LGR - 1998 Hardcore Gamer Resource Kit for PC

[@JimBuschman]

watching you not be able to get most of this working is a good representation of gaming in the 90's

[@Ty-douken]

Obligatory "Gaming In The 90's" theme was playing in my head as soon as I saw the thumbnail.

[@danieloar072]

Windows Themes were the bomb. Made you feel like you had a different computer, even for a brief moment.

[@Not-TheOne]

Yeah, those themes rocked. Matrix, Blood, etc. some of those sounds though, could get annoying.

[@domoncar6782]

But to my 14 yo mind, they were awesome! And totally COOL!

[@JulianManatee]

i once installed a spooky theme that even replaced the screen at the start with the windows 98 logo. got so freaked out that i had my mom call a guy to reformat the pc.

[@OsirisLord]

I remember the time I installed a Dilbert Windows Theme. I still think that's the most 90's sentence written since: Cowabunga dude what you see is what you get!

[@N.E.D.M.]

Feels

[@PeachyPixel28]

The real star of this video is the box art... I didn't need to sleep again anyway.

[@yellowblanka6058]

It's totally tubular to the MAX duuuude!

[@Dream0Asylum]

[It's totally tubular to the MAX duuuude!] That's '80s. 90s would be; "Wow, that cover's !!!EXTREME!!! It's so fresh!

[@ultrasom]

How is your comment marked as posted "1 week ago" for me?

[@yellowblanka6058]

Dream - haha, thanks for the correction, though I was a child in the 90's I guess I mentally blocked out too much of that decade.

[@yellowblanka6058]

Dream - haha, thanks for the correction, though I was a child in the 90's I guess I mentally blocked out too much of that decade.

[@FooneTuring]

I had the VooDoo Lights screensaver back in the day. It was amazing! It's a rotating spherical galaxy, with periodic supernovae and such. Basically just a simple particle engine, but it was great for the time.

[@MagikGimp]

Some kind chap has uploaded the final installer plus crack so you can relive those memories. Works on modern hardware too! falconfly.vogonswiki.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB8eb1.html?num=1385950469/0

[@tarrker]

Yeah I had some of those too. The butterflies thing instantly brought back some memories :)

[@MyFriendlyPup]

Propaganda for every age demographic.

[@kamiboy]

Ah, a perfectly accurate representation of the genuine PC "experience". Nothing works, for no good reason. What a joy.

[@charlescampuz5812]

1337Sauce You know PCs aren’t perfect. They can be *very* finicky at times.

[@jamesisaac7684]

@@charlescampuz5812 this is they late 90s. You need to be a genuine nerd to play the games. But now things have changed.

[@PR0XIDIAN]

Things have changed. With steam, automatic driver updates, ECT. Being a PC gamer in 2019 is so easy that there is a grandma ob youtube that built her own gaming PC, streams to twitch, and plays Skyrim. Are you saying she is smarter with technology than you? ;)

[@Triggerfingers]

Hey I work in Walnut Creek! Fun fact: David Brevik (creator of Diablo) grew up in nearby Danville, CA. He got the inspiration for the name of the series from Mount Diablo, which is located in Walnut Creek.

[@alwinter]

Yep! Also, unrelated but mildly interesting... Maxis' headquarters was originally in Walnut Creek. A lot of cool tech companies were out there back in the 80s and 90s.

[@benmasta5814]

its funny how the art on the box really portrays the 90's grunge/gross art stuff always had. It was always like bulging eyes with brains and guts exploding and grotesque/mutated faces/bodies for like everything lol. Being grungy was cool back then. Its funny cause grungy was cool, but dirty was not. So hard to be grungy but not be dirty lmao

[@LGR]

It's true, especially when it came to things like gaming and kids/teenage stuff in general.

[@Dustie1984]

YES! I was wondering why NO ONE seemed to notice this!!! And, this wasn't just games - this was a very, very strong trend everywhere in the entertainment industry, including magazines and cover and poster art for major motion pictures, print ads... Looking back at it I find myself impressed at how they did it, because certainly Photoshop and photo manipulation software wasn't nearly as powerful and potent as it is now, and yet with so much stylisation they almost made it look flawless.

[@dhoffnun]

XTREEM TO THE MAX

[@Seymour-Butts_666]

Wat

[@funkymugs7388]

Walnut Creek CDROM was, for most of its existence I think, actually in Concord. I lived one town over and knew people that worked there. They made Slackware Linux, one of the first real distros. I remember being at their offices and a prerelease original quad Xeon was running with the case off, cause it had big heat issues. And... It was running FreeBSD 😈

[@c0wg0d]

I created a website back in the day called The Q2 File Fanatic because I was obsessed with Windows theme customization back then. The Quake 2 Windows theme that LGR showed off in this video was created by BowZer and is still available for download on the website at www.quake2.com/fanatic along with tons of other files and fun stuff.

[@MarkyShaw]

Whew. Major kick in the nostalgia with the windows themes. I distinctly remember one called "Broccoli" in a pack of themes that was so utterly ridiculous that is was brilliant.

[@Dzeroed]

That's what I love​ about this channel. Here, it doesn't matter if something is "good" or "bad", it deserves to be recognised because it *_is._* Someone, at some point, took the time to put these things all together and they are *(shitty pun alert)* "Windows" into a different time. It doesn't have to be good- it is _interesting._ :-)

[@technopoptart]

pretty much, yeah XD

[@cricalix]

Walnut Creek? Damn that takes me back. They were the publishers for Slackware Linux.

[@jcgiacomi]

Ya I was just about to say that Walnut Creek is about an hour from Sonoma.

[@tasospodcast8832]

1998: The last year of an entire era in PC Gaming.

[@GeminiWoods]

1998 was one of the greatest years in gaming ever. Could almost say the same about 97.

[@sdFreerey]

What're you talking about? 2017 is probably the best year in gaming since 2004--maybe even 1998.

[@1967KID]

Tasos Podcast in1998 I got onto computer gaming and never looked back quake 2, unreal Half-Life, sin, motomadness.

[@caffeinatedspider3224]

1967 kID Don't forget Fallout 2 and Baldur's gate

[@truthugizle8667]

*any gays?*

[@AnFellow]

Oh wow, seeing that quake theme made me miss the old Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun theme I had on my 98 machine....

[@fuwaneko]

If I remember correctly my venture into Quake 2 source code, CD check is implemented in game.dll which was Q2's way of working with mods. Every mod is a game.dll and main executable loads it. So if those movies were implemented based on old Q2 sources they still have CD check in it. So it's not a problem with your installation or hardware but with the movies themselves.

[@HertzRico]

Oh! Windows Themes.... Loved that, I still use on my new windows some sounds of the Z extra DVD with stuff that came with the collector editión of the game.

[@matthewdunk]

I found your channel a couple of weeks ago. I have been binge watching them ever since. Your content is top class, keep the great work!

[@baskerwilNL]

Ahh 1998... I wish I could remember that year but I was 12 and Half-Life was all I cared about.

[@DxDeksor]

Me too. Though I was 0 and food was probably all I cared about X)

[@EngineeringVignettes]

In 1998, HL was all you needed to care about.

[@famoussession7426]

How did you enjoy 3?

[@pjackson7395]

Yeah, I was 12 back in '98 too. Thief Gold and HL were where it was at. My PC Gamer subscription kept me up to date on gaming news. The internet wasn't a thing in my house until about 2001!

[@wabbit234]

Hello I was also 12 in 98. I played a lot of Carmageddon and NFS-SE as I couldn't afford the very latest games as a kid. I was aware of just how great the games that were coming out at the time thanks to large amounts of demo discs though. /end of 1998 anecdote.

[@Not-TheOne]

when I saw Walnut, memories overflowed....DEWD! I learned how use FTP to browse ftp.cdrom.com i would spend hours at work grabbing Quake 1 and 2 mods, writting them to stiffies and trying them at home...damn I miss the 90's...

[@EngineeringVignettes]

wustl for me... getting Amiga software off of FTP sites.

[@slimebuck]

i miss those days spending hours on ftps trade mirc chats trading files, getting music and games

[@edsiefker1301]

"Somewhere named Walnut Creek", holy cow! Maybe Clint just never read the banner.

[@azliberalgeek]

ftp.cdrom.com was definitely awesome but with my dial-up modem connection back then, Walnut Creek's true benefit was their super cheap CD-ROMs. I got more than a few Linux distros on CD-ROM through there without having to tie up my phone line for days on end!

[@user-jk6lt9cl5f]

They were also the original commercial distributors of Slackware Linux and FreeBSD.

[@thomasjryan4711]

The rambling videos of LGR are a special treat.

[@SamJDH]

Still the best KZbinr after all these years, I think I've left some variation of this comment every single year but it continues to be true. Fucking love you Clint

[@AudioCraZ]

I will go back and look at my Quake and Quake II files. I know there was some specific "tweaks" you had to do (just config file changes if I remember correctly) that had to be done to get them to run correctly. I know I have had a few quake II Machinima (movies) that I have kept in my install over the years. It was always fun to go back and look at how creative some people were back in the days with game engines. Basically hacking quake 1 & 2 save files and "splicing" them together in a sequence to make a movie. Pretty amazing.

[@leetmoka3482]

You're always coming out with the best videos man! What a blast from the past when you pulled up those .htm files.

[@Chamele7n]

One of my favorite things about Quake Champions are all the cosmetic stuff. Costumes and attachments and whatnot. Its good to see that even back in the 90s people were putting skins in Quake.

[@Rubbercookie]

About patches back then, a lot of them were really like DLC these days. Games got entire new modes, tons of new maps, weapons and enemies. Games like Heroes of Might and Magic II typically more than doubled in content with these. So, it wasn't all balance adjustments and bug fixes.

[@DefiantPunk0810]

I love these collections because whether they meant to or not these act as a capsule for their time period. Those discs could contain patches and extra media and mod content that very well might not exist anymore. These things are like big archives and I love it.

[@Evil.Turkey]

This is exaxtly what I was expecting. Shareware discs or collections were a pain in the ass!

[@jgrimsley2000]

Clint, I used to be a Sysop on a BBS from the late 80s to the mid 90s (DOS Guys BBS in San Antonio, Texas!). We used to get CD-Roms from Walnut Creek to pad our file downloads section. They had CDs of MODs, Shareware, demos, drivers, MIDI, GIFs, ANSI, etc. Our BBS supported MS-DOS, Amiga, Commodore 64 and CPM. Walnut Creek had CDs for all of these platforms.

[@Jinomorro]

That HoMM2 box you got there, I am extremely jealous. I only ever had the jewel case with the expansion in it. Now to browse Amazon/Ebay to see pricing.

[@yellowblanka6058]

Sounds like they told some intern to throw a bunch of random patches onto a disc. Have to wonder what the original MSRP was, lol. As a side note, I was unaware that Voodoo3 cards were incompatible with earlier software/versions of Glide etc. - seems like a pretty big oversight.

[@rickjames3034]

yeah but they went to the effort of writing and printing a reasonably thick manual so at least some thought went in to it

[@FinestCitizen]

I had to install patches simply because online servers would be running the latest version, especially with games such as "Quake III Arena" where the sole purpose behind it was to play with actual people. If I didn't update it, it would say something like "Server running (version number). Client not compatible." So, I'd have to sit there and download a huge .exe file over dial-up when all I wanted to do was play the damn game, LOL! They had a good idea, but my goodness, I wonder how many times they had to discard the older CDs and keep replacing them? I remember "Quake II" constantly having add-ons being published by various artists, not to mention some of those games needing newer patches well after 1998. And, the Internet MEGA-PAK being $70? Woof, thank goodness broadband started rolling around in the early 2000s in my area.

[@yellowblanka6058]

DSL can vary greatly in speed - I'm on 61Mb/6Mb DSL here.

[@yellowblanka6058]

Emma Anderson - I hear ya, despite living down the street from a Frontier office/switching station I was stuck at 16Mb sec download until recently when they finally upgraded their infrastructure and bumped the "max speed" option up to 61Mb/6Mb to compete with local cable.

[@eagdhj]

1000/1000 fiber yeah i live in sweden

[@craymands]

Woow, maaan, you got G-Nome on your PC! Such cool memories - I found its CD without a box about 15 years ago in a backyard of my cousin's apartment building. That's how I found out about this game. :D

[@PictureProductStudio]

What a unique piece of late 90's gaming history! It is like a time capsule. And the artwork is a piece of surreal art on it's own.

[@mrmgubu2414]

Clint, I love the music on your videos.

[@sonic0424]

Dude! That box art is so 90s! That puts a big dumb grin on my 30-ish face. Late 90s PC gaming was awesome.

[@rubz1390]

Man you are the guardian of history that gaming needs. Pity there's such compatibility issues with technology. The 90's aren't even that long ago in the greater perspective of human history.

[@mikekz4489]

That mosquito game look like a fake game that would be made up for TV show at the time with an episode that dealt with computers and "cyber space".

[@Vitorruy1]

Michael Kuzmanovski it looks like a regular PS1 game to me.

[@lordmegatron4789]

wasn't it on playstation? i remember playing a mosquito game but perhaps I'm making stuff up

[@BucketHeadJunior]

@@lordmegatron4789 you're probably thinking of Mister Mosquito

[@lordmegatron4789]

@@BucketHeadJunior DUDE YES THANK YOU

[@BucketHeadJunior]

@@lordmegatron4789 lol no problem man. Straight up classic. I think I still have a mark on the center of my palm from that game.

[@Suralin0]

I got all kinds of warm nostalgic fuzzies from this video. Reminds me of when I was modding Freespace 1 back in 1998.

[@Dreadjaws]

This is the kind of stuff that they'd put into free disks that came bundled with PC magazines back in the day. I remember that at the time I loved that kind of stuff but nowadays I just realize it was mostly useless junk, and half of it I never managed to make it work. I do remember distinctly that Banzai Bug demo. Never managed to see the full game anywhere, I don't know if it even exists. Edit: a quick google search shows that it did indeed exist, and it was nothing special.

[@GoreGraveBass]

This brought the 'great' memory of how not everything was guaranteed to work on a PC in the 90's. You would get a demo disc and sometimes only a few of them actually ran on your PC.

[@legendarydragoon]

Whenever you see an old game that runs too fast on more modern hardware, it's usually the fact the programmer did not multiply by the Delta Time (or time since last frame). Not doing this means all of your calculations are frame-based which is bad... as FPS increases, so does the speed of your program/simulation.

[@spookerd]

You made me miss the late 90s and all of it's late 90s glory. May your WAREZ forever be uninfected.

[@Magpie1701]

And people these days complain about how hard it is to mod Skyrim, dragging & dropping a few files and selecting .esm files to load in correct order. And all downloading at 25mbit!

[@d00m3fanatic]

Magpie Grun yeah I'm getting into modding again and grew up around the same time as LGR--- I see these 10 minute KZbin tutorials which amount to them dragging and dropping files but making such a big deal about it....and to top it off half the time the tutorial is in the readme and takes 5 seconds LOL

[@maarekstele2815]

I love Heroes! Another Great Vid Clint!

[@MichaelRusso]

So cool....it brings me back to the 90's. Love it.

[@RoodeMenon]

I clicked because quake 2 was on the thumbnail. I still have it because it was the first ever pc game i played and those memories are awesome. My friends did not have computers then, they would come over just to play this game and Rogue Squadron, AND also RECOIL! that was an awesome game. Back then one could load audio cds for games and the songs will play as the music track in the background. good times.

[@leon_De_Grelle]

that's repack aged share ware from walnut creeks cdrom.com. that's why it said walnut creek there. they just jacked it all and stuck it on cd. guess it made sense if you had a dial up as most people did. I bought Linux and BSD installs on CD to save from downloading it.

[@SigurdKristvik]

Love quake 2! Wish you had shown more of it in this video.

[@Dawwwg]

I think a part of the charm of these packages was exactly getting them to work ... kinda like the Crazy Bytes releases :)

[@styloroc2000]

oh man, Walnut creek was a big shareware distribution platform; I used to be the distribution/sales manager for a small shareware company and we had used them a few times just to bundle our shareware.

[@KanoWhite53]

Man I remember the Quake theme. So many feels when you bought that up!

[@AirborneSurfer]

Oh, man, I miss spending hours messing around with "MS Plus!" themes! Thanks for this trip down memory lane!

[@Lemonidas75]

2:45 - Michael Knight ? The Knight Rider himself edited this thing? :P Don't hassle the Hoff ! :P

[@sonic0424]

Yes! That's exactly where my brain went, too.

[@JulesVonBasslake]

That just makes me wonder, was it really the authors real name or did they pick a pseudonym because they were afraid of being sued or something, since it was "unauthorized" :P

[@anumeon]

Of course he did.. The cd:s were K.I.T.T:s :) or am i the only one who saw that.. ;)

[@Wasmachineman]

"Michael what is this?" "A book I wrote about video games, Bonnie."

[@turnerlarson12]

Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless, in a world of criminals who operate above the law. ...and editor of Hottest PC Games.

[@mueffe1357]

Everything I had to reinstall my 98/Millennials back in the day. I immediately install C&C theme packs. Lol. Those were the lovely days.

[@AgentMull]

I love how convoluted the chart on the back is.

[@Scorpio2074]

Oh, man. Thanks to this I just remembered the hours I spent making my own plus themes... I was driving my girlfriend at the time insane with all the sounds that played when you clicked on something.

[@Elboy522]

holy SHIT, from watching this video, you let me figure out the name of an old pc I used to watch my brother play back in the windows 98 days, Banzai Bug! THANK YOU

[@DaeOh]

Dang this takes me back. I had completely forgotten that a similar box is how I got my first Quake map editor.

[@codexnecro3917]

That box looks insane.

[@shadownavi64]

Ah, good 'ol Diablo

[@dhoffnun]

90's Diablo is best Diablo

[@gordlord561]

Diablo 2 is best Diablo, I've never played to first one.

[@elcouz]

@@gordlord561 I can you know if you never played Diablo and Diablo:Hell Fire?

[@gordlord561]

elcouz I have and I still feel the same way, I bought it the moment it came on GOG and I like it a lot but 2 just does it better for me cuz multiplayer and the Median XL mod

[@psivewri]

I always loved watching the trailer for MS flight simular 98 when I was young

[@fuzz11111111]

The Quake 2 stuff reminded me a of the experiences I had recently, when I tried to get it running so I could convert some old multiplayer demo recordings to video (to share with some of the people in those recordings). I initially used the steam version, thinking that maybe they'd done things to make it a better experience on a modern PC, but nope! I saw how dark the game was, saw how the brightness slider didn't really help much, remembered that this was a texture palette issue that affected pretty much all non-3DFX cards (requiring tweaking several console variables to fix properly), and that was enough to send me looking for the backup of my old install (where I'd gone through the effort of tweaking things with my PC running next to a mates that had a 3DFX Banshee). Old install was much better, and seeing how much my custom UI improved things on a modern resolution me appreciate all the work teenaged me had done 20 years ago (though setting a modern wide-screen resolution actually involved the use of a hex editor on quake2.exe - setting custom resolutions wasn't introduced until Quake 3).

[@mystman1210]

I saw the graph at 3:17 and thought "...Is that Riven?" I gotta say I'm kind of proud I was able to recognize that just by seeing it for a split second. :P

[@XeCuTioNR]

Sonoma multimedia...I had another of their gamer multipacks where it included a few reprinted titles, notably the one I had, with Big Red Racing, WWF Wrestlemania the Arcade Game, and a few odd ball titles in the box. @2:14 aaahhh there it is... *The ULTIMATE BUBBA PACK* :D

[@fatshadow2062]

My God, that gamer resource kit is sooooo hardcore! Radical!

[@TheMadAfrican1]

That cover art is AMAZING. I WANT IT ON MY WALL AS A PRINT!

[@yurisorcerer]

Mannnn my stepdad had one of those save editor things for Diablo II and it let you (somehow or another) make custom items. I would fiddle with that thing for hours. I distinctly remember at one point trying to make a shield that would teleport me whenever I got hit, but I did something wrong and instead it teleported me whenever I hit anything else. Good times.

[@mehmetkarabulut4234]

Best years of pc gaming. Missed that times so much.

[@keithbrown7685]

Shit. Man, if that was the best, wtf was the worst?? : )

[@jukahri]

​ Keith Brown 10 years earlier, and ten years laters. The late 80s/early 90s were pretty dire because of the lack of hardware and software compatibility and pc gaming was still experimenting too much, and in the end most of the decent or good games that came out in the early 90s matured into real gems at the end of the decade. The late 2000s were the worst time for pc gaming, with too much of a focus on graphics and accessibility at the expense of gameplay. We're only just getting out of that period, with a few indies or AA games coming out that have learned the lessons of the past 20 years and are trying to make basically better versions of those games from the late 90s but with proper UI and UX, or to just make good modern games. 1998 will probably still remain the golden age for a while though: all those games that came out then were developped by triple A studios who still thought that to make money they had to make good games, whereas today big studios are more interested in developing fancy microtransaction stores with shiny graphics on top. So even if the past 5 years have seen some solid titles come out, that's nothing like the rate at which the industry pumped them out back then.

[@seanpatapon]

i had this back in the day and i may have the cds somewhere now and it added a lot to Diablo at the time which was awesome for me

[@this_connor_guy]

OHHH MY GOD, DESKTOP THEMES!! The PC version of the first Resident Evil came with a theme, which I most definitely did install on my Windows XP back in the day.

[@eckomind]

We need to bring back old school themes to Windows 10. Thanks for the sweet memories. :D

[@Uzur9]

Morning coffee with LGR

[@MrBytorr]

LGR needs a video on Diablo 2!

[@Cimlite]

Just seeing the 3Dfx logo fills me with nostalgia and happiness.

[@djtecthreat]

This is a beautiful piece of gaming history.

[@albynoson]

If I had that Quake II theme when I was a lot younger I probably would have used it. Especially with those sounds. Quake I and II have many of my favorite sound effects, particularly the health kit pickups; I love the health kit pickup sounds in Quake II. So much so I tried to use it in Team Fortress 2, but it wasn't loud enough and I went with a Quake III health pickup sound instead (and while I was at it a Quake III hitsound as well).

[@safetytfh]

Used to play FS98 on my dad's Cyrix 686 box

[@meanmole3212]

Those Windows 98 themes, man... I used to have C&C theme with a screensaver that had sounds and explosions and it was awesome.

[@EzraKnickelbine]

TIL Doom had a 1.666 patch.

[@jasonblalock4429]

Yeah, I was actually thinking that for a 90s FPS fan, having a complete archive of (what looked like) every Doom patch could be really nice. They went through a lot of versions and there were usually map changes - sometimes pretty major ones - along with the bugfixes.

[@heymonkey65]

m.kzbin.info/www/bejne/janRf2Nrq7Soia8

[@ultrasom]

Having a binary DIFF file, it's possible to patch any of the original Doom 1 or 2 id's IWAD files into any version (shareware, demos, registered, etc). Google "LADOPATO" for more info, but I'm not sure it's avaiable anymore (legitimate doom sites pulled it out for obvious reasons).

[@jokerzwild00]

Patches could be a nightmare for lots of games back in the 90s and early 00s. Especially online multiplayer games that needed the latest patch. Sometimes there were many that you had to install in a certain order to be able to connect to whatever servers you wanted to play on. That's why I never jumped on the hate bandwagon for Steam when it first took off. I still take a moment to appreciate all my games being up to date without hunting all over download sites for patches.

[@Ritokure]

11:50 Groo? Holy shit, this takes me back big time! Groo comics were awesone.

[@djchonny]

The Golden year of games

[@elementguy14DS]

SunTzu 2004?

[@ricarnuninho80]

VERY IMPORTANT: If you get too fast in some games (eg: boid.exe in "c:\3dmania\saver10\") then you need to enable v-sync. But we get pure smooth motion for v-sync enabled only. :)

[@krayzieridah]

I can't be the only one who loved the smell of those 90s and early 00s PC Magazines.

[@LGR]

They still smell wonderful, provided they were well-preserved. Something about that combo of ink and paper they used.

[@jeffsadowski9244]

You actually had the internet on a CD ROM! That’s worth the price of admission!

[@thandermax]

I remember during that time, NES cartridges with "99999 games in 1" titles in store. Most of them was just same game with different levels/title.

[@Vitorruy1]

thandermax I fell for that, imagine my face after convincing my mom to buy it and loading the cartdrige. Feels bad man.

[@yes9086]

I love your stuff man

[@LGR]

Thanks!

[@nocturnetuber]

I had a pack of Quake 1 mods that came free with a gamer mag. It included the fantastic Malice TC. There where some jems hidden on discs like this for nescient modders.

[@crossmr]

I remember a lot of unauthorized add-ons for the original star craft back in the day. I had most of them.. I may still even have the CDs somewhere.

[@galactor123]

The nice authentic Windows 98 experience. Video card compatibility issues with older games, things just inexplicably not being able to find cds or run based on.... nothing at all. And then getting a cd full of what you think are going to be fun games and yet turn out to be shareware and other things so you feel bad begging your parents for that rad looking game compilation, only to realize Deus Ex is a shareware version that they (probably illegally) are reselling unlicensed on a disk in best buy for some reason. Aaah, the good old days.

[@TechGorilla1987]

Walnut Creek is a suburb of San Francisco. Walnut CDROM was a thing: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walnut_Creek_CDROM

[@Not-TheOne]

Walnut Creek FTP server....man the memories. Thats where I learned to use command-line FTP. Would download lots of Quake 1 mods/maps/skins/etc, copy them to floppy at work and in the evenings, try them out.

[@BOTTERvids]

Micheal Knight: From ultimate 80s action hero with a talking Trans Am to 90s PC game reviewer. A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of PC gaming.

[@AmayirotAkago]

I loved Banzai Bug back in the day, very unique and quirky little game :) Definitely worthwhile to hunt down a full copy sometime to do a review of ;)

[@pagb666]

For the people actually missing the doom section of cdromdotcom... There's ftp.fu-berlin.de/pc/games/ among other mirrors, which still are used for new doom levels uploads.

[@kevnar]

I remember downloading a save game editor for Diablo back in the day. I gave myself a million HP and a million GP, and I was able to one-shot the last boss when I got there. It was fun.

[@alistair4909]

It would make my day if you ever found a shovel ware compilation that said 3000 shovel ware games.

[@certs743]

Holly crap. That box art is terrifying.

[@DragonNexus]

I managed to get a Metal Gear Solid theme for Windows back in the day. I changed a lot of the colour scheme back to normal (it had a lot of green or brown to it). But the sound effects were awesome. Hearing that "Diit" noise every time you opened the Start menu and that "CH-KLIK" when you clicked on something...and someone trying to voice chat made the codec call sound. And what else would shutting down but play the game over theme? Good times.

[@kekmcpepe6736]

Don't you remember "walnut creek CD-ROM.com"? It was an amazing resource for downloadable content for many games, it was THE repository for all your content needs gaming or otherwise via the FTP site. It had Doom levels, Doom TCs, Quake stuff, obscure server side Quake 2 mods, it had a whole lot more as well, it was pretty awesome if you were into gaming in the 90s. My friends and I would always skim it for interesting stuff.

[@ekiouja]

I bought diablo in elementry school, from a kid on the bus, in a plastic bag, in 2007...

[@Vitorruy1]

ekiouja mad trading skillz

[@keithbrown7685]

It sounds like a shady drug deal you made. : )

[@soulagent79]

The artwork looks like it was done by Van Gogh on acid.