Like many people, I’ve been thinking about physical media lately, and how our entertainment items – movies, albums, books – used to be things that sat on a shelf that someone else could see and say, “Hey I like this thing on your shelf.”
PC games were one of those things, once. I have a few. And I’ve scrounged them up from their various moving boxes and parents’ houses to see if they still work.
Does anyone here still play a game from an optical drive? A game where your regularly-played copy isn’t the Steam version?
For me, Morrowind was the last game that I was still playing on a disc. I have newer games on discs, but just played those once or twice and then put them back on the shelf. But I was still playing Morrowind from a CD up until 2023, when it went on sale on Steam for $1, so I bought it. I almost didn’t get it, since I liked the fact that I was still playing a game on a CD.
I plan on taking inventory of which games still work and what it takes to install them today.
What were (are?) some of your favorites?
Bruh I haven’t had a computer with a disc drive in like…15 years.
Last game I played with a disc was disc golf.
I haven’t had a disk drive in my PC for over 10 years now. It’s a PITA even finding an inexpensive case that has front bays these days.
Yeah, they definitely aren’t seen as a necessity anymore.
However, the Silverstone FLP01 was mentioned in another community around here and I was so tempted to get one. At $150, it’s not exactly inexpensive, and I already have a perfectly good case (Fractal Design Core 500), but man I want one. The “floppy disk drives” are doors that flip down: the top one reveals an optical drive, and the bottom one reveals the USB ports.
Why not USB-based disk reader?
I get a lot of old oc games on disc from thrift stores all the time.
However once I confirm they work I back them up and continue to use them in a disc emulator.
Technically last week realistically a very long time ago.
Very cool. I’ve never backed mine up; I should do that. What game was it last week?
Disc rot is a thing, so backing up a bin/cue for CDs or ISO for dvd is always a good idea (if it hasn’t been backed up already)
Monopoly 1998 was what I played last week. Nothing ran it except my XP laptop
Probably Crysis.
Long enough ago that my DVD drive had sealed shut since then and I had to use a paperclip to open it.
Nice. I had borrowed a friend’s physical copy of Crysis, and that’s how I played it back in the day.
Now I want to install a game to a disk and run it from the disk drive, my dad’s old desktop has a drive. I wonder if it can burn dvds.
Maybe I could install stardew valley to the disk.
I’ve been wanting to do this, too, for games that I bought on Steam. Like, make a bootable Linux DVD that has Steam and the game preinstalled on it, with Steam already logged in as my account.
I was thinking it would be easier with gog games.
You can just burn the install directory to a disk and then insert the disk and launch the game without launchers
Some Steam games can be played without Steam. Some require more and others less or none work to achieve that. GOG is the better choice for this task, but if you already have Steam game that could work for this, maybe no need to rebuy it on GOG. I was thinking of doing something similar to archive what can be archived, but never got around doing it. Here some resources:
I don’t think cds and dvds hold data for too long. I guess it’s better than a hard drive.
There were special long lived BlueRay format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC . I was thinking of getting into, but they were expensive when I looked at it years ago. With 100 GB per disc, this might be a good solution for longtime archive (but you need the reader too…).
As for the CDs and DVDs, the longevity also highly depends on the burner, the blank disc and maybe the software and settings you used at that time. A pressed CD that you buy and its not burned can hold data for very long time, and is much more durable than your burned ones. At least compared to a mechanical hard drive you don’t need to reuse (rewrite) to not loose data. But a hard drive can hold so much data.
2007, I think. I had recently moved and didn’t have internet hooked up yet, so I bought BioShock as a physical disc so that I wouldn’t have to wait. Imagine my frustration when I learned about the online-only authentication bullshit it used for DRM, so having the disc didn’t even matter; without Internet I couldn’t play the damn thing at all.
Piracy hysteria was at an absolute fever pitch in 2007 – those online activations are what make me think that much of my physical collection won’t be playable anymore.
Last one was oblivion in 2011. New home no internet and the pc towen on the lunch table. Good memories
Oblivion was also one that I owned physically. I just assumed that I had also acquired it on Steam by now, but it looks like I haven’t. Also great memories with Oblivion. I think it’s still my 4th or 5th most-played game. (I have to guess, based on remembering the number of hours that Xfire said I had back in the day, which is a whole nother nostalgia trip right there, lol.)
Starcraft 2 for me. I haven’t had an optical drive in my pc for probably 10 years or so. The last “physical” game I bought was Mass Effect Andromeda, and it was just a box with a download code inside.
PC gamers were incentivized to move away from optical media asap, since optical drives read slowly compared to HDDs, and SSDs are even faster.
Yeah, I had forgotten how slow an optical drive was, and how that was usually the limiting factor. I installed Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear from the original CD a couple days ago, and it took about 20 minutes to install on my current PC. I’m pretty sure that’s about how long it took in 1999, too.
Downloading it from Steam takes about 10 seconds.
