Like many people, I’ve been thinking about physical media lately, and how our entertainment items – movies, albums, books – used to be things that sat on a shelf that someone else could see and say, “Hey I like this thing on your shelf.”
PC games were one of those things, once. I have a few. And I’ve scrounged them up from their various moving boxes and parents’ houses to see if they still work.
Does anyone here still play a game from an optical drive? A game where your regularly-played copy isn’t the Steam version?
For me, Morrowind was the last game that I was still playing on a disc. I have newer games on discs, but just played those once or twice and then put them back on the shelf. But I was still playing Morrowind from a CD up until 2023, when it went on sale on Steam for $1, so I bought it. I almost didn’t get it, since I liked the fact that I was still playing a game on a CD.
I plan on taking inventory of which games still work and what it takes to install them today.
2007, I think. I had recently moved and didn’t have internet hooked up yet, so I bought BioShock as a physical disc so that I wouldn’t have to wait. Imagine my frustration when I learned about the online-only authentication bullshit it used for DRM, so having the disc didn’t even matter; without Internet I couldn’t play the damn thing at all.
Piracy hysteria was at an absolute fever pitch in 2007 – those online activations are what make me think that much of my physical collection won’t be playable anymore.
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2007, I think. I had recently moved and didn’t have internet hooked up yet, so I bought BioShock as a physical disc so that I wouldn’t have to wait. Imagine my frustration when I learned about the online-only authentication bullshit it used for DRM, so having the disc didn’t even matter; without Internet I couldn’t play the damn thing at all.
Piracy hysteria was at an absolute fever pitch in 2007 – those online activations are what make me think that much of my physical collection won’t be playable anymore.