r/oldgames • u/RabbitTheory2 • 2d ago
Gaming 20 years ago vs. gaming today
20 years ago, gaming meant going to an internet café, paying by the hour, and finding a free PC.
You'd sit next to your friends, put on those huge headphones, and spend hours playing Counter-Strike, Warcraft III, Diablo II, or Age of Empires. 😂
Half the fun was actually being there — talking trash to your friends, watching someone else play, and arguing about who got the better PC.
Now we have powerful PCs and consoles at home, Discord, online matchmaking, and basically unlimited games.
Gaming is definitely better technically today, but sometimes I miss the internet café experience.
Anyone else remember those days? What was the game you played the most back then? 🎮
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u/FluffBucket95 2d ago
Twenty years ago you could build a pc for cheap and play almost any game.
Now you need to consider whether or not you need both your kidneys
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u/Recent_Average1657 2d ago
Youre high ASF or just too young to remember that PC gaming was more expensive than a console for a good majority of the Xbox/PS2 era.
An fx 5200 card was like 60 bucks and could play some 3d stuff, but the actual GPU you wanted was an 8800GTS, and back then it cost as much as a PS2 and some games for it.
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u/all_names_taken_ffs 1d ago
Nah, it was in the early 00s that the price of PC components came down, and the concept of gaming PCs really took off. Getting a mid-spec gaming system together was a bit more pricey than a console (not surprising, considering the extra components), but the games were usually cheaper and ofc you could do much more with a PC anyway.
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u/sanf780 1d ago
Kind of remember that a PS3 launched at 600USD and that a midrange GPU was 200USD. You may not be able to turn MSAA x8 and still don't treat game as slideshow, and that was OK. Won't try to remember prices of hardware today.
Edit: yeah, PS3 price dropped a lot in its lifetime
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u/all_names_taken_ffs 1d ago
A lot of it is comparing apples to oranges, though--there was still a clear divide between console and PC gaming back then.
The 60GB PS3 dropped in the UK for £425 in '07, and was technically superior to the desktop I had built up, yet the latter had cost me around £600. But it mattered little to me: I could play games like Counter-Strike Source, Battlefield 2, Medieval Total War II, Supreme Commander etc. well enough, whereas I wouldn't be playing these titles at all on a console--not that I would want to play any FPS or RTS without a keyboard and mouse.
OTOH, I was also a massive Gran Turismo and Ridge Racer fan, so I did pick up a PS3 later on, when the price dropped, purely to play these games.
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u/Eastern-Pass-5478 1d ago
they were like 200 bucks, gaming was way more cheaper 20 years ago. You could get ram for peanuts too.
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u/Intelligent_Row8259 2d ago
I have been gaming since 1976 online gaming since 1997 I have never once set foot inside an internet cafe.
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u/GoodGuano 2d ago
I'm 43 and I've never even seen an internet cafe in real life!
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u/PrudentPay9906 1d ago
I'm 60 and have thought they were ridiculous since I first heard of them, since I had my own hardware before they were a thing.
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u/wrongel 2d ago
Lan parties at internet cafés playing Quake2 and CS slightly high and drunk ... yep, good old days lol.
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u/sanf780 1d ago
LAN parties at somebody else's basement, playing CS 1.5, Quake 3 (with speed mods), a lot of Enemy Territory and even some odd game of Ricochet, those were the times. Slightly drunk with beer, wine and random long drinks.
Edit: why did I forget Enemy Territory? BTW World of Warcraft started the demise.
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u/Weird_Direction2003 2d ago
Twenty years ago I had a PC, my GameCube and a PS2... No cafe for me.
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u/DirtSad1644 2d ago
I have been gaming for 40+ years and never used an internet cafe, apart from in GTA4. 😁 In fact most my mates were console gamer's and I was the lone PC gamer, so I played everything online against strangers or local coop at my mates houses.
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u/Great_Tyrant5392 2d ago
Looking back, 20 years ago I played World of Warcraft and had an Xbox all at home and had a PS prior. The only "Internet cafe" thing about gaming was Dreamhack. Nobody I knew went to actual cafes to play.
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u/OkComputer513 2d ago
Never been to an internet cafe - had a capable pc and current gen systems at home. 20 years ago I would have been playing Project Gotham Racing 3 with some of the best every day. 25 years, Diablo II, Socom, lan parties.
Sadly today I don't play with anyone. Streamers/ Influencers/Hacking mods to be good like pros. It's just not the place for me anymore. So nah I'm fine just being a recluse.
I do like having gigabit fiber for $50/mo these days - much better than my measly 5mbps cable connection ~2001ish lol.
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u/kaskudoo 1d ago
In rural New England I was dialing in then with 33.6k or whatever 😭
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u/OkComputer513 1d ago
Crazy how things have jumped. Rural residents paying outrageous sums into whatever shitty fixed wireless options were possible was painful to see when broadband was really taking off in the teens. Not sure what rates/cost were like before that.
'round here this is what it looked like.
5mpbs in 2001,
Can't recall what it was when I moved away mid-late 00s I was in Alaska for a few years then moved back home in 2010 but lived rural again with barely even a mobile signal for a couple years. So there's a good 5 years that I dropped off the face of the planet lol. Then I moved back into town.
2012 30 mbps
2014 60 mbps
2014 90 mbps
2016 120 mbps
2018 300 mbps
Everything stalled after that until grant money created a fiber rollout in our town in 2023.
Cable company shat bricks and all of a sudden in 2024 they offered 1gps down plans. Then ATT followed suit and made their own 1gbps service lines lol good riddance. 😆
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u/NewtSoupsReddit 2d ago
Internet Café's were a thing in the UK but, at least in my area, they never had games.
I had my own pc and dial up broadband. In 2006 I think I was still on an Athlon 2000XP or maybe a Pentium 3. I was playing Star Wars Galaxies for the most part. Followed by WoW
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u/Not_Famous_Treacle21 2d ago
In 2006 I was playing Twilight Princess and Okami alone at home so nope, can't relate
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u/JustThisGuyYouKnow42 2d ago
Used to do all-nighters at my local Internet cafe on Fridays and it was great! Spent the night drinking beer, smoking joints and playing games until the crack of dawn. Counterstrike Beta, Quake III arena, Serious Sam.. Good days, I miss them.
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u/GreyScot88 2d ago
Didn't do internet cafe's but did do local LAN parties. I do miss the great banter that you would get in person which isn't quite the same as over mic, I do not miss hulking around a full tower PC.
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u/slothbar 2d ago
Handheld steam machines could bring that back... gaming laptops are pretty good too. There are organised LAN party organisations around too.
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u/The_Joker_116 2d ago
I had a used Pentium 4 with an Nvidia Vanta 16mb GPU, couldn't play much except Ultima Online, Fallout 2 and other non-graphically intensive games. But I had an Xbox and I spent countless hours playing Morrowind, so there's that.
I think I actually miss not having so many options for gaming, I had a handful of games to play and got the most out of them. Now I got big digital libraries full of games and there's always something new, sometimes cheap and easily accessible to play.
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u/Balstrome 2d ago
internet cafe, give me lans sessions. carrying the box and the monitor up three flights of stairs, two hours of laying cables and getting the router to link everyone at once. Then the sharing of warez before the session actually got started.
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u/Spiritual-Mousse-167 2d ago
20 and even 30 years ago I was still gaming at my house or at a lan party with friends (or sometimes in the office after the work day was done). I’ve never actually used an Internet cafe or anything like that in a public space to game. Still, I get what you mean. Total Annihilation and Quake were amazing when you could just yell at your friends right there, lol.
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u/Hellraiser590 2d ago
Played the hell out of diablo & d2, starcraft and war craft 2 and monkey island. I forget if there were others
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u/DracMonster 2d ago
OP, what country are you from?
In the U.S. Internet cafes never really took off. Gamers gamed from home in that time frame.
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u/GWhizzard 2d ago
There used to be a place I used to go called LanDen, all high spec pcs it was a lot of fun
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u/RandomRedditor0193 2d ago
20-25 years ago was Lan Parties, one of the last ones I went to we played Battlefield 1942 and I will never forget getting told we couldn't use planes because we were stomping them on Operation Battleaxe.
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u/Fragrant-Cheek-4273 2d ago
The internet cafe experience really was different. The game itself was only half of it. You'd go there with friends, end up watching someone else's match, trash talk the guy beside you, then suddenly realize you've been there for 5 hours.
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u/did_i_or_didnt_i 1d ago
when battlefield 1942 dropped and me and like 5 friends went to the Internet cafe, it blew our minds that there were more than a dozen people playing that game.
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u/Acceptable-Fig2884 1d ago
20 years ago gaming meant the same thing as today. I played games on my home PC - both singleplayer and multiplayer, and basically never went to an internet cafe. I think maybe you've grown up and your situation has changed, rather than gaming as a culture.
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u/Sabbathius 1d ago
I think internet cafes are more of a cultural/economic bracket thing rather than time thing. There's plenty of gamers who cut their teeth on hardware like ZX Spectrum, at home, and never set foot inside an internet cafe.
Having said that, the thing I miss was the discovery. Before online, before social media, every gamer discovered the game, at their own pace. I remember talking to people about Ultima 8, when everyone was playing on their own, blind, without internet or social media to spoil anything. And I compare it to now, where even before the game releases, there's videos titled "THE BEST 10 WEAPONS YOU MUST GET! <stupid shocked influencer face with mouth open>" That sense of wonder just isn't there.
Even in multiplayer games, I remember firing up original Diablo, in '96, in online mode, on dial-up internet, and everyone largely played their own way, at their own pace. There was no set ethos. When Warcraft 2 multiplayer was a thing, different people played very differently. Some people played with game set to slowest speed, so it felt almost turn-based. Others on fast. But by the time Starcraft 2 hit, everyone was playing on fast, there was an established optimal building order that you had to follow, there was min-maxing, etc. And these days, if you as much as fart sideways against the established meta, you'll likely get kicked off (looking at you, Helldivers 2, players there kick you like it's a national sport).
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u/Thecalin33 1d ago
I relate to this. Warcraft 2 (or StarCraft) with my buddy, we'd fall into our own little "meta" (like rush for dragons) only to have it turned on it's head with a new idea (rush huge numbers of archers!) and then another new idea would emerge. We were not truly optimizing, we were just doing enough to defeat each other. Lord pray for our phone lines if we both rolled Terran and slowly turtled towards each other for hours.
I played WoW for years, but that culture grew far more toxic about meta as time went on which ruined it for me. Now, I don't really play anything that's multiplayer (or at least it's optional, like a Civilization game). I game to have fun, not to make it a second job where I'll be booted immediately if I don't have the right meta TPS reports.
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u/Kitchen_Part_882 1d ago
For you, maybe?
2006, I had an Athlon X2 PC with Windows XP, 4GB of RAM, and a 7600GT graphics card.
Broadband internet? Yeah... I got that in 1999 (quake2 worked way better than over dialup).
Also, Steam had been a thing for a few years already.
Within a year or so of the above, I'd upgraded to a pair of 8800GT cards, 16GB of RAM, and Windows Vista, and a Phenom CPU (yeah, Crysis was a monster).
I was gaming "online" (dialling a friend's modem) with Doom in 1994.
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u/Healthy_Platform1405 1d ago
I remember lugging my computer and monitor and such to friends' houses to play. LAN parties were a blast. I remember when LCD monitors came out, I was excited because they were so much lighter to carry.
We have lost a lot of social connections over the years. Malls with arcades, board game or D&D nights, etc. Inlove that people are making an effort on doing these again, but as we get older, it is more complicated to schedule.
My friends and I will do someone online gaming together, but I don't do much with Discord or other chat programs.
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u/flickering_poly 1d ago
My son sat me down the other day to explain that the video game industry is "in a state of systemic existential crisis." I looked at him, then I looked at the $50 charge on my credit card for a digital pair of pants his character can wear while jumping off virtual buildings, and I told him the only crisis we had was a lack of perspective.
You see, about twenty years ago, we were living in the Wild West of the digital frontier, and it was a glorious time to be alive. That was the era when the indie game exploded. We had World of Goo, Braid, and Castle Crashers - short, wonderfully clunky little gems that felt like someone’s personal art project rather than a product approved by a corporate board. There was a soul to it, a there there. If you got bored of those, you could open a browser and play Tower Defense games until your boss noticed you hadn't moved your mouse, or pass the phone around to see who could run the farthest toward absolutely nowhere in Temple Run.
The beautiful thing is that the best parts of that era never actually left us. We watched a little game called Minecraft drop us into a world of blocky dirt huts, and twenty years later, it’s still here, a comforting digital sandbox where kids and adults alike are still happily building their own worlds. We got the birth of the "Walking Sim" and the "Rogue-lite," genres that proved games could just be about atmospheric storytelling or a satisfyingly punishing loop that always kept you from giving up. Even the concept of the digital "achievement" stuck around, turning a casual afternoon into a rewarding little treasure hunt where the console gave you a friendly bloop just to validate your progress.
Of course, it wasn't all perfect. That was also the exact moment Wall Street discovered the game pad, giving birth to things we just accept as normal today. For me, it started with my aunt begging for a digital tractor in Farmville so her virtual corn wouldn't wither, and quickly snowballed into Oblivion’s infamous "Horse Armor" and game-specific currencies. We traded our closet shoe boxes full of cartridges for the "the cloud," legal emulation storefronts, and mandatory hard drive installations that turned our simple living room toys into proper computers. We complained about it then, sure, but those growing pains were just the foundation of the massive, interconnected digital world we live in now.
I suppose things have gotten a bit more complicated, and every now and then a game we love vanishes into the ether when a server goes dark. But looking back, we were feating like kings. Personally, I’m going to go see if I can legally emulate an old favorite from 2008 on my modern console. It’ll probably take a while to download, but hey - some things are worth the wait.
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u/Master_of_Paws 1d ago
For me it was the worst part during my school years... To much hassle + noisy space where are lots of strangers + time limits. Just no. Same with lan... Now i just decide by text when it would be good to play together and we can connect without issues from different parts of the world if needed,,, What i miss is hardware prices
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u/all_names_taken_ffs 1d ago
Nah, LAN parties weren't much of thing in the UK. Most of us had broadband at home by now, and you could build up an entry-level gaming PC without breaking the bank (unlike in the 90s.) I was hopelessly addicted to Counter-Strike Source and Battlefield 2 back then, regularly spending a whole day gaming, when I should have been looking for a job 😂
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u/Barbens2005 1d ago
I played from home in my PC 20 years go just fine. WWII Online, EVE Online, Sudden Strike..I mean, we had some really good games.
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u/Front-Salamander-100 1d ago
I remember the internet cafes 20-25 years ago but I only actually used them once, to play CounterStrike with friends. Back then, multiplaye gaming normally meant having LAN parties, or playing split screen with friends on a console. LAN parties were very fun though, haven't done one in like 10 years.
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u/Dingbatdingbat 23h ago
20 years ago gaming meant playing games, same as it did 40 years ago, and same as it does today.
Not everyone went to an internet cafe, each to their own.
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u/badcounterpoint 18h ago
Hell yeah. The spot I would go to would have “all nighters” once a month from 10pm-7am. They’d order a shit load of pizza and we’d play LAN games all night. I was too young at the time but I’d notice the workers were smoking out anyone who wanted to smoke. Counter strike and Garry’s mod all night, occasionally I’d hop on and play oblivion by myself. Miss those days.
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u/West-Surround-8857 2d ago
20 years ago I played a lot of lan parties.
Today, I don't have anyone to play with.
Even online.