Thread by @gravislizard

ok i'm gonna briefly describe a video game phenomenon that happened to me as a kid that i'm still kind of working through

if you were a kid with a PC in 1995 you got one of two childhoods. one was that mom bought you big box retail copies of lucasarts adventure games and the other was you had like 9 of these

obviously these are bargain bin garbage compiled by vultures. software ranging from the dawn of the PC to present, scraped from BBSes, other CDs, whatever, and poorly packed onto a disc with a broken installer as quickly and cheaply as possible

even if you had internet, google wouldn't exist in its current form for years, and what's important about this is that it meant you had no fucking clue what was going on, since all the games are demos.

this is typically what you'd get. notice there is no "readme.txt," no "manual.txt." those were rarely included, because you were expected to have obtained this from a reputable distributor (who had a catalog) or a BBS, where the posting would include necessary info

i don't know what the process of making demos is like. i assume, particularly at the time, that it was a hack and slash operation where huge swaths of code were cut out and couldn't easily be replaced without spending more on the demo than you'd make in sales.

so, you'd just try every EXE until something started the game, and then you'd hit "NEW GAME" or just be plunged straight into the demo level. bam, you're playing.

at this time, many games had no in-game text, particularly on the PC. if you didn't watch the interstitial static-image cutscenes (in later games) or read the manual (most games) you had literally no context for the events occurring, and no idea what the controls were.

so the process of exploring these CDs was largely one of starting unknown EXEs, most of which crashed or printed inscrutable errors, and if you did get into a game, smashing keys until you figured out what made you move and shoot and interact.

at this time, there were successful 3D games, but like, 8. no joke. in 1995 i think there might literally have been less than 20 successful 3D games for the PC. part of that's because the platform had zero inbuilt capability for it.

every 3D game was written completely from scratch (wolf, doom, descent, elder scrolls), down to the primitives (polygons and hacks to simulate 3D) and it cost a fortune in CPU time to draw perspective-correct 3D

and of course 3D games were particularly hard to interact with due to 3D games not having solidified and the PC lacking any reasonable input mechanisms (the PC joystick was atrocious)

so to sum up, sometimes when going through folders on your 1001 GREAT GAMES disc you'd find a title that dropped you directly into a 3D world made of inscrutably textured polygons, running at <10fps, with controls that made zero sense

no readme, no ingame text, no cutscenes (in a demo downloaded at 9600 baud, are you shitting me) - things that might have (and this is the CRUCIAL part here) existed in the full game but had to be cut for the demo

if you were 12 at this time, the idea that there was something beyond this was too large for your brain to comprehend. the PC was a dark, cold thing - it was not like owning a videogame console.

my entire childhood was timeshifted by several years due to my family being completely out of touch, barely going out, and being poor. so while i was doing all this, I didn't know the playstation or n64 existed

owning a game console was not an experience i had, but i can tell what it was like. you were part of an active, living phenomenon where the company was advertising directly to you, and you went to brightly lit stores and there were new games! dialogue! cutscenes! music!

all i had was this cold, black DOS prompt and these games that made no sense, and which I didn't quite understand were meant to have been consumed *in context* - I was never supposed to have these apart from a BBS post or pamplet explaining what they were.

PC games were weird enough in general because the PC had almost no ports from real consoles, even once it was possible, which was very, very late - the PC finally got intrinsic NES-grade graphics/sound in the 90s, *far* too late to be a serious 2D contender

so what *did* get developed for the PC was low budget stuff, a few games made by (basically) highly skilled solo programmers in an era when indie releases on console were impossible, and the occasional port from the Amiga

i was aware of how weird PC games were at the time - I had an NES, and I had seen SNES games in a magazine and they seemed so much more with-it, so much more connected to the reality I knew outside of this cold, soulless box that was all I had.

so the fact that these 3D games felt so lifeless and cold and lonely was not surprising to me, although it did definitely affect me (deeply, in ways i'm still sorting out)

so here's the crux of this: i didn't find out until only a couple years ago that many of those weird 3D games WERE ports, some of the only ports the PC ever saw. they were ports from the Saturn and PSX, and if you see them in THAT context they don't feel so weird

Fade To Black, for instance, is a game where you're wandering around in a mostly untextured series of gray hallways. your camera sits at a bizarre downward angle and can't be adjusted - it's basically an early attempt at an over the shoulder shooter, and it sucks shit.

the PC demo I had was kind of terrifying. the game has zero explanation. you start it and you're suddenly just a faceless, voiceless dude in a dark room. it says "new message" but you can't figure out how to read it. when you leave the room, text says "PRISONER SIX HAS ESCAPED"

everything is strange and awkward. it uses tank controls but very jerky and stiff. the controls are all over the keyboard so you can't memorize what controls this QWOP motherfucker, but the bigger problem is just how dark and empty the world is

every room stretches away into darkness that, it turns out, hides enemies you can't make sense of, that shoot you when you can't see them. there are abstract shapes on the ceiling that shoot at you and you can't tilt the camera up to look at them.

imagine a nightmare where something is attacking you but you can't move your head to look at it. you wave your hands at it in your peripheral vision, hoping to hit it, but your head just - won't - move

well, it turns out this is a PSX game, and it's no better there, but it's so much more alive. there's an opening cinematic, there's voiceovers, there's music. the game sucks but it doesn't feel like you're in the fucking Backrooms

Destruction Derby is a Psygnosis title released for DOS that i just found in a game collection. the graphics are a mess and things clip through each other, and it has that awful hollow emptiness that 3D DOS games had.

but it also came out for PSX, and just seeing the box, imagining putting this in the PSX and seeing that bootup screen, tells me that anyone who played this on there didn't feel so completely isolated and alienated.

having something, anything familiar to lock my compass to would have made all this easier, but I had nothing. I had bizarre, empty, dead worlds with no music and no text and no instructions

I know that when I was doing this my peers were playing Twisted Metal, which I wouldn't experience until the early 2000s. i know kids were playing Parappa The Rapper while I was trying to find meaning in a demo of Alone In The Dark where I couldn't leave the first room

but it doesn't feel like that's true. it's hard to accept that that could have been going on somewhere while I was having the experiences I was having, bumping around lost in some of the same worlds they were, except dead and lifeless

i feel like i grew up in a world that the langoliers ate just after i escaped