Lol, some games were certainly buggy, but most games I played as a kid on my NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and Xbox worked pretty well. I remember by siblings being games testers as high school and college students, but that seems to no longer be a thing.
These days, only indie games seem to work okay day 1, and that’s not even a guarantee. Ever since WiFi became standard on consoles, it seems developers ship games way too early since they know they can patch it later.
Ah yeah, I guess that is true. I think Nintendo really clamped down on quality assurance due to the fact they rose up from the ashes of the Atari era and the global video game crash of the 80’s, that was directly attributed to a lack of quality assurance in the industry.
PC games, though… Oh boy. They were doing way more cool stuff, taking the tech to its limit, but they also tended to be smaller teams from garage companies, so had less resources for QA. Though it still was pretty rare to get a brand new game that straight up didn’t work. I think the only time that had ever happened to me was with Anarchy Online. I bought it retail the day of launch; that shit didn’t even install correctly. I couldn’t play it for a whole year, at which point they patched it and also put up a digital download cuz the physical media was botched.
Yeah, PC games were more rough, but they also often had a mechanism for updates. Sometimes it was a physical expansion pack (I think Warcraft 2 and StarCraft expansions were distributed that way, I forget though), and some had an online updater (I had dialup for most of my childhood so I am very aware of how much that sucked).
However, since I mostly played larger titles, I didn’t have to deal with that. Some games I loved as a kid:
Dark Forces
Lords of the Realm 2
Command and Conquer - most titles
Warcraft - 1&2
Age of Empires
Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear
I don’t remember any kind of patching needed for those games, and these were all mid to late 90s games, and I also played a lot of older floppy games, like ZZT and Scorched Earth, though the latter saw plenty of updates (I think my brother downloaded them at school or something).
Sometime after 2000 or so games started relying on downloading updates on PC, and with the PS3 and Xbox 360, that moved to consoles as well.
Lol, some games were certainly buggy, but most games I played as a kid on my NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and Xbox worked pretty well. I remember by siblings being games testers as high school and college students, but that seems to no longer be a thing.
These days, only indie games seem to work okay day 1, and that’s not even a guarantee. Ever since WiFi became standard on consoles, it seems developers ship games way too early since they know they can patch it later.
Ah yeah, I guess that is true. I think Nintendo really clamped down on quality assurance due to the fact they rose up from the ashes of the Atari era and the global video game crash of the 80’s, that was directly attributed to a lack of quality assurance in the industry.
PC games, though… Oh boy. They were doing way more cool stuff, taking the tech to its limit, but they also tended to be smaller teams from garage companies, so had less resources for QA. Though it still was pretty rare to get a brand new game that straight up didn’t work. I think the only time that had ever happened to me was with Anarchy Online. I bought it retail the day of launch; that shit didn’t even install correctly. I couldn’t play it for a whole year, at which point they patched it and also put up a digital download cuz the physical media was botched.
Yeah, PC games were more rough, but they also often had a mechanism for updates. Sometimes it was a physical expansion pack (I think Warcraft 2 and StarCraft expansions were distributed that way, I forget though), and some had an online updater (I had dialup for most of my childhood so I am very aware of how much that sucked).
However, since I mostly played larger titles, I didn’t have to deal with that. Some games I loved as a kid:
I don’t remember any kind of patching needed for those games, and these were all mid to late 90s games, and I also played a lot of older floppy games, like ZZT and Scorched Earth, though the latter saw plenty of updates (I think my brother downloaded them at school or something).
Sometime after 2000 or so games started relying on downloading updates on PC, and with the PS3 and Xbox 360, that moved to consoles as well.