Tag Archives: abandonware

Entro-PC

ent_bigbox

Warning: this might get a little rambly in places. Also the above collection of big boxes in the header image is sadly not my collection, although I dearly wish it was – image swiped from http://www.retrocollect.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8408.

I have just taken a week off that’s somehow left me more exhausted than if I’d spent it at work. For once the reasons behind this are pretty obvious: instead of spending my free time zoning out in front of my computer – whether it be playing games or watching Netflix — I actually had a couple of concrete hobby projects to be getting on with. The first of these involved building a Hadoop cluster out of five Raspberry Pis (beware data engineer-types with an overabundance of free time and spare cash) and was suitably gruelling1; I might even write something about it on here if I can both get my thoughts in order and deem them sufficiently interesting. It’s the second project I want to spend a little time talking about today, though, since it involved culling certain segments of my childhood and got me thinking once again about the slow, creeping obsolescence that eventually overtakes all PC games.

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  1. Especially since I made the poor decision to do the bulk of the work on the hottest day of the year so far.
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Abandon-What?

Shifting paradigms in gaming are hard to see coming, even when they’re already underway. Ideas often crop up ahead of their time before the technology or infrastructure exists to support them; CDs are a good example of this, being used mainly to store awfully digitised voice samples and full-motion video for a good couple of years after their introduction as a storage medium, and it wasn’t until the Playstation that they began to be filled with the art assets required to render 3D games. Graphics cards were another distinct shift in the market, and I can hazily remember after the first 3dfx Voodoo card came out that it was considered unthinkable that one day in the near future PC games would not only make use of them, they’d require them in order to run. And now we have fibre-optic broadband connections and digital distribution making physical media obsolete. If I want to play a certain game from the last 15-odd years of PC gaming history the chances are there’s a digital distribution channel somewhere which will provide me with the goods almost instantly. It’s gotten to the point where buying a game that comes on a disc inside a box feels distinctly dated.

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