Pushing Buttons: Building a gaming PC is painstaking and humbling – I can’t wait to do it again
In this week's newsletter: Consoles are plug-and-play, but starting from scratch gave me new appreciation for everything that goes into making games
Next week I am going to build a gaming PC. I've done it once before and wrote an article about what a nightmare the process was - although the issue turned out to be with the USB stick I used to install the motherboard update patch and ... well, don't get me started. The thing is, I figured it out because when you have played PC games for as long as I have, you know that figuring technical stuff out is a key part of the experience.
While games consoles have always been pure plug-and-play experiences, PC games have definitely not. When I started playing in the early 1990s, they came on multiple floppy discs - The Secret of Monkey Island was on eight - and you had to keep swapping them in and out of the drive, like feeding a voracious robot. Not that you necessarily bought complete games back then. I first played Wolfenstein 3D when my friend got the first couple of levels free on a magazine cover disc. That's how a lot of games were distributed - the famed shareware model. Once you'd played the sample, you were supposed to contact the publisher to get the full game sent to you. Comparatively few people had the internet back then, so as a distribution model it made a lot of sense. It's rumoured that there were once more copies of the shareware version of Doom (pictured below) on PCs than there were copies of Microsoft Windows 95. This was just another oddity of being a PC gamer - having a drawer full of magazine front cover discs crammed with shareware and public domain mini games.
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