Dollar Tree stores, when they were a dollar.
Yeah it was a very nice point in time when you were tight on a budget and there was dollar tree near you, everything very affordable. Not everything was built to last and most of the food were arguably unhealthy but you got by with what you could get. Nowadays, we’ve seen Dollar Tree turn into just any dollar store you could think of.
24/7 Wal-Marts
It’s been a while but there was that time Wal-Mart was opened for 24 hours. This allowed you to shop at 2 in the morning, in a big store, with next to no one. Sure some of the services might not be available but that isn’t the point. And maybe it disgruntled a lot of overnight workers who’re trying to get the store ready for the normal period of the day, now having anything disrupted and so few people to cover the store.
Video Games that were shipped in complete versions
Back when developers actually had to make sure that what they’re shipping out to be played, was both good and functioning. Now everyone lately is so quick to release games that breaks on Day 1, require lots of patches that take weeks to even years, slapping on Early Access to milk even more money from people and eventually not even test it. While still charging top dollar.
It’s funny to me to see people mythologize how perfect video games were before they could be remotely updated.
Sure, game developers rely on fix-it-later updates much more than they should today, but games had bugs back then too.
It’s not mythology, testing was crucial so you wouldn’t ship a broken cartridge, which was very costly than a patch download. It made financial sense to test throughly, and more than that, develop carefully.
I think the only guys that made a working game in a week were Atari VCS developers, and IMO it wa a combination of the limited hardware, and the skill of a few legendary programmers.
Today we get games that dwarf the entire software stack of computers decades ago, but they’re made loosely, knowing they’ll ship broken and need patch after patch until it doesn’t make financial sense, and then they’re abandoned.
My most recent experience is Fallout 76 on Steam, and by god it is a bag of bugs despite being the bread winner of the franchise. For example, a long-standing bug is that once it starts, and offers to press any button to sign in, you have to wait about a minute before doing that, otherwise it will likely hang. This has existed since launch, and after numerous patches it hasn’t been addressed yet.
The crazy part is that it’s only mildly inconvenient now compared to the spray glued collection of game breaking bugs and horrendous design choices it was at launch.
And yes, I’m an old timey gamer who’s also a masochist playing it nightly.
Stupid sexy Fasnacht!
You know what’s interesting? I see footage and images from the previous few fallout games, all of them, in so many different contexts - people love those games and they talk about them, A LOT.
But I have never seen any footage from fallout 76.comparitively nbody seems to think it worth celebrating, in the same way as the other few fallout games.
That’s how you can tell a series fell off. You can apply this to TV and movies too - i see less ‘House of the Dragon’ stuff than i saw ‘Game of Thrones’ stuff
games back then were also done by dev teams of like a dozen people or two who did literally everything and you had like 1-2 people on each task. localizing games also took like a year or more from their country of origin.
now they are done by teams of hundreds or thousands, esp once you start adding all the middleware and outsourcing of various parts of the game they do now, and they are released internationally in dozens of markets at once.
it’s lot easier to find bugs in a game that is 1MB than on that is 256GB
Hot take: games don’t need to be 256GB. Even 10GB is pushing it.
They do if they want high quality 4K textures and uncompressed audio.
The first gaming system that connected to the Internet was the Sega Dreamcast, and even that ran games only off disc. It isn’t until you get to the PS3/XBox 360 era when games would be downloaded to the console directly, and even then games weren’t expected to need an Internet connection to use.
Mario Brothers might have had a small design team, but Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas had a much larger dev team.
SA had 50-60 devs. in 2025 that’s a small dev team. The original gta3 had 25-30. SA only has about double the devs of GTA3
GTA6 dev team is over 6,000 people. Most dev teams today are to 400-500 people for AAA games.
Well, yeah. There’s a meme I actually saw that demonstrates how developers were back then compared to now. Developers back then, really did care about how to make a game at its best with like…2MB of cache or very little video memory or what little of bits they had to work with.
Today and for a while, with technology as to where it is at where sky is virtually the limit, we’ve got games that are so poorly optimized, it makes you wonder.
Y’all might enjoy this.
I was guilty of that very thing once. During my first programming class back in college, I wrote an Asteroids clone as a project. My professor kept sending it back telling me to fix it. I really racked my brain trying to figure out what he was sending back to me (he wouldn’t tell me, I was supposed to find and correct the error). The game ran just fine. Finally a gave up and asked him to tell me the answer of what my code was doing wrong. He showed me that I had one line of code that was basically making a new instance of the entire game for every screen refresh. (I wrote it in Java, so Java was just correcting it for me in real time.)