The Golden Age of PC Gaming
IN LAST MONTH’S TRADE CHAT, I discussed the merits of gaming in a world where consoles are reaching parity with their PC cousins. Long story short, yes—PC gaming is still “worth it” in many ways. But when it comes to playing, archiving, and discovering retro games, it’s invaluable.
When it comes to the classics of yesteryear, no platform is doing its part to help preserve and make retro games available more than PC. If you’re looking to step into a wonderland of ’90s pointand-click adventures or classic shooters, you need only an Internet connection. Simply put, the PC ecosystem is the best possible place to take refuge from the frustrations of modern gaming. If you routinely find yourself saddled with the insatiable desire to dive into the classics, you should regularly be sitting at a mouse and keyboard.
If you’re comfortable tinkering and want to spend a few hours at a time doing so, you can always opt to emulate classic operating systems, consoles, and games themselves with a little doing. There are plenty of tutorials (many of them found within the pages of this magazine) that can help you accomplish this feat, but it’s not always the end goal for some users. Some players simply want to find a game they enjoyed from 20 years prior and jump in for a fun night of nostalgia.
It’s easier than ever to find the games you want to experience from the heyday of PC gaming. And gaming on PC enables you to explore the seemingly never-ending founts of vintage games available across the very marketplaces erected to preserve the titles that brought us where we are in gaming history right now.
Console marketplaces have hosted a modicum of retro titles here and there, but across Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch, there’s a paucity of classic games. While some efforts have been made to offer titles fans want to play from previous console generations, hundreds are missing from these stores. Whether that’s due to publishers’ refusal to port, licensing issues, or a litany of other reasons, it’s an unfortunate reality. You just can’t enjoy most retro titles on newer consoles, especially if they came from PC.
What you can do, however, is head to a storefront like GOG.com to browse dozens of classic titles, from the excellent Phantasmagoria to lesser-known dungeon crawlers such as Nox. It’s a well-known repository for games that come wrapped in DRM-free DOSBox containers, so you don’t even need to go to great lengths to get these classic titles to run.
Steam is a nobrainer for new titles, but retro games have also slowly made their way to the catalog. Titles such as the previously incredibly rare Purple Saturn Day or the difficult to run The Dame Was Loaded are now available to purchase for a pittance. Although many collectors (including myself) would prefer hard copies for display, the fact it’s so simple to play games that can’t be found anywhere else like this is phenomenal. And these two platforms are hardly the only ones to offer such a service.
Consoles are fantastic, and they certainly have their fair share of unique titles. But when it comes to experiencing the golden age of gaming, it’ll never be easier to enjoy the oldest, most obscure games on your bucket list than hopping on to your favorite storefront and paying peanuts to experience a blast from the past.
Brittany has been writing about gaming, tech, anime, and more for 14 years. Follow her on Twitter: @MolotovCupcake.
You can’t enjoy most retro titles on newer consoles, especially if they came from PC.