Next Week Build Gaming PC Games New Appreciation Plug and Play

In this week’s newsletter: Consoles are plug-and-play, but starting from scratch gave me new appreciation for everything that goes into making games

Next week I am going to build a gaming PC. I’ve done it once before and wrote an article about what a nightmare the process was – although the issue turned out to be with the USB stick I used to install the motherboard update patch and … well, don’t get me started. The thing is, I figured it out because when you have played PC games for as long as I have, you know that figuring technical stuff out is a key part of the experience.

While games consoles have always been pure plug-and-play experiences, PC games have definitely not. When I started playing in the early 1990s, they came on multiple floppy discs – The Secret of Monkey Island was on eight – and you had to keep swapping them in and out of the drive, like feeding a voracious robot. 

Not that you necessarily bought complete games back then. I first played Wolfenstein 3D when my friend got the first couple of levels free on a magazine cover disc. That’s how a lot of games were distributed – the famed shareware model. Once you’d played the sample, you were supposed to contact the publisher to get the full game sent to you. 

Comparatively few people had the internet back then, so as a distribution model it made a lot of sense. It’s rumoured that there were once more copies of the shareware version of Doom (pictured below) on PCs than there were copies of Microsoft Windows 95. This was just another oddity of being a PC gamer – having a drawer full of magazine front cover discs crammed with shareware and public domain mini games.

In the days before Windows 95, most games ran on MS-DOS and you had to install them by using a command-line interface to enter DOS prompts – yes, you typed into your computer to make it do stuff! Then different games required you to manage different types of memory and sometimes create boot disks with custom autoexec.bat and config.sys files. Oh and you had to intricately configure your sound drivers and your graphics card, usually through a never-ending cascade of option menus. The confusion ramped up when Windows became more popular because not all game devs were totally on board. I still have a copy of the 1994 classic Colonization, whose instruction manual states: “This game has not been tested under Microsoft Windows; therefore we suggest you do not use it with Windows. Chances are very good that the two will not work together.” That counted as tech support in the mid-90s.

When Windows 95 became more stable, things started to change. Microsoft launched its Direct X technology, a group of applications designed to standardise how games were developed and played on PCs. But it didn’t actually get much easier. Instead, 3D graphics accelerator cards such as the 3Dfx and PowerVR arrived and we had to learn a whole new set of exciting compatibility and performance paradigms. And there were still issues with multiple disks, even in the new era of CD-Roms, which stored a lot more data than floppy disks. Unfortunately, developers started filling them with video clips and CD-quality sounds, birthing the craze for “interactive movies”. The supernatural adventure game Phantasmagoria came on seven CDs! Seven! It was crazy.

What I’m trying to say is, PC gamers have to be tinkerers, and this has always been the case. It’s a different sort of relationship than console gamers. Even before I built my first PC, I knew about the basic structure of the machine – the role of the motherboard as the sort of nerve centre, the CPU as brain, then the system memory, the hard-drive, the graphics processor. 

I knew how they interoperated, I knew how to install drivers. I secretly like this process, even though it is often frustrating. I like the camaraderie it creates between gamers as they desperately attempt to solve each other’s hardware incompatibilities. I like that people are so incredibly invested in their builds and the craft that went into them, like car fanatics, or wine connoisseurs.

Even now, when we have digital stores such as Steam and Epic to manage and streamline theprocess, PC gamers still need to get their hands dirty. You have to configure the performance parameters of any new title to align with your own specific PC build. Does your machine support high-dynamic range lighting? Can it run a new game in 4K? Is switching ray tracing on going to slow everything down to a grind?

Knowing the limits of a machine you built (or painstakingly ordered from a site that builds them for you), teaches you a bit about the complexity of the game development process – how sometimes, things just don’t work and there could be a million reasons why. Conversely, this little degree of technical knowledge also makes PC owners incredibly exacting and demanding consumers. The past year has seen several major publishers struggling with the PC builds of their latest titles – The Last of Us, Forspoken, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and the recent Redfall all had PC versions that were cursed with bugs and performance issues. Incandescent players review-bombed score aggregation sites and saturated forums and social media with raging lists of complaints. Developers will often point to the complexity of the PC space – the sheer variety of hardware builds they have to support and optimise for, but often the feeling is that PC gamers are being short-changed with poor ports of games that have been built with PS5 and Xbox Series X in mind.

It’s a complicated and humbling process owing a PC. As its components age, your system gradually slips down the ranks from cutting edge to minimum required performance. You can upgrade parts, of course, but it will eventually become easier to move on and start from scratch. I sometimes get pangs of guilt looking at the graveyard of old PCs and components littering my games room. These were my proudest possessions once. The Pentium I discovered The Sims and Half-Life on, the first PC I owned that could run the original Far Cry at a decent rate. They’re useless now, fit only for the recycling centre, and with them will go the gamer I once was.

There is something existential about it. As Nietzsche definitely said: when you stare into your PC technical specifications, your PC technical specifications also stare into you.

What to play?

I’ve only just started Cassette Beasts, but I can already recommend it to lapsed Pokémon fanatics. The game takes the monster-collecting framework of the legendary series and adds interesting new systems (mixing monsters together to create new ones) as well as some nostalgic nods to 1990s culture. The beautiful pixel visuals and large, open environment are especially impressive considering it was made by a two-person team, Bytten Studio, based in Brighton. The game is infused with that town’s idiosyncratic charm.