The 2000s PC Game Experience (as a child)
When I was a young kid in the early 2000s, consoles and PCs seemed like two distinct worlds of video games that could never meet. Today it’s the opposite—most games people generally used to think of as console-only games get PC releases, and likewise, traditionally PC-focused games like Civilization get console releases. But back then? I once saw Roller Coaster Tycoon for Xbox and my mind nearly melted.
Today I’m reflecting on my childhood interest in the Personal Computer. Specifically the “playing games” part.
Same Name, Different Game
Remember when companies like THQ were constantly making games based on licenses popular with children? Stores used to be full of these things.
I’ve always been a big SpongeBob fan. And if you’re like me, a 2000s kid who liked SpongeBob and video games, there’s a high probability you enjoyed the game Battle for Bikini Bottom. But guess what? That’s a console game.
Oh, there is a game for PC with the same name, but I assure you, it’s not the same game or anything close to it. It features SpongeBob and the gang dealing with an invasion of robots, and uh… that’s about the only similarity. It’s not a 3D platformer at all, but instead is a collection of mini-games controlled mainly with the mouse that takes probably less than an hour to play through. Naturally, I played through it multiple times. It does have the real voices of SpongeBob, Plankton, etc. in there like the console game, so at least it has that going for it.
The SpongeBob Movie came to theaters in 2004, and Nick Games and THQ made sure they had video games ready to go with it. On console, Heavy Iron Studios, the developers behind Battle for Bikini Bottom, returned and made another 3D platformer game. PC players once again did not get that game, but instead got a point-and-click adventure game… which was an upgrade from the mini-game collection at least.
I remember seeing a commercial for the game, which of course showed the console version, and being a little disappointed when the PC version had none of that crazy action. And it didn’t even have any clips from the movie.
Of course, I had already learned to expect disappointment by that point, because the Harry Potter PC games were also quite different from their console counterparts. This is something I think I learned for the first time by exploring the DVD bonus features of Chamber of Secrets and seeing footage of the video game there. I could never look at my PC version the same after that.
However, in this case, the fundamentals of both the console and PC versions are actually pretty similar. From what I’ve heard, both versions of these games were built off the same design document and thus involve learning spells and flying a broom through rings. But since little else was shared between the development teams, you end up with two vastly different implementations of the same concepts.
So why did PC games like this where the box is the same but it’s an entirely different game from the console version exist?
Well, what I realized while pondering this question is that it really comes down to answering a bigger question: why the overall divide between console and PC games existed in the first place.
But that answer is kind of long, so to avoid interrupting the flow of nostalgia, I’m putting it off until the end of this post.
Buying Roller Coaster Tycoon at the Book Fair
Simulation games fascinated me as a kid. Unfortunately, I don’t think I knew the name SimCity, but I always was, like, sort of aware of its existence and would think, “Man, isn’t there some sort of game out there where you get to build your own city? I’m pretty sure I saw something like that once.” I was probably too distracted by the licensed games to find out more, however.
The freedom and creativity offered by this type of game always appealed to me. You get a blank canvas and you can build what you want and make decisions—and you can see how the virtual customers react to what you’ve built! It’s not just a still image!
The simulation game I played the most was, of course, Roller Coaster Tycoon.
You know what’s cool? They had the game at the Scholastic Book Fair at my elementary school. I can’t remember if I had the game previously or had played it somewhere else, but I saw it and convinced my mom to buy it for me. Gotta love that.
I suppose it does have educational value. You can learn about physics a little bit. You can learn about money and how to charge guests to use bathrooms.
By the way, were you the type of player to torment park guests by trapping them on an island full of soda places but no bathrooms? My friend did that but I always felt like I shouldn’t.
Anyway, the game is a PC classic, and it’s playable on pretty much any computer today including Mac and Linux thanks to the open source implementation you can find online (it requires a legitimate copy of the game of course).
Lots of Flash Games
Macromedia Flash (later Adobe Flash) took over the Internet for a good while. It got to a point where if you were promoting something online, you couldn’t just have a normal boring website. No, it had to be animated. Even if it took forever to load on slow connections.
Now of course, for kids, Flash opened up the door for a lot of games. The games weren’t crazy elaborate, but did that matter? They were free online games!
Once again, TV told me to use the Internet to play games involving TV shows I liked, so I was on Nick.com regularly playing games I don’t even remember because they were probably just not that good. I do remember this one Avatar game where you threw fireballs at the other player’s tower to try to destroy it before they destroyed yours.
In the mid-2000s, the two big sites for flash games were Miniclip and AddictingGames. There was a game on AddictingGames called Interactive Buddy where the point of the game was just to beat the crap out of a little faceless character. But you could change him to have the face of Napoleon Dynamite and he would start saying lines from the movie. I thought this was the funniest thing ever.
Miniclip introduced me to Club Penguin, a charming little multiplayer game made by a Canadian studio. That became a whole three-year passion for me. I ended up making Club Penguin videos in the early days of YouTube. Gooood times. That game could probably still be alive today if one of the biggest companies in the world hadn’t bought it and eventually found it unprofitable. But what can you do?
Anyway, as for the Flash Player itself…. It deserved to die, ultimately. It was controversial when Apple refused to allow it to run on iPad, but guess who turned out to be correct? Still, you can’t deny that Flash was how some incredibly creative people were able to bring unique art to millions of homes outside of the traditional avenues of television and retail stores. And luckily, we now have Ruffle, a Flash emulator which will help preserve that art without opening your computer up to dangerous vulnerabilities. Hooray!
License Keys and Data Discs
One of the big differences between gaming on consoles and PCs in the past was that PC games required installations, while console games would run straight off the disc. This is no longer the case, because now console games also require installations even when you use a disc. (Unless it’s the Nintendo Switch).
There was one thing I didn’t really understand as a kid: why do some games require me to insert the CD to play and others don’t? This was because of how different games handled copyright. Some games included a key you would type in upon installation, which was verified through the Internet. You don’t really need the disc after the installation. For other games, the disc itself is your proof of purchase (which is also how console discs work now).
I think PC software just had a different way of thinking about things back then because connecting to the Internet was already such an important part of using a PC. Consoles were only barely starting to think about getting online at that point.
In 2013, when Microsoft planned to launch a console that required an Internet connection and would tie ownership of a game disc to a user’s account, greatly complicating the simple act of loaning a game to a friend or even selling a used game, fan backlash was fierce. At first, Microsoft persisted—they were doing publishers a huge favor by trying to reduce used games sales, after all. But fan backlash only grew, and Sony took advantage, highlighting PlayStation 4 as being a console that didn’t require an Internet connection and placed no restrictions on borrowing or buying used games. Microsoft soon relented and dropped their plans for an always-online console.
Microsoft’s moves were premature—even though they changed course, the market has continued to more and more towards digital games anyway (Microsoft’s GamePass being a factor in this), and that ultimately gives the publishers what they wanted in the first place: the elimination of the secondary market.
Now, on the PC side—do physical games even exist anymore? I see a few at Wal-Mart but I’m not even sure if there are even discs in those boxes; it’s more likely just download codes.
In late 2005, I wanted Star Wars Battlefront II on PC. It wasn’t on GameCube because of those JERKS at LucasArts (to be fair, first-person shooters were probably kind of tough to control with the C-Stick, right?) Our computer didn’t have a DVD drive, but that wasn’t a problem, because they released the game on CD too! But that meant the game came in a fat DVD-size case with like four data discs. Kinda crazy, right? (By the way, that game was the same game on PC as on console, except it lacked movie clips and the UI had a more boring font—but I had been burned enough times that those differences felt significant and I felt envious of PS2 and Xbox players).
People who remember the floppy disk era can attest to games coming with even more disks than that, but that’s before my time. We had firmly moved on to the CD era by the time I was using a PC regularly.
You know what was great about installing games on a PC though? Every installation screen could look a little unique! It wasn’t like today where you just let Steam do everything. Nah, the developers really took the opportunity to hype you up for what you were going to experience when you finished installing…. Um, ok, maybe that’s an exaggeration. Really, in most cases, you’d probably just see some images of the game on the screen as you watched the progress bar fill. Oooh. So thrilling. And yet, the anticipation really was fun as a kid!
On the other hand, popping a game into a console and jumping right into it was an amazing experience as well. Today we get neither of those experiences. Wack.
Anyway, in the early 2000s, PCs needed physical media just as much as consoles did, because even though you could download some games, Internet speeds were slow. And games could be quite big.
I remember using Internet Explorer to download MapleStory in fifth grade. I don’t know how big it actually was, but I know it took all night.
Eventually, though, Internet speeds get better for more and more people. And you can start saying, “Hey, this huge, full-priced PC game? Why not just download it instead of going to the store? You’d have to wait for the installation either way.”
Now, personally, at the end of the decade, when this was becoming more of a thing, there was no way I was gonna be able to download any big expensive games on the family PC. But the idea of it seemed novel and exciting to me. I mean, getting something that’s supposed to come in a disc right from the comfort of your home? That’s crazy, right?
Keep in mind this is also exactly when Netflix streaming was really starting to take off. Yeah, they used to be a DVD rental service! Remember that?
Anyway, I do wonder if the lack of hesitation in going all-digital by PC players was in part simply because they were ahead of the curve. They were jumping on to a new, convenient way to get games and maybe not really considering that discs would even go away.
But I also think the prevalence of free-to-play games was a factor, too. There’s no disc for a free-to-play game. Yet some of these games were big! So you just get used to the idea of downloading big games and never really question it.
There are worrying aspects of on all-digital media landscape, but I won’t get into all that. Point is, in the 2000s, we weren’t there yet on PC.
Backyard (dramatic pause) Baseball
Earlier I talked about the need for games aimed at children to run on as many PCs as possible. Who understood this better than Humongous Entertainment, the developers of Pajama Sam, Backyard Sports, and some kinda Blue’s Clues game I remember having as a child?
Hold up, did somebody say Backyard Sports? Broooooo
Hey, did you hear someone is reviving Backyard Sports? I am not optimistic.
But yeah, as a kid, I had Backyard Baseball and quite enjoyed it.
There were several versions of the game over the years that, as far as I can tell, aren’t super different from each other but have small improvements. I don’t remember exactly which one I had, but I know it was one that had MLB players in it. The twist is, they are MLB players… as kids! I would usually get the kid version of Todd Helton on my team, since I’ve always been a homer for all my Colorado teams, even if rooting for the Rockies is mostly an exercise in misery…. But yeah, kinda neat, right?
You look at this game, and yeah, it’s basic. But it had colorful characters with voice acting and animation, which was pretty cool!
A kid like me didn’t have Madden! Well, I did later. But before I had a console, this was my main sports video game experience!
I think every single adult who grew up playing this can tell you who the best hitter was. It was not even a debate. When you heard Pablo Sanchez’ awesome music, you knew you were about to get a home run.
Would I want to go back and play this? Probably not. But I do love that kids whose only gaming device was just a regular PC had the chance to play stuff like this, made just for them.
Runescape
How come I go back to school one year and every kid on the four-square court is talking about Runescape? I had to Google “ruin scape” when I got home.
Runescape is a free MMORPG that still exists as Runescape Classic. You can play it for yourself even now.
It was built in Java. Its graphics are very basic. But in 2004, being able to play a fantasy adventure in a virtual world with other, real people seemed pretty darn cool.
Unfortunately I didn’t understand RPGs at all, and so I gave up on the game fairly quickly.
I had to mention this game though, because it really was huge. The main thing I remember from it is the music.
Also I went back to it when I was around 13 with a new account and someone started chatting at me like “lol you’re a noob” and I got so mad. Because OBVIOUSLY I’M A NOOB YOU IDIOT I’M LITERALLY EARLY IN THE GAME WHY DO YOU THINK THAT MAKES YOU BETTER THAN ME. I mean really it was stupid of me to even let that provoke me.
What about the cool PC games?
Ok so maybe you’re wondering if I ever played something like, I don’t know, Battlefield 1942. Of course, the answer is no. I think I saw a neighbor kid playing some sort of Battlefield game one time, probably around 2005 or so, and it seemed cool—there were tanks and it just seemed very grown-up and impressive to me.
You know what else I never played? Any of those 90s games that were filled with live-action FMVs. Except for this one time I went to a friend’s house and I watched him play one a bit. I don’t know how many of those people actually like, but they are interesting.
You know what I did play? Xevious. Mappy. Ms. Pacman. Motos. Yeah, we had a collection of Namco arcade games on CDs. Microsoft actually published several of these collections in the 90s.
Also, remember the pinball game included in Windows XP? Oh I definitely played that a fair bit.
But was I playing Half Life 2 in 2004? Obviously not. But I did play it in 2013. And it’s good. You should play it.
Was I playing Morrowind? No, but I do own it. I’ve realized more recently I’m probably never going to actually invest the time to play it. Sorry Morrowind.
The point is, obviously there was a whole world of PC games out there, but as a kid, I guess I mostly just knew whatever I found for free. And also whatever was based on SpongeBob or Harry Potter.
Who even introduced me to Roller Coaster Tycoon in the first place, I wonder? I’m glad they did, because it’s good to have at least one classic on my gaming resume.
Games for Windows - Live. (what.)
Technically, this memory is really from sometime in my tweens, so it’s a little different from most of the stuff I’ve been talking about. For some reason, in 2007, a couple years after the early success of Xbox Live, Microsoft decided to bring the Live brand to Windows gaming. But…why, exactly? People had been gaming on Windows and competing online for years. What does this service actually offer?
Well, you can use your Xbox gamertag and earn achievements on PC games, for one thing. It even offers cross-platform play with some Xbox 360 games.
Also, the Halo 2 Windows port is exclusive to this service and Windows Vista! Have fun everyone!
Yeah, I can’t imagine that went over well.
Strangely, I remember when Halo 2 for Windows released. See, in 2007, I would sometimes look at the ads that came with the Sunday paper. The Wii stuff usually caught my attention, but I distinctly remember one day seeing Halo 2 with the Games for Windows box art in one of these ads. I don’t know why that was so memorable to me. It was the first time I’d seen this branding, of course. And perhaps I was surprised that a game that so many kids seemed to love was on PC.
But anyway, when it comes to Games for Windows - Live, I don’t know what Microsoft was thinking. When it first launched, it cost fifty bucks. You could get away with charging people to play online on Xbox because online games on consoles had hardly been done before. But on PC? People had been playing online games on PC for years, and now you’re trying to charge them so they can access… what benefits, exactly? Good luck.
Initially developers had to pay to use it, too, but that didn’t last long either. It seems like Microsoft basically thought they could get more money out of Windows games if they just took the Xbox strategy to it—but this is where you see the benefits of PC being an open platform. There were other options for devs and players.
Now, for a less experienced player, perhaps if they’re looking for games to play, it would make sense for them to go to a service called Games for Windows. So I can see why developers would want to get in on that.
I mean, I was a stupid kid who was apparently impressed by that Games for Windows box.
Actually, whenever I saw screenshots of Windows Vista, I was like “OHHH MAN I WISH I HAD THAT.” It looked shiny. It looked slick. I had no idea it would become one of the most hated versions of Windows ever. Luckily Windows 7 was much better and still looked quite nice.
Anyway, I definitely had this Games for Windows service installed on the family computer at some point even though I had no games that used it. I remember looking at Starcraft II on there. I can’t really remember what interested me about that game in particular. But I looked at the minimum system requirements and determined that our computer definitely couldn’t run it.
There was a time when I was feeling some real envy for the Xbox 360. Not only did it have some cool-looking games, the online features seemed far more impressive than what the Wii could do. This is why, in 2010, when Microsoft came up with something for both Xbox 360 and PC called Game Room, which was like a virtual arcade featuring Xbox avatars, I downloaded it on PC. I think I booted it up once. The actual arcade games cost money (in the form of Microsoft Points), and I don’t think I was interested enough to actually pay. But apparently, I was grasping at straws trying to be part of this cool Xbox community everyone else seemed to be enjoying.
I checked my profile just now, and sure enough, I have one achievement for Game Room. 5 points.
I would reunite with Games for Windows - Live a few years later when I played Arkham City on Steam. I guess it didn’t cause problems, but it was just unnecessary. Luckily, this service is now pretty much dead for good.
Explaining The PC-Console Divide
Before I wrap this up, I need to circle back to the question I had early on. Why were PC and console games so different in the past? I believe there are many reasons (though you shouldn’t quote me on any of this stuff, to be clear).
Unlike today, where a PC player can expect that almost any console exclusive other than one by Nintendo (or Vanillaware, for some reason) is going to get a PC port eventually, good PC ports of console games in the 90s were rare.
There was a PC port of Final Fantasy VII a couple years after it released on consoles. What I’m seeing on Wikipedia is they had to rewrite 80% of the code, and the game came with a license to use some Yamaha synthesizer software so that it could play the music the way it was supposed to sound regardless of users’ different hardware.
You may be thinking, “Huh? You need extra software just to play the music?” But computers have come a long way since then. I mean, the sound card was still a discrete part you actually had to think about at the time! I feel like almost no one born after 2000 will ever have to use the words “sound” and “card” next to each other.
PC gaming in the 90s could be complicated for the user—which is probably part of why many of the big high-spec PC games you think about from the era were more adult-oriented. And from the developer perspective, it must have been quite a challenge developing a game that works not just on one type of hardware, but on several, and on numerous combinations of hardware.
(And sure, developing for PCs today still means there are many possibilities for hardware, but—speaking as an idiot, doesn’t it seem like hardware drivers and graphics APIs have been reduced to just a few different options, making things a lot simpler? Eh I dunno maybe I should stop talking about that).
The point is, developing for a console meant developing for specific hardware and nothing else. And that hardware was specifically designed for games. You didn’t need additional software to play the music for Final Fantasy VII, because the sound hardware was built into the console, and the game was programmed to use that hardware.
PCs, on the other hand, were built for general use. They were good at things other than games.
This difference remained in place with the next generation of consoles that arrived at the dawn of the 2000s—actually, the Xbox took a strategy you might call ahead of its time by utilizing custom versions of off-the-shelf PC parts, but when you look at the sales of the PS2, which did have a unique SOC built in-house at Sony, Xbox just didn’t matter as much.
So, because of the many differences between these two sides of video games, development studios tended to focus on either one or the other.
I guess Nickelodeon and THQ must have hired one of those PC studios for that SpongeBob game, and I’m thinking the budget they allocated for it was a lot smaller than the console version.
The 2000s is when things slowly started to change, I think, and PCs and consoles started to move towards being less different. But when I was a kid, that gap was definitely still evident.
Also, the physical formats the games shipped on probably made a difference at various times. Console games were on cartridges and stored no data permanently on the console itself (games that saved data saved it to the cartridge). A PC was going to have some persistent storage, however, so games could take advantage of that. They could also use a bunch of floppy disks, like I was talking about earlier. When PS2 came around, it used DVDs, which was huge for popularizing the DVD format. I don’t think many PCs had DVD drives at that point, but I don’t think this was actually much of a problem, because again, PC games required installation and didn’t even rely on the disc anyway.
You wanna know a big reason other than the internal hardware for that divide? The controllers. PC games were mostly built for mouse and keyboard, which definitely shaped the types of genres you’d see there. Any kind of game you’d see in the arcade, such as a fighting game, was a great fit for the controllers that consoles had. Now, you could get a joystick for PC, of course. You could even get one of them airplane controller things and play Flight Simulator. But there were also genres like simulation, strategy, RPGs (the isometric camera kind of RPGs), and adventure games that were and still are great to control with a mouse.
But nowadays we just let the players run free! Do you want to control an action-adventure game with a mouse and keyboard? Seems psychotic, but you do you. Some games will gently suggest you use a controller (“real yakuza use a controller”) but they’re not gonna force you.
I don’t know what exactly caused this revolution, but I want to give a lot of credit to the Xbox 360 controller and its compatibility with Windows. It was the best controller of its time (some would say ever), and it was simply the obvious choice if you wanted a controller for your PC, which I think helped those who traditionally play on console get comfortable playing more stuff on PC.
Oh and here’s another obvious one. Do you want to game at a desk with a monitor or do you want to use the TV? It’s interesting how this isn’t as much of a factor anymore either, because now all these devices can use HDMI cables. Obviously, this was not the case back then. Nowadays the main limiting factor of using a PC from your living room is the question of how to control it, but you can probably set it up to launch into Steam Big Picture mode if you really try.
Another factor contributing to the past divide between console and PCs is a result simply of what developers in Japan versus in the west were doing. Nintendo, Sega, Capcom, Squaresoft, Konami, and other Japanese studios were making dozens of absolute classic games in the 80s and 90s…for consoles. The PC game market in Japan, on the other hand, had become the home of a unique genre: the visual novel. This genre does kinda carry a certain stigma, however, and I have heard that this led to a stigma against PC games in general—but I don’t know if this is actually true. Whatever the case, the big developers in Japan were making all sorts of games for consoles and not much for PC. Really, it wasn’t until the past decade that most Japanese games got PC releases simultaneous to their console counterparts.
So yeah, PCs and consoles were once different worlds, but nowadays it really feels like they’re becoming more similar than ever. Of course, consoles are still locked to being able to access only one digital storefront but considering how the EU has compelled iPhone to open up to other storefronts besides Apple’s App Store, I have to think the same will happen to consoles eventually. Which will be a good thing overall, I believe—though the console makers might not like it.
Here’s the end
Well, it’s been fun remembering how things used to be. Honestly, most of the games I played on PC as a kid are not games I’d actually want to go back to today. You couldn’t play Wind Waker on a PC back then, ok? But that’s exactly why I wanted to talk about this topic. It was simply a different time, and it fascinates me to see how things have changed.