jungle, Jazz Jack Rabbit. Okay. Well, let's look at the top games. They the cover stories. Um Hollywood, that's probably Sillywood. Rock and roll. I don't understand that. U Micro Media PCs, Digital Escapes, Full Motion Video. See, this um PC games was in the '90s was all about multimedia. So, that was a

big thing. And this is what I according to my research, this magazine specialized in is more of the multimedia side of things. But look at that. Look at that issue. 1994. Cyber Sex. Let me tell you, sex was invented before you were born, kids. Right there. See that? Uh power play. Dark Forces shooter. Star Trek. Probably some strategy. Doom killers. See, everybody was a Doom killer. There was a They didn't say clones as much. They were like doom killers. Um this is before they really used the word FPS, I think. Flight sims. So we got shooters, flight sims, um shooters, um Club Dead, Choice Awards, um Full Throttle Adventure Game, Adventure Gaming, Multiplayer Gaming, another sex issue about a year apart. Um Top Gun, which is probably simulation, Rebel Assault, a shooter. Um, Siberia, I can't remember what that game is. Crusaders strategy. Uh, Windows 95 Dungeon Keeper, um, management simulation style game. Future

Mac games. Duke Nukem Shooter. Air Warrior air simulation. This is a good game. I like Area Warrior. And Diablo, a dungeon crawler. Not a single platformer on this list. It's PC games, just like strategy simulation games. And it doesn't change. So, I don't mean to cherrypick, but I just went through this whole thing. I didn't pick a single cherry. Okay, the cherries were all just laying out. I didn't have to I picked them up. I scooped up the cherries. I didn't have to pick a cherry. All the cherries are right here. Okay, so I'm telling you, it's really that PC. I know you you can always think of a platformer like Jill of the Jungle, but nobody was talking about Jill of the Jungle. Okay, I played Jill of the Jungle, too. I remember it. I did play it back in the day. Okay. Uh whole article on 3D audio and all the different sub things. some guy, one of the guys that uh left a really uncomment. I said something wrong about Sound Blaster Pro and he wrote like a four paragraph thing. Dude, make a blog. Don't comment on YouTube. Talk

about the history of that stuff. Okay, here's a hardware spotlight. Um, let's take a look here. Um, just reviewing a thing. One, look at these microphones. They just don't make microphones like this anymore. I I should buy one of these just so I can do a couple lectures. Every PC in the 90s had a microphone that looked like this. Even though they were different brands, for some reason, this was the industrial design. I don't know why. They were like this long, skinny, weird thing on this little swivel joint. Every single PC from every company had a microphone that looked like that. I don't know what happened. What was wrong with people that microphones looked like that for a day? But anyway, um people always like, "Oh yeah, PC gaming. It was such a golden age." This PC, which your phone could run 12 times over, used to cost the equivalent. I did the currency conversion of $5,266. $5,200. People complaining about memory. I know memory is expensive, but it's always been expensive. So, $5,266 was for this setup here. And you'd get these weird speaker systems.

Okay. Um, this is a nice article about um let me zoom in so you could see that. Okay. um joysticks. I always say like um part of the reason I think platformers aren't big because platforms I know some people you say you can play with your keyboard. It's really most people don't play with keyboard for their platformers. Um but plat uh there was never a standardized control system like um on consoles and so games that require flicking reflexes have don't just work as well. And somebody was saying like um it says um oh one is Toad the Wet Sprocket reference here. Toad the Wet Sprocket. Look at that nice ' 90s reference. '90s magazine right here. This is what I was trying to point out. This guy's like uh okay. Uh people used to play I've never been a fan of using joysticks for firsterson action games such as Doom Dark Forces and Doom 2 3D. Imagine playing a first-person shooter with this. Um, we now I mean of course,

[snorts] you know, I I sometimes will play a first-person shooter with a controller. Don't tell my PC friends. Um, sometimes it is fun to play on a nice uh controller, but it wasn't like it was ludicrous to think that you would play a first-person shooter with a joystick. Ludicrous. And just like I I referenced in the previous one, um, PC gaming is still only 15% of gameplay sessions involve a controller. Most sessions are keyboard and mouse. Back then, people mostly have played keyboard and mouse for first-person shooters. Same today. Same today, my friends. All right. Um, here's what we got. Um, this Okay, so I'm going to pop this meme up again where people complain about how like, oh man, games just worked back in the day. This is a guy saying he bought Civilization 2 and it didn't work. And then here's this long explanation of how you have to patch it and fix it. All of this stuff. This is a whole page in a magazine dedicated to how to fix your software. And this this meme, this silly meme again, they're always like, "Oh yeah, we just we just made our games

work." No, games have always been buggy and cruddy and stuff like that. This PC gaming consoles have uh you know, that's the whole benefit of consoles. Consoles is that they're for babies and you don't have to patch anything because there's a standard platform and everything just works right out of the box. But PC gaming is fiddly, funky, janky, crazy. Um, nothing to show here except great graphic design. Look at this dude. Let me get the glare off of this dude. Look. I love 90s graphic design. Look at this dude. Look at this guy. This Oh my goodness. It's all just controls, different flight controls. PC gaming is just hardcore. Here's an ad for a guide for um um Gemstone 3. Gemstone 3 is very important because I loved playing this game on AOL. It's a textbased mud multiplayer dungeon MMO and I was playing it and my mom's car broke down at Costco and they were trying to call

our house but we only had one phone line and it was busy and my mom was broken down. Her car was broken. She was stuck at Costco and they were trying to call us. I think my dad had to call the neighbor to talk to my mom or something. And after that, my dad's like, "We're getting two phone lines." This game is the reason the Zukowski household had two phone lines in 1996 because you could play it on um Yeah. Well, it was pretty fun. I One of my favorite gaming memories is um uh Gemstone 3. I It's just I I don't want this is going long. I don't want to tell you all my Gemstone 3 stories, but just such great memories from this crazy text plate text thing. I just highlight this guy. This guy is such the '9s boss. This is just your '9s boss right here. Like a little pudgy a white chamber shirt or a green a blue chamé denim shirt, pleated pants, big thick tie with like some parramiums on it. This is just like '

90s boss right there. Just such nostalgia. Love that '9s boss guy. Um here's marketplaces where indies would advertise their stuff. Here's an indie game. Um, this is like just dude. This is kind of like the cheapo section. We got this total classy ad for total knockout. [laughter] Look at this. This is like Foxy Boxing game. And you can just order it by calling this one number by Digital Lobster Company. Look at this arm. [laughter] Look at this. And people were like turned on by this. Look at that. Look at those arm. Like what? Where did you learn anatomy? Look at your forearms. I just People were really turned on by this, let me tell you. Um, another one. I just this one just the graphic design on this. Look at this 90s graphic design. So cool. The mix match fonts, the big blocky squares with the sans sah block font and these like thin typewriter type fonts. H, it's just so

and it's like, oh, we don't know how to line up call with 1800 and it's like bumping through. Ah, just such classic graphic design. It just feels so nostalgic to look at this graphic. I've never seen this ad, but just this graphic design style. H. Here you go again. This is a whole page of adult stuff. Look at this. This is just so many ads for adult games. Adult adult. Look at this live video. How else you would come and you'd get like software just so that you could, you know, voyer room to room. And let me tell you folks, PC is nutty. It always has been. Uh, private CDROM Pleasure Part Two. These are just adult CDROMs. Sexy. This This URL is sexy. I don't I didn't go to this website. I don't know if it still exists. Somebody in the comments, tell me what happens when you go to this address. You're probably infected with something. Um, but yeah, I'm telling you folks, anytime you see something, if you were going to complain

about too much stuff on Steam that's uh adult or not safe for work, you are denying your PC heritage. This is PC heritage right here. Okay? You should look at adult stuff on on Steam and be like, "Yes, this is part of the culture. This is just who we are. Embrace it." And then just end with a picture of a website about the PC web store and stuff like that. just just classic. He used you. There's screenshots of websites that you had to include the net uh the navigator just so that people knew this was a website. Like see this is a website the Netscape navigator. Look, GameSpot. I think they still have this logo. Gamespot.com. Look at that cool ad. We go to the back. Um and then we have a surprisingly I gota I got to hand it to them. Gotta hand it to Creative Labs. Surprisingly tasteful ad. You would think if you just read this headline, you didn't see all this stuff. a breakthrough and sound so real your PC would have its own groupies. I could just predict what kind of pictures would

be under there. It's just a classy grungy dude. This and not a single like luring uh you know lurid female like gross comment about a groupy or something. No, it's just like oh yeah, just some dude with his lighter. That's that's just what they So I got to hand it classy ad creative. This is Creative Labs and actual cray advertising and they didn't sync to the the lowest common denominator. So, I got to hand it to him and let's end on a positive note. So, what did we learn? I I really, folks, I don't think PC gaming has changed very much. Uh the stuff that works on this magazine pretty much works for Steam. Of course, your graphics have to be better, but uh for the most part, it still works. Uh FMV doesn't work as much, but guess what? There is that uh FMV Chinese games coming back. And I think uh the western market I think well Barlo what's Barlo and his her story he's he's been doing FMV games and they do pretty well. So yeah, nothing's really changed and we're all doing okay.

Everybody's going to be fine. So don't freak out. Start a website. That's my main thing. Start a website today. Don't leave any comments. Don't subscribe to me. Go start a website. And uh with that, what I want you to do is you've watched way too much stuff today. I want you to watch this video next. This is my video where it says one hour of work done. If you watch this video, you will get one hour of work done. You've watched too much YouTube already. It's time to put down the YouTube. Put this on. Put on some headphones. Just listen to this white noise and get an hour of gamedev done. That's what's going to get you a good game done, not watching some other person talk about their gamedev journey and all that stuff. Don't listen to that stuff. It's It's distracting. Just focus on getting one hour done. Goodbye.