Like many people, I’ve been thinking about physical media lately, and how our entertainment items – movies, albums, books – used to be things that sat on a shelf that someone else could see and say, “Hey I like this thing on your shelf.”
PC games were one of those things, once. I have a few. And I’ve scrounged them up from their various moving boxes and parents’ houses to see if they still work.
Does anyone here still play a game from an optical drive? A game where your regularly-played copy isn’t the Steam version?
For me, Morrowind was the last game that I was still playing on a disc. I have newer games on discs, but just played those once or twice and then put them back on the shelf. But I was still playing Morrowind from a CD up until 2023, when it went on sale on Steam for $1, so I bought it. I almost didn’t get it, since I liked the fact that I was still playing a game on a CD.
I plan on taking inventory of which games still work and what it takes to install them today.
What were (are?) some of your favorites?
I still have some floppies in working order, even.
But no, I don’t play them regularly. It’s just easier to make a backup that doesn’t need a disk in the drive. Even most of my retro PCs these days run out of a large-ish hard drive replacement, so keeping games outside their unreliable original media and the original media elsewhere is a better alternative.
It’s a bit different on consoles where carts are harder to duplicate and ingest, as well as being more reliable and loading faster. Floppies and optical media, particularly when you can access the files, less so.