I remember my father used to play PC games and be all about PCs when I was a child in the 1990s and I would watch and be amazed. He died in 2000...watching these videos about 1990s computers feels like...making a bit of a connection to him again.
There's a similar connection with my sister who passed in '98 that I try to recapture when making these nostalgic videos, so I hope that they continue to bring you many happy memories.
Guess my kids will feel the same when I go. Those were the days. I still have my classic computers. Never play on them but I remember the joys of having them working. Voodoo cards and GEneral Midi sound cards. The ensoniqs were super easy to set up. No drivers to hog you RAM :-)
I am late since I joined and subbed to the channel a year ago. I know the feeling, my dad is slowly dying and he gave me all his old pc crap that still works. I was crying looking at it all seven year old me trying to help my Dad solve Space Quest or Kings Quest. It hurts, I hope you are doing well. And LGR I hope you keep doing this series as I binge watch it.
I still remember how I bought my first PC game with my own money. It was C&C:RA with all the addons included. The store clerk asked me if my PC's hardware was good enough to run it (the first and only time this happened) and I said "Yes, because I have a Pentium 2!" and smiled at him proudly.
It's funny that, nowadays, we blow right past those system requirements on the lowest-end walmart PC, but because of things like 64-bit Windows versions, we can't even get them to run on our now elite magical hardware of the future.
I had issues with DOSBox trying to play my CD copy of Duke Nukem 3D on one of my PCs, but that was a few years ago. I don't think I ever got it to work properly.
one thing that kept me away from PC-gaming for two decades: -PC is complete overkill ocmpared to the systhem requirements -still doesn't work i can't even run games from the 2000's on my pc. and i can'T even get them to work with virtual box or stuff like that either.
I remember being really young when I got into PC gaming and never really worrying about the system requirements until I got Battlefield Vietnam and realized I couldn't play it in its choppy state. Luckily, some bored employee at circuit city ended up walking me through my RAM problem. Shouts out to that dude wherever he's at!
I think one of the things that really helped get rid of the system requirement madness was Windows itself. In the days of DOS, the idea of the "PC standard" was pretty vague. Drivers and compatibility were all over the place with things. When Windows released, it HAD to run on any compatible. In order to do this, it HAD to support all the graphics types and sound types. This modularized it into the way we programmers do it today via WinAPI, DX/OGL libraries, and assorted sound libraries. If it works with Windows, you just need the right drivers and programming for it usually just includes using WinAPI and DX/OGL. No longer do we actually need to address and access the GPU and sound cards directly (thank goodness).
I can totally relate to this obsession about mundane objects.While my parents refused to fork out the money for a pc back in the day :( I was obsessed over NES black box art the ones with the pixals on the box.After years of atari 2600 I loved the fact that the sprites actually looked like something lol. Now that im all grown up I spend too much on pc's.Even bought an old 486 to play all them cool games that mocked me as a kid....Emulators for me just is not the same. While I missed the epic goodness of 90's pc gaming.A few times a week I take a time trip back pretending its state of the art.Amazingly it works as the games are still SOLID! and the 2d graphics holds up better than early 3d games. Thanks for all the retro stuff LGR!
One of my favorite things to do when i was about 12-15 years old, was look at the system requirements on all of the software boxes in best buy or any store that sold software. The late 90s amd early 2000s was the golden age of sys req
I really like how calming this video is. I wasn't old enough to play these games or know much about them when I was growing up, but there's something really relaxing and interesting about listening to you talk about stickers. That time when you reviewed a chair that I wouldn't buy even if I had the money, it was still pleasant just listening to you. Would you ever consider doing an intentional ASMR video? Indulge in those little tech sounds of fans whirring, disks spinning, the soft tapping of a keyboard, plus with that smooth voice narrating after it, oh man. It would make my day. :D
Yeah, I remember all these old requirements when they came out. Remembering my first "new" store bought "Packard Bell 486 SX 25 mhz with Panasonic printer" from Best Buy (late 1992) and 4 megabytes of ram. Windows 3.1 and dos 5.0 and direct x 1. I upgraded that system for years with 486DX 50 mhz then 100 mhz cpu and then a cyrix 133 mhz. Ram upgraded to max at 20 megabytes with ram double software installed for even more space. Sound blaster (original then awe 32 version later on) Print shop deluxe taking an hour and a half thinking and about the same amount of time printing it making banners for work. 4x cd rom drive also. One of my all time windows direct x games was "Chrystal Calliburn" (pinball game I still love and still own today) The good Ole' days of computers and gaming :) Thanks for sharing these cool memories :)
I didn't pay much attention to system requirements for a long time because every DOS game I had installed on my 486 would run without a hitch. But then I bought MechWarrior 4 and tried to play it on the family Pentium 2 machine, and couldn't see anything because It didn't have a decent graphics card. Fortunately, one trip to Staples and one Rage Fury Pro later, I was dazzled by the hyper-realistic visuals and mind blowing 800x600 resolution streaming from my CRT monitor.
tristikov Staples actually used to have decent graphics cards? I work there and the best we have is not much better than integrated on a relatively new PC.
I still remember the days, I remember seeing a game that required 2 Gigs in free space and I was like, "Wow!...This is the biggest Game ever!..." Haha, Now you have games like GTA 5 that is 65 Gigs in size!
So True. Back then I thought a game of 25 MB (yes 25 MB) was a lot. These days you will need a one TB or greater drive just so you can have space for 'em. By the way, I will cringe when the first Terrabyte game comes out.
Ah nostalgia! I have always had that issue of never having the best graphics (or amount of RAM for that matter) to play games and I often remember looking at games back in the late 90s until the mid 00s and hoping my lower end system would run the game, which sadly often wasn't the case and I couldn't play many of the popular games everyone I knew that played PC games, had. I always looked at the Recommended System Requirements, rather than the Minimum System Requirements as I knew I wouldn't be satisfied with playing the game on minimum. It was the best or nothing for me and sadly it was often nothing, although I did still have several games I couldn't run using the best quality settings. The best PC I had for years was a Packard Bell PC my parents bought for me back in 1999. It had 17 inch giant CRT which took up most of the desk, a Pentium III 733Mhz CPU, 64MB DDR RAM (eventually upgraded to 384MB), 15GB HDD (eventually upgraded to 30GB) and 128MB Geforce FX 5200 PCI graphics (Sadly my motherboard didn't have an AGP graphics expansion slot so I was stuck with slower PCI graphics) I remember trying to play games like Star Trek Elite Fore II on that PC,but they would lag so badly it was impossible to play them and for a few years I was limited to a 15GB HDD, so I couldn't have many games installed at any one time. My monitor was also limited to a resolution of 1280x1024 which often wasn't high enough to play many games well either. I had the PC until 2007 when I finally had enough of my own money to really start building a much better PC and I was glad I upgraded. I couldn't play many games and as for video editing, forget about it, but that was about to change. Now I got a much better PC with 32GB RAM, several 1TB HDDs, 240GB SSD, MSi Nvidia Geforce 750 Ti Graphics, Intel Quad Core i7 3.1Ghz etc... much better for playing a lot of games, although I do still look at the graphics requirements for games since, although I do have a decent graphics card, there have been much better ones made since and some games may not run the best on it.
***** "but the ability to just put something in the original Xbox and play it was amazing to me." That's something I might have got back in the 8 bit days when computer games came on tape and took at least ten minutes to load and the other choice was the NES or the Master System (though some computers used cartridges too) not that it mattered in the UK.
That was mostly true but certain A1000 games couldn't run on anything other than Kickstart 1.1. There were later compatibility issues between OCS and ECS machines and still later ones with AGA.
woooooooa thanks for the nostalgi trip. I'mm 80's kid. 90's teen, so I remeber all that specification readings, and all the savings every yer or so to get the newest voodoo graphic card and the soundblaster clones.... oh man.
You're that kind of guy who makes videos that I love to watch while I eat a meal, learn something, and laugh a bit at the quirky humor. Definitely one of my favorite TH-camrs.
That grid like on NFS is what I remember the most. Mostly looking at processor, RAM, eventually video card; I didn't look at DirectX though it was on there, leading to my most recent compatibility problem - Freelancer back in 2004. (Not counting backwards compatibility problems of course.)
I remember when you would find a VGA game and get all tingly with excitement because the graphics were going to be great. Then SVGA came out and you would drop to your knees and worship at the potential graphical awesomeness right up to the point where you realized your PC couldn't run it.
Holy shiiiiiit, motocross madness really brings the memories back. I remember spending the better part of a day downloading the demo of this game on our 56k modem, and it completely blew my mind.
I started off in computing at about 8 years old with the good old VIC20, great for building electronics projects and using the VIC to control them, I bought a switchable RAM expansion for it because I needed it to play a few of the games I had... Then it was the C64 and onto an Amiga and a CD32... Then in the early to mid 90s I moved from Amiga to a PC... Chased the system requirements, constantly upgrading and building new PCs... Eventually I bought a laptop for serious stuff and an Xbox then a PS3 for games... Gaming on a PC just became a slog, constantly shelling out for faster this and more of that... I miss my VIC20 and my CD32... Getting quite nostalgic today.
Nice. I don't know if this theme was ever revisited, but I remember... it was either Falcon 3 or 4. Came in a binder, initially. And had three sets of requirements... I don't remember what they were called, but it was something like "minimum," "playable" and "incredible." I appreciated that at the time.
Excellent video, and a tidal wave of nostalgia. I still remember when SimCopter came out, but my father's computer didn't meet the minimum CPU requirements of 90MHz (ours was a 75MHz CPU). He still bought it for me and tweaked the computer enough to get it to run. Despite it running at under 15 FPS, I played the CRAP out of it. Thanks again for yet another great video!
The most Annoying thing for me was 'Expanded Memory' I remember getting a game 'Aces of the Pacific' At my Grandparents house on Christmas Eve. I just couldn't wait to get home, go to bed and play it before parents woke up for Christmas Morning. I was only greeted with Disappointment when I got the 'Not Enough Expanded Memory" and I tried everything, from using a boot disk as it suggested and buying more memory chips, nothing worked. Even tech support couldn't help me out. I don't know how but I did finally mage to get it to work, though It did something weird with the startup.
i like that you did this. i also find it interesting. i also find it amazing how much the quality of your videos improved from the start to this point (2013) what a diff . great job!
Oh god, that brings backs some memories: For my birthday or Christmas or something, I asked for a Sound Blaster board. And my dad ended up buying me the Covox Sound Master II. What a disappointment. That thing was awful. Yeah, it was sorta "compatible" with the Sound Blaster... if you ran some special driver that sat in memory. The driver used up so much RAM that most games would not run! Star Control II was about the only game that supported it natively. Wish I still had that POS around, then I could send it to you to do an Oddware episode or something.
Had a similar experience with my first computer back in 1998 or 99 which my father bought us. A compaq with a 533MHz K6-III. You can imagine my discontent when it failed to run some game a few years later. And my fury when I found out it had no AGP slot. OK, first I went from integrated graphics top 64MB PCI card, then a 128MB PCI card. But upon discovering the lack of AGP I swore to myself that i will never let my father buy me computer equipment ever again.
mustpaike dude that was AMDs top of the line chip at the time you spoiled brat lol Me and my brothers first pc was a PII 400mhz 64mb ram and 8mb good for nothing ati-gfxcard that couldn't play shit after 2000...we got it in March of 99 😅...and I couldn't afford another one until I was sixteen in 2006 , which was then again obsolete by 2008 ...well let's just say not everything was better in the past ;)
I have little similar thing with video games. I love to read game manuals on freetimes. These manuals are very different from each others, that I love to study them & see how much the game makers really cared to help us players to learn to play their games. Sometimes I check out the box of the games too for fun. The cover art & the back of the box really can tell much. I feel like I'm such a nerd because of this, but I'm happy that I'm not the only gamer with weird ways to have little joy.
It wasn't just the requirements, in a time without internet help, configuring the sound cards and memory was quite hard in DOS games. I can't remember how I learned to free "conventional memory" or set the IRQ
Those were much greater times back then... my first desktop pc was a Dell, Intel 166Mhz MMX, 32mb, S3 Trio64 2mb video card, 7gb hd, 4xcdrom drive and floppy's. Had a lot of great times with it!!
Considering I mentioned Treasure Mountain in my comment of your Reader Rabbit video, I was pleasantly surprised to see it in this one! My school computer class days remember that game fondly, along with its sibling, Treasure Mathstorm lol
This was much more entertaining than a video about system requirements stickers has any right to be. I got into PC gaming at the tail end of this stuff around the Unreal Tournament era. I had a lot to learn.
I hope I'm not the only gamer born in the early 80's who can't read the new system requirement stickers on computer games anymore. I look at it and I think "Good God I have no idea what these processors and graphics cards models are anymore!" LOVED the SimCity 4 music in the background by the way!!!
That's a great idea! I especially remember some of the elaborate ones like Command & Conquer where they had the fancy graphics even while just setting up your sound card!
gotta say it is one of the good things to come out making games look and run the same on consoles and PCs.. you only need to upgrade your computer once every 5 or 6 years to stay ahead of the curve.
Neat video... I distinctly remember that all my PC upgrades were basically to get a version of Simcity to run. Simcity Classic: hand me down 286 in like 1994... Simcity 2000: hand me down parts to make a 486; Simcity 3000: scraping together 200$ to get an AMD k6. Simcity 4: overclocking a p4 to eek out better performance for this beast...
Cool video! I grew up on the Mac side of things, and even though the systems were more standardized, I loved reading system requirement stickers. The thing you had to look out for back then was if the game supported a 68k or PowerPC processor. You had to watch out for how much Virtual Memory a game or program needed since the classic mac os made you manually manage it. Also, Maxis games just put a Mac requirement sticker over the PC print on the box!
theres something I found so intriguing about your videos. Its like a friend telling me about something he's interested in. I dig them lol keep it up man
You have a great way of turning a seemingly boring topic and turning it interesting, funny how something so small can capture the history of something so well.
As a Pole I got a chuckle from that last comment ^^ We'll see how and if system requirements jump as the new console generation kicks into gear, though I'm not expecting a huge jump. After all companies want to sell to as many users as possible and that sometimes means lowering the bar.
I'm really surprised that Unreal Tournament came in the retail box with Linux support, albeit not on the disc itself. I didn't even know that was a thing back then. Then again, I do see all those Unreal Tournament clones for Linux in the software repos.
Hello LGR, i always watch your video and this is one of my favorite topic or discussion. I like these kind of discussion or everything about whats in/have at packaging. I hope you do more video like this for example, your favorite art cover packaging, weird and something like that. By the way nice vids here!
I can't help but feel a bit jealous of your daggerfall box. So shiny (mine is all brown and not shiny). Anyway, this inspired me to take a look at my own collection of old boxes, and I found two that stands out: Havets Vargar (Herrscher der Meere), where the requirements take up an entire side of the box, and Longbow 2, with all the "if you have a 3dfx card you only need this and this of that", which just takes up so much space, supported joysticks and about a million different ways to play mp.
I didn't know that requirements were printed so randomly back then as i didn't PC game then...interesting video :) Obviously nowadays there is more of a standard, like you mentioned earlier in the video.
This really helps you appreciate the development of APIs. Instead of supporting individual video cards and listing hundreds of them in the requirements, you just use the latest version of DirectX or OpenGL and list that.
Continued... Also meant I've not been able to play so many games, which one day I aim to get to do so, if possible. Thank goodness for emulators sometimes... which allow at least some of the more obscure items to be played at long last. Oh also BBC Micros/Nimbus PCs at school, whereby some other games could be played. And some PC games which I've played since that time, obviously! Great review/video on the stickers though, Clint. Thank you for making one on this subject/topic.
Man, I remember walking into Gamestop and picking up Doom 3. The associate behind the counter actually warned me I might not be able to play it, which I quickly refuted with the fact I had just picked up the original Inspiron XPS Gen 1 laptop that could run it on high without issue. Worth the 10lbs and $3000 down the crapper.
I remember when I was a kid (early 90s), I was obcessed with reading the system requirement (it was back when my dad was teaching me how a computer worked). I'd spend hours in a store just reading them off the boxes (or reading them off gaming magazines).
I remember my father used to play PC games and be all about PCs when I was a child in the 1990s and I would watch and be amazed. He died in 2000...watching these videos about 1990s computers feels like...making a bit of a connection to him again.
There's a similar connection with my sister who passed in '98 that I try to recapture when making these nostalgic videos, so I hope that they continue to bring you many happy memories.
Facade That's good. Not the death the fact that you can make a connection with him. He is in a better place and probably watching over you.
Guess my kids will feel the same when I go. Those were the days. I still have my classic computers. Never play on them but I remember the joys of having them working. Voodoo cards and GEneral Midi sound cards. The ensoniqs were super easy to set up. No drivers to hog you RAM :-)
Stop you're gonna make me cry
I am late since I joined and subbed to the channel a year ago. I know the feeling, my dad is slowly dying and he gave me all his old pc crap that still works. I was crying looking at it all seven year old me trying to help my Dad solve Space Quest or Kings Quest. It hurts, I hope you are doing well. And LGR I hope you keep doing this series as I binge watch it.
I still remember how I bought my first PC game with my own money. It was C&C:RA with all the addons included. The store clerk asked me if my PC's hardware was good enough to run it (the first and only time this happened) and I said "Yes, because I have a Pentium 2!" and smiled at him proudly.
This made my day. Thank you.
Late 90s system requirements look like nutritional information put on food products.
Since when are food products nutricional... what are you thinking!?!
RickyRicardo80
is that not a thing in america? You know, the little white labels with black text that says how much salt, sugar, fat is in the thing?
It is a thing here but the stickers are not on apples
Dalmation935
yeah they're usually not on fruit that's sold seperately. But they are on bags of oranges.
I thought that too.
It's funny that, nowadays, we blow right past those system requirements on the lowest-end walmart PC, but because of things like 64-bit Windows versions, we can't even get them to run on our now elite magical hardware of the future.
I had issues with DOSBox trying to play my CD copy of Duke Nukem 3D on one of my PCs, but that was a few years ago. I don't think I ever got it to work properly.
one thing that kept me away from PC-gaming for two decades:
-PC is complete overkill ocmpared to the systhem requirements
-still doesn't work
i can't even run games from the 2000's on my pc.
and i can'T even get them to work with virtual box or stuff like that either.
DOSBox requires some setting up but DN3D works entirely fine on it once you do. EDuke32 is still the better solution though.
That is why you of course have a retro computer as well, right?
This is why I pay GOG to do the DosBox dirty work for me :)
I like it how "Land of the Unicorn" has an *upper* age limit... Makes me want to play it out of pure rebellion...
I remember being really young when I got into PC gaming and never really worrying about the system requirements until I got Battlefield Vietnam and realized I couldn't play it in its choppy state. Luckily, some bored employee at circuit city ended up walking me through my RAM problem. Shouts out to that dude wherever he's at!
I think one of the things that really helped get rid of the system requirement madness was Windows itself. In the days of DOS, the idea of the "PC standard" was pretty vague. Drivers and compatibility were all over the place with things. When Windows released, it HAD to run on any compatible. In order to do this, it HAD to support all the graphics types and sound types. This modularized it into the way we programmers do it today via WinAPI, DX/OGL libraries, and assorted sound libraries. If it works with Windows, you just need the right drivers and programming for it usually just includes using WinAPI and DX/OGL. No longer do we actually need to address and access the GPU and sound cards directly (thank goodness).
Singular8ty so wait, by accessing the cards directly, was it kind of like writing your own driver software?
I can totally relate to this obsession about mundane objects.While my parents refused to fork out the money for a pc back in the day :(
I was obsessed over NES black box art the ones with the pixals on the box.After years of atari 2600 I loved the fact that the sprites actually looked like something lol.
Now that im all grown up I spend too much on pc's.Even bought an old 486 to play all them cool games that mocked me as a kid....Emulators for me just is not the same.
While I missed the epic goodness of 90's pc gaming.A few times a week I take a time trip back pretending its state of the art.Amazingly it works as the games are still SOLID! and the 2d graphics holds up better than early 3d games.
Thanks for all the retro stuff LGR!
I do like the Unreal Tournament's "Linux version included, not supported" :D
Red and gold make a good combination. I can see why you like the sticker, man.
Iron Man and new C-3PO agree.
+Lazy Game Reviews Boy George will tell you to throw some green in there too ...do not do it!
so does the gryffindore house
yenee94 Kate
Lose the "e" on the the end there, sweetie. Gryffindor doesn't have one.
My high school colours were "Cherry and Gold". Basically just a slightly darker red.
One of my favorite things to do when i was about 12-15 years old, was look at the system requirements on all of the software boxes in best buy or any store that sold software. The late 90s amd early 2000s was the golden age of sys req
I really like how calming this video is. I wasn't old enough to play these games or know much about them when I was growing up, but there's something really relaxing and interesting about listening to you talk about stickers. That time when you reviewed a chair that I wouldn't buy even if I had the money, it was still pleasant just listening to you.
Would you ever consider doing an intentional ASMR video? Indulge in those little tech sounds of fans whirring, disks spinning, the soft tapping of a keyboard, plus with that smooth voice narrating after it, oh man. It would make my day. :D
I have really considered it, as I'm quite into ASMR videos myself.
+Lazy Game Reviews Oh man, that would be sweeeeeet.
+Lazy Game Reviews it would put me to sleep. So calming!!! Is this your natural voice if you're out and about? Always wondered.
I only have a 99% IBM-compatible PC.
Must be a Tandy 2000.
You mean a Windows 10 computer?
Linux is IBM compatible (IBM works with Linux)!
Then you can run 80% of games.
Yeah, I remember all these old requirements when they came out. Remembering my first "new" store bought "Packard Bell 486 SX 25 mhz with Panasonic printer" from Best Buy (late 1992) and 4 megabytes of ram. Windows 3.1 and dos 5.0 and direct x 1. I upgraded that system for years with 486DX 50 mhz then 100 mhz cpu and then a cyrix 133 mhz. Ram upgraded to max at 20 megabytes with ram double software installed for even more space. Sound blaster (original then awe 32 version later on) Print shop deluxe taking an hour and a half thinking and about the same amount of time printing it making banners for work. 4x cd rom drive also. One of my all time windows direct x games was "Chrystal Calliburn" (pinball game I still love and still own today) The good Ole' days of computers and gaming :) Thanks for sharing these cool memories :)
He's got such a great voice, I could listen to him talking about pretty much anything
Watching this and just thinking about how far computers have come, it's just nuts.
Advanced basic... eheheh. Still makes me chuckle.
I didn't pay much attention to system requirements for a long time because every DOS game I had installed on my 486 would run without a hitch. But then I bought MechWarrior 4 and tried to play it on the family Pentium 2 machine, and couldn't see anything because It didn't have a decent graphics card. Fortunately, one trip to Staples and one Rage Fury Pro later, I was dazzled by the hyper-realistic visuals and mind blowing 800x600 resolution streaming from my CRT monitor.
tristikov Staples actually used to have decent graphics cards? I work there and the best we have is not much better than integrated on a relatively new PC.
I still remember the days, I remember seeing a game that required 2 Gigs in free space and I was like, "Wow!...This is the biggest Game ever!..." Haha, Now you have games like GTA 5 that is 65 Gigs in size!
So True. Back then I thought a game of 25 MB (yes 25 MB) was a lot. These days you will need a one TB or greater drive just so you can have space for 'em. By the way, I will cringe when the first Terrabyte game comes out.
What about windows system grade that was a thing for a little bit
Try 200+ GB now :)))
I like these videos covering odd video game subjects.
Would like to see a demo CD video.
Ah nostalgia! I have always had that issue of never having the best graphics (or amount of RAM for that matter) to play games and I often remember looking at games back in the late 90s until the mid 00s and hoping my lower end system would run the game, which sadly often wasn't the case and I couldn't play many of the popular games everyone I knew that played PC games, had.
I always looked at the Recommended System Requirements, rather than the Minimum System Requirements as I knew I wouldn't be satisfied with playing the game on minimum. It was the best or nothing for me and sadly it was often nothing, although I did still have several games I couldn't run using the best quality settings.
The best PC I had for years was a Packard Bell PC my parents bought for me back in 1999. It had 17 inch giant CRT which took up most of the desk, a Pentium III 733Mhz CPU, 64MB DDR RAM (eventually upgraded to 384MB), 15GB HDD (eventually upgraded to 30GB) and 128MB Geforce FX 5200 PCI graphics (Sadly my motherboard didn't have an AGP graphics expansion slot so I was stuck with slower PCI graphics)
I remember trying to play games like Star Trek Elite Fore II on that PC,but they would lag so badly it was impossible to play them and for a few years I was limited to a 15GB HDD, so I couldn't have many games installed at any one time. My monitor was also limited to a resolution of 1280x1024 which often wasn't high enough to play many games well either.
I had the PC until 2007 when I finally had enough of my own money to really start building a much better PC and I was glad I upgraded. I couldn't play many games and as for video editing, forget about it, but that was about to change.
Now I got a much better PC with 32GB RAM, several 1TB HDDs, 240GB SSD, MSi Nvidia Geforce 750 Ti Graphics, Intel Quad Core i7 3.1Ghz etc... much better for playing a lot of games, although I do still look at the graphics requirements for games since, although I do have a decent graphics card, there have been much better ones made since and some games may not run the best on it.
Only Mr. Basinger could make a 20 minute feature about flipping box labels and yet keep me completely enthralled throughout !
No wonder the Amiga was so popular back in the day.All you had to worry about really was ram.
+Solo Gals Plus the Amiga was a lot cheaper than PCs back in the day.
***** "but the ability to just put something in the original Xbox and play it was amazing to me."
That's something I might have got back in the 8 bit days when computer games came on tape and took at least ten minutes to load and the other choice was the NES or the Master System (though some computers used cartridges too) not that it mattered in the UK.
+'Murrican Oil no!
That was mostly true but certain A1000 games couldn't run on anything other than Kickstart 1.1. There were later compatibility issues between OCS and ECS machines and still later ones with AGA.
Not to mention that at least up until really VGA took off PC games looked and handled like 8-bit games.
woooooooa thanks for the nostalgi trip.
I'mm 80's kid. 90's teen, so I remeber all that specification readings, and all the savings every yer or so to get the newest voodoo graphic card and the soundblaster clones.... oh man.
Love this kind of videos. I still remember the frustration i had when i saw a really cool game i couldn't run on the shelf of a store mocking me.
This brings sooo much memories! That and anything talking about XP makes me nostalgic.
I should be asleep, yet here I am watching a video about stickers.
You're that kind of guy who makes videos that I love to watch while I eat a meal, learn something, and laugh a bit at the quirky humor.
Definitely one of my favorite TH-camrs.
Hello.
lol hi Cry
There's also the Australian Edition, with yet more differing box art :)
That grid like on NFS is what I remember the most. Mostly looking at processor, RAM, eventually video card; I didn't look at DirectX though it was on there, leading to my most recent compatibility problem - Freelancer back in 2004. (Not counting backwards compatibility problems of course.)
Oh my god... That SimCity 2000 BGM nostalgia... Literally chills down my spine, thanks for that Clint :D
I remember when you would find a VGA game and get all tingly with excitement because the graphics were going to be great. Then SVGA came out and you would drop to your knees and worship at the potential graphical awesomeness right up to the point where you realized your PC couldn't run it.
This was actually really interesting - I remember when PC games had all the compatibility stuff on them. Showing my age now I expect :)
Holy shiiiiiit, motocross madness really brings the memories back. I remember spending the better part of a day downloading the demo of this game on our 56k modem, and it completely blew my mind.
You can talk about stickers and still make it interesting.
Ah , once again LGR is the only youtuber who can make a nearly 20 minute video about system requirements stickers so smooth , interesting and relaxing
Diggin' the SC4 music in the background.
SC3 at the start too
I was actually just talking to someone about maybe covering some classic game installers, and it's not a bad idea. Will keep it in mind!
"Tandy VGA only" means on Tandy computers, it didn't support EGA displays, only VGA displays.
I started off in computing at about 8 years old with the good old VIC20, great for building electronics projects and using the VIC to control them, I bought a switchable RAM expansion for it because I needed it to play a few of the games I had... Then it was the C64 and onto an Amiga and a CD32... Then in the early to mid 90s I moved from Amiga to a PC... Chased the system requirements, constantly upgrading and building new PCs... Eventually I bought a laptop for serious stuff and an Xbox then a PS3 for games... Gaming on a PC just became a slog, constantly shelling out for faster this and more of that... I miss my VIC20 and my CD32... Getting quite nostalgic today.
Nice. I don't know if this theme was ever revisited, but I remember... it was either Falcon 3 or 4. Came in a binder, initially. And had three sets of requirements... I don't remember what they were called, but it was something like "minimum," "playable" and "incredible." I appreciated that at the time.
Excellent video, and a tidal wave of nostalgia. I still remember when SimCopter came out, but my father's computer didn't meet the minimum CPU requirements of 90MHz (ours was a 75MHz CPU). He still bought it for me and tweaked the computer enough to get it to run. Despite it running at under 15 FPS, I played the CRAP out of it.
Thanks again for yet another great video!
Simcity 4 music hell yeah
The most Annoying thing for me was 'Expanded Memory'
I remember getting a game 'Aces of the Pacific' At my Grandparents house on Christmas Eve. I just couldn't wait to get home, go to bed and play it before parents woke up for Christmas Morning.
I was only greeted with Disappointment when I got the 'Not Enough Expanded Memory" and I tried everything, from using a boot disk as it suggested and buying more memory chips, nothing worked. Even tech support couldn't help me out.
I don't know how but I did finally mage to get it to work, though It did something weird with the startup.
Only LGR could keep me hooked for almost 20 minutes talking about stickers on boxes at its most basic level.
All power to you LGR.
Ah yeah, I meant to mention that! I even had a game box out that had a sticker half coming off to show this. Oh well, thanks for bringing it up here.
you sure do go deep in nostalgia games for a "lazy" game review!
i lived by "the grid" in my early gaming years to know what i could run. keep up the good work LGR!!
i like that you did this. i also find it interesting. i also find it amazing how much the quality of your videos improved from the start to this point (2013) what a diff . great job!
Love the cataloging and nostalgia in his videos, top stuff!
Oh god, that brings backs some memories: For my birthday or Christmas or something, I asked for a Sound Blaster board. And my dad ended up buying me the Covox Sound Master II. What a disappointment. That thing was awful. Yeah, it was sorta "compatible" with the Sound Blaster... if you ran some special driver that sat in memory. The driver used up so much RAM that most games would not run! Star Control II was about the only game that supported it natively. Wish I still had that POS around, then I could send it to you to do an Oddware episode or something.
Had a similar experience with my first computer back in 1998 or 99 which my father bought us. A compaq with a 533MHz K6-III. You can imagine my discontent when it failed to run some game a few years later. And my fury when I found out it had no AGP slot. OK, first I went from integrated graphics top 64MB PCI card, then a 128MB PCI card. But upon discovering the lack of AGP I swore to myself that i will never let my father buy me computer equipment ever again.
mustpaike dude that was AMDs top of the line chip at the time you spoiled brat lol
Me and my brothers first pc was a PII 400mhz 64mb ram and 8mb good for nothing ati-gfxcard that couldn't play shit after 2000...we got it in March of 99 😅...and I couldn't afford another one until I was sixteen in 2006 , which was then again obsolete by 2008 ...well let's just say not everything was better in the past ;)
I have little similar thing with video games.
I love to read game manuals on freetimes. These manuals are very different from each others, that I love to study them & see how much the game makers really cared to help us players to learn to play their games.
Sometimes I check out the box of the games too for fun. The cover art & the back of the box really can tell much.
I feel like I'm such a nerd because of this, but I'm happy that I'm not the only gamer with weird ways to have little joy.
It wasn't just the requirements, in a time without internet help, configuring the sound cards and memory was quite hard in DOS games. I can't remember how I learned to free "conventional memory" or set the IRQ
Those were much greater times back then... my first desktop pc was a Dell, Intel 166Mhz MMX, 32mb, S3 Trio64 2mb video card, 7gb hd, 4xcdrom drive and floppy's. Had a lot of great times with it!!
I dig the music from the Sim City 4 soundtrack. Brings back good memories of exploding power plants and giant lizards :)
Sorry for commenting on a very old video, but I just love this. I'd love to see you do a full video about the MT-32!
Considering I mentioned Treasure Mountain in my comment of your Reader Rabbit video, I was pleasantly surprised to see it in this one! My school computer class days remember that game fondly, along with its sibling, Treasure Mathstorm lol
This is a good video, but what really sells it is the Neil Sedaka gif. That needs to be a meme.
I hope to review it before Wasteland 2 comes out!
This was much more entertaining than a video about system requirements stickers has any right to be.
I got into PC gaming at the tail end of this stuff around the Unreal Tournament era. I had a lot to learn.
I hope I'm not the only gamer born in the early 80's who can't read the new system requirement stickers on computer games anymore. I look at it and I think "Good God I have no idea what these processors and graphics cards models are anymore!" LOVED the SimCity 4 music in the background by the way!!!
That's a great idea! I especially remember some of the elaborate ones like Command & Conquer where they had the fancy graphics even while just setting up your sound card!
gotta say it is one of the good things to come out making games look and run the same on consoles and PCs.. you only need to upgrade your computer once every 5 or 6 years to stay ahead of the curve.
"It's going to run to some degree "
I admire your optimism. :)
I also read the reardments for the games when I used to have a cd rom reader and a floppy disc drive
*Trying to run City Skylines 2 on a brand new $4000 computer* This video has aged rly badly.
Neat video... I distinctly remember that all my PC upgrades were basically to get a version of Simcity to run.
Simcity Classic: hand me down 286 in like 1994...
Simcity 2000: hand me down parts to make a 486;
Simcity 3000: scraping together 200$ to get an AMD k6.
Simcity 4: overclocking a p4 to eek out better performance for this beast...
A man that can talk about stickers for 19 minutes deserves all of the subscribes he can get.
Cool video! I grew up on the Mac side of things, and even though the systems were more standardized, I loved reading system requirement stickers. The thing you had to look out for back then was if the game supported a 68k or PowerPC processor. You had to watch out for how much Virtual Memory a game or program needed since the classic mac os made you manually manage it. Also, Maxis games just put a Mac requirement sticker over the PC print on the box!
18:00 memories. I used to love that game when I was a little kid. It came with our old computer.
Great video. I great up as a PC gamer in the 1990's too, it was a great time indeed!!
That was a nice trip down memory lane.
theres something I found so intriguing about your videos. Its like a friend telling me about something he's interested in. I dig them lol keep it up man
You have a great way of turning a seemingly boring topic and turning it interesting, funny how something so small can capture the history of something so well.
Man I can relate to the nostalgia of those days when going into those PC specific stores and just going through all the different boxes. It
Have to say LGR, you have a smoooth voice XD
As a Pole I got a chuckle from that last comment ^^
We'll see how and if system requirements jump as the new console generation kicks into gear, though I'm not expecting a huge jump. After all companies want to sell to as many users as possible and that sometimes means lowering the bar.
I'm really surprised that Unreal Tournament came in the retail box with Linux support, albeit not on the disc itself. I didn't even know that was a thing back then. Then again, I do see all those Unreal Tournament clones for Linux in the software repos.
Hello LGR, i always watch your video and this is one of my favorite topic or discussion. I like these kind of discussion or everything about whats in/have at packaging. I hope you do more video like this for example, your favorite art cover packaging, weird and something like that. By the way nice vids here!
No idea, just grabbed it from Google. But it looks the same as the one in the Winston-Salem mall, so, chances are they all look pretty darned similar.
Ahh, man, big thumbs up for the Unreal Tournament music at the end!
Seeing them boxes with Cyrix, MEGAbytes of RAM and disk space requirements bring lots of nostalgic tears to my eyes.
Amazing. I didn't realize how much computer history was/is wrapped up in these seemingly insignificant stickers.
You, good sir, are awesome.
I can't help but feel a bit jealous of your daggerfall box. So shiny (mine is all brown and not shiny).
Anyway, this inspired me to take a look at my own collection of old boxes, and I found two that stands out: Havets Vargar (Herrscher der Meere), where the requirements take up an entire side of the box, and Longbow 2, with all the "if you have a 3dfx card you only need this and this of that", which just takes up so much space, supported joysticks and about a million different ways to play mp.
I didn't know that requirements were printed so randomly back then as i didn't PC game then...interesting video :) Obviously nowadays there is more of a standard, like you mentioned earlier in the video.
Yeah, sounds like a fun thing actually, I'll keep it in mind.
Aww man, so jealous those great looking King's Quest and Leisure Suit Larry boxes. Really entertaining video about text on boxes
This really helps you appreciate the development of APIs. Instead of supporting individual video cards and listing hundreds of them in the requirements, you just use the latest version of DirectX or OpenGL and list that.
Amazing! you managed to get a rich story from something so simple as a requirement label or a sticker.
Nostalgia man.
Continued... Also meant I've not been able to play so many games, which one day I aim to get to do so, if possible. Thank goodness for emulators sometimes... which allow at least some of the more obscure items to be played at long last. Oh also BBC Micros/Nimbus PCs at school, whereby some other games could be played. And some PC games which I've played since that time, obviously! Great review/video on the stickers though, Clint. Thank you for making one on this subject/topic.
This guy and CGR are the only people who can make a 20-minute sticker videos interesting.
Hey that DaggerFall box looks sweet!! I guess I'm a sucker for that glossy/shiny look and it has a nice darker scheme going for it.
Man, I remember walking into Gamestop and picking up Doom 3. The associate behind the counter actually warned me I might not be able to play it, which I quickly refuted with the fact I had just picked up the original Inspiron XPS Gen 1 laptop that could run it on high without issue. Worth the 10lbs and $3000 down the crapper.
Oh dear GOD that LOVELY LOVELY SIM CITY SOUNDTRACK. That's why I love LGR, spoiled when we least expect it. Nostalgia and bubble gum.
Never come between a man and his stickers.
You were a gamer before I was even born! I find that rather amazing!
All that nostalgia, brought some real memories back. Top notch.
I remember when I was a kid (early 90s), I was obcessed with reading the system requirement (it was back when my dad was teaching me how a computer worked). I'd spend hours in a store just reading them off the boxes (or reading them off gaming magazines).
LGR's the only TH-camr I know that can make a high-quality, 20 minute video on freaking system requirement stickers.
Red and gold is just plain visually appealing. Like silver and blue.