I Got Lucky: I Was There for the Years PC Gaming Blew Up

Finished the book-writing gig my boss handed me today, and I still felt like writing something. I’d promised Yong-dage I’d have a Chrome OS review done today, but then stuff came up in the afternoon and I spent half the day running errands, so it never got written. Guess it’s getting pushed to tomorrow. In the meantime I messed around with a few recent single-player releases—COD8, NFS The Run (sorry, no idea which number this one is), and BF3—about 30 minutes each, then uninstalled all of them. Figured it was worth laying out some thoughts on games, and on missing those school days.

The earliest entertainment

Honestly, the first computer I actually owned was in 1998, running Win98. The second-edition Win98 still had that time-lock bug, so I stayed on the first edition. The first game I ever touched was an FPS—specifically Novalogic’s Delta Force. By today’s standards that game is brain-dead dumb, but at the time it was fresh as hell. It let a lot of people feel, for the first time, what a realistic war game could be—even though the first one still ran on software rendering. And by software rendering I mean the 3D you saw was wall-to-wall jaggies.

Later I played Diablo, StarCraft, Xianjian, and the first Toy Soldiers—so I did get a taste of all sorts of games. But these were still the embryonic years. Truth is, what they delivered was more about being ahead of their time. And back then even owning a 3D-accelerated card was a luxury; 4MB of VRAM running NFS3 was gorgeous. Even in an era like that, I could still see the reflections on the car windows.

A flood of big titles

At the start of 2001, right around when broadband was just spreading, the big titles started piling up. First came Quake III out of nowhere. I’d played Quake II and found the story incomprehensible—it was basically just shooting aliens over and over. Quake III’s visuals gave all the graphics nerds hope, and gave all the GPU review outlets the fairest benchmark path they could ask for. The reason I bring up Quake III isn’t just that it successfully made OpenGL the hot thing—it’s that without it, a lot of today’s big titles wouldn’t exist.

In 2002 I saw Warcraft III arrive. I was playing it on a Celeron 900 + 128MB RAM, and I never would’ve guessed that nearly 10 years later the game would still be alive and kicking on the historical stage. Same year, Medal of Honor showed up and kicked off the first WWII craze. A year later, some of the Medal of Honor devs jumped ship to make Call of Duty—also WWII, of course. You could call it a straight-up Medal of Honor clone.

One thing I should point out: the earliest Medal of Honor, including Call of Duty, and a bunch of the mainstream games of the time, all ran on the Quake III engine from id’s Carmack, the god himself. That engine didn’t really retire until 2006.

I vaguely remember starting broadband in 2002, and basically every connection was spent downloading that month’s big releases, and every single one was a surprise. Meanwhile online games were still stuck in 2D—a 256-color Legend of Mir was already the best MMO you could get. Of course, that didn’t change until World of Warcraft showed up.

New games just aren’t fun

A lot of what I played today were sequels to games I was addicted to back in the day—Call of Duty, Need for Speed, Battlefield. All I can say is, games today have drifted away from the original design philosophy. More precisely, they’re not fun anymore. Or at least not as fun as they used to be.

I’m not denying that Modern Warfare’s story is excellent. But if you’re calling it the best, then I can only assume you never played the first Medal of Honor, or No One Lives Forever from the same era, or Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix. Even the much-praised sniper mission doesn’t hold a candle to the assassination levels in IGI, or even the stealth sections in Return to Castle Wolfenstein. If you want a tragic-hero story, Max Payne’s plot is probably better anyway. I have a hard time understanding how design ideas that were already used back in 2002 get a fresh coat of paint in a new game and suddenly it’s brilliant. The protagonist-driven story route has existed forever—whether it’s the spy intel-gathering in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the assassinations and double betrayals in No One Lives Forever, the desperate breakout feel of Soldier of Fortune, or the brutal-warfare setup of Medal of Honor. The way I see it, today’s FPS games just have better graphics, more effects, and enemies that die in more self-satisfied poses. Otherwise, nothing’s changed. Cutscenes, you say? Oh, kid, Medal of Honor had those too—and you got to see soldiers puking before the Omaha Beach landing, you got to see the first wave of guys getting trampled to death the moment they stepped off the boat. Isn’t that enough to show how brutal war is? Please don’t complain about the graphics—in 2002 that was top-tier.

Prince of Persia and Tomb Raider are the action games that stayed somewhat alive in recent years. They’re basically dead now—all you get is various shooty-shoot stuff—but they lasted longer than most… Still, I maintain the best action game belongs to something called Oni.

Oni is a 3D fighting action game. You control Konoko with mouse + keyboard, punching and kicking, and you can chain all sorts of combos. You can use weapons—pistols up to heavy weapons—but most of the time you don’t need them, because you can disarm enemies bare-handed and dodge shots just by moving. The real threat is the mercury sniper rifle, one shot and you’re dead. Fortunately the game is always stealth ops, so head-on firefights are rare.

Oni’s plot still holds up as a wild ride today: your superiors betray you, a brother-versus-sister fight, a mysterious parentage, an environmental struggle for the Earth. But the real highlight is the combat impact. Honestly, I still haven’t seen any game beat Oni’s hit feel. Not to this day. There were a couple PSP games that came close, but that’s another story.

Decline and growing old

The rise of PC gaming came from FPS—from the earliest DOOM and Delta Force, to Quake III later, to the peak-era全民 CS, and now in decline it’s still FPS, with a new shooty blockbuster every year. You rarely see pure action games survive anymore. The few that remain are stealth-assassination types. We can hardly find that old hit feel again.

Another reason for the decline is probably games getting more complicated. Honestly, my old man’s a game fan too—FPS especially, he plays more than I do. But after we set up a new PC at home, I installed COD4–8 for him, he played a bit, and in the end he went back to Discord Games to play Dou Dizhu, or Plants vs. Zombies. Asked why: “The screen’s too busy, the controls are too complicated, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.” Fair enough—my father doesn’t know English and hates complicated controls. And yeah, shooters today aren’t like the old days where you could just tell him move and reload and he’d clear the game.

More and more games are going online, and the PC version increasingly feels like an accessory to the Xbox and PS3 versions. You can see it in the latest NFS The Run—frames capped at 30, no detailed GPU settings. Don’t ask why. Those options are redundant on a console.

Postscript

They say when a person gets endlessly nostalgic, it means they’ve started to age. As someone who plays old games every day—who even fires up the PSP for Famicom titles regularly—I feel like I’m aging prematurely. No, scratch that. I’m already old. But as part of the aging generation, I got lucky: I was there for the years PC gaming blew up……