I’m diving into the Golden Age of PC gaming (Win98/XP) and sharing some of my favorite retro PC games and how to play them today! These games have a timeless appeal and still resonate with players!
GAMES SHOWN:
No One Lives Forever 1 & 2
NOX
Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force 1 & 2
Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father
Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines
Thief 1 & 2
PC gaming in the late ’90s and early 2000s—a time when computers were beige, monitors were deeper than they were wide, and installing a game meant you were probably going to war… not in-game, but with your system’s drivers.
Graphics Cards
You weren’t just a gamer; you were an amateur electrician. Want to play Half-Life? Better make a blood sacrifice to the gods of DirectX and hope your Voodoo2 card doesn’t start smoking. Oh, and if you had a TNT2 or, dare we say, a GeForce—congrats, you were the king of the LAN party (more on that chaos in a sec).
Game Installations
Games came on 4 CDs or, if you were lucky, a single glorious DVD-ROM. You’d click “Install” and then go make a sandwich, take a nap, and maybe grow a beard while the progress bar pretended to move. And woe to you if you lost Disc 2. That game was now just a very shiny coaster.
Internet Gaming
Online multiplayer meant two things: dial-up and lag. You’d be mid-Quake III Arena duel when your mom picked up the phone and boom, connection gone. Entire friendships were lost over 56k modems and someone yelling, “Stop downloading music, I’m trying to play StarCraft!”
Sound Cards
If you heard your game in surround sound, that meant you either had a Sound Blaster Live! or your rich friend did. Everyone else? Enjoyed Duke Nukem through the soothing buzz of mono PC speaker bleeps.
System Requirements
Every game box came with specs written in a language only wizards understood: “Pentium II 266 MHz, 64MB RAM, 3D accelerator required.” You’d read it and think, “I might be able to run this if I close Microsoft Word first.”
Ah, it was messy, it was glitchy, it was wonderful—and somehow, games felt like magic despite everything trying to stop them from running.