Do you actually miss the old days of gaming, or are you just romanticising plastic cases and dial-up?
You didn’t need an internet connection to enjoy a game in the old days. You needed a disc, some patience, and maybe a patch off a magazine cover CD. The rest? You figured it out. Or you read the manual.
And what a thing the manual was. Some were massive, with 40+ pages. They explained the factions, the backstory, the unit types, the weapons, the hotkeys. Some had short stories to set the scene. Others had charts or tech trees. You’d read them on the toilet, in bed, or on the bus like you were studying for an exam. Compare that to now. Most games don’t even tell you how to quit properly. You get a vague tutorial pop-up that vanishes before you’ve read it. Maybe a splash screen with some AI-generated backstory about an interdimensional war. Then it’s straight to the battle pass.
Map packs used to be events. One-time purchases. A small bundle of extra content. Maybe a few new maps, a new campaign mission, something fresh. You’d get it on a disc or download it from FilePlanet. Done. No expiry, no login, no ‘seasonal rotation’. The maps didn’t disappear in a month. Now it’s constant churn. The goal isn’t to keep you playing because it’s good, it’s to keep you playing because you’re scared you’ll miss something. The kids called this FOMO, but we’re not kids.
Modding was encouraged. Companies released tools. Hell, Command & Conquer included a map editor on the disc. Half-Life gave birth to Counter-Strike. Total Annihilation modders built entire new games. Today, modders fight against encrypted files, broken toolchains, or TOS that threaten bans for daring to tweak something. Everything is tied into an account, wrapped in DRM, or reliant on online servers that can vanish without warning.
Then there’s the death of local multiplayer. LAN parties and hot-seat multiplayer were part of gaming culture. You dragged your PC or console to a mate’s house. You brought snacks and cables. You argued over who got which monitor. And you played for hours. If something broke, you fixed it together. If someone cheated, you smacked them. Now it’s all “invite to party” and “waiting for host.” Games come out without split-screen. Co-op is patched in months later if at all.
And don’t even start on ownership. You bought a game and it was yours. You could install it whenever you liked. Play it whenever you liked. Now? You’re licensing access. That “purchase” might stop working if the servers go down or the publisher pulls support. Half of the time you’re downloading 60 GB just to launch the game, and the day-one patch is bigger than the install size used to be.
This isn’t about nostalgia. The industry really has shifted. Convenience turned into control. Online play turned into dependency. Add-ons became monetisation pipelines. And worst of all? We let it happen. We bought into it, literally. We traded permanence for perks. Manuals for microtransactions. Community for algorithms.
The old days weren’t perfect. Some games were buggy. You couldn’t Google a walkthrough. But they respected you more than most games do now. You were expected to learn, to experiment, to fail and try again. Now everything’s drip-fed and overexplained. You’re a product, not a player.
When did you stop expecting games to come with anything real?
