this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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So we're just gonna conveniently forget all the shovelware from that time period?
Yes. Because older is always better. Then when the present is the before times people will look back fondly on it too.
Wait...just how much worse are they going to get‽
the enshitification continues...
That's just being intellectually dishonest in the opposite direction.
The truth is some things do get worse, some things get better, and in either case, the right thing to do is examine the tangible effects, positive or negative.
Yeah, heavy survivorship bias in this one.
Everyone seems to think that games like Doom and Half-Life came out all the time. I remember looking at shareware disks in shops and seeing loads of games that looked like total crap.
For sure! just go to Abandonware and try to go to a specific year to find something. You have to wade through pages of garbo to find something worth playing.
One of my favorite pastimes as a kid was digging through the "1000s of Games" disc I had that was full of demos, shovelware, Doom mods, and tons of other garbage. Occasionally you'd find a diamond hidden in the turds.
There's even a Youtuber who does "Shovelware Diggers" as a show and it's just that! Him and his community riffle around in old shareware collections looking for treasures, which he showcases. (Edit to add: Looked it up and he ended the show after 300 episodes! He still does other retro gaming stuff too. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCIZNtotF3Xh0dfQjJx8XcP_73UGtjqN0&si=Gvx5W0mmjTE48z79 )
But yeah, most of the content on those discs would have qualified more as viruses than games, if they even ran in the first place!
Rollercoaster Tycoon was 1999, so I'll choose to believe that the "then" era was after the big gaming crash of the 80s. There was still shovelware, but it wasn't nearly as bad as during the 80s when you'd see mountains and mountains of terrible, non-functioning games. I don't think anyone really has nostalgia for that period of gaming, but the late 90s to early 2000s really were as close to a golden age as we ever got.
Gaming crash was more of a console thing. One of the arguments was why you should buy a console when you can buy a computer for a bit more and do so much more. Computer games ran through it mostly unfazed.
Or all the shitty licensed games. I'm sure there's a number of older gamers triggered by the LJN logo.