I’ve been wondering this recently. I grew up on atari/nes/snes and so of course almost all of those games (pretty sure all) are written in assembly and are rock solid smooth and responsive for the most part. I wonder if this has affected how I cannot stand to play badly optimized games eith even a hint of a laggy feel to it. I’ve always been drawn to quake and cs for that reason: damn smooth. And no, it doesn’t just need to be FPS games either. I cant play beat saber with a modicum of lag or i suck massively, but others can play just fine and not even notice the lag.
Its odd. I feel like a complainer but maybe I just notice it more easily than others?
I feel the opposite when I hear people complain about load times… “We want you to buy our SSD so your game will boot in 11 seconds instead of 19 seconds!”
Son, let me tell you about loading games from casette tape.
You’d start it loading, get up and go have dinner with the family. After 30 minutes, maybe it would be done. Maybe.
Maybe it hit an error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you need to re-wind and try again.
Beginning of file not found… Shit, didn’t rewind it far enough
When did they have games on tape?
Oh, you sweet summer child…
Up to the 90s my friend. Then 3.5 floppy"s took over (1.44 MEGAbyte!) then came zip (100MB) but only for rich people, then it became the era of CD and later dvd burning. Internet was not measured in mbits back then and most of the time not even in kbits. The internet was not a valid delivery system. It was slow and very expensive. Also the first memory cards (CF) around the millennium and from there it went on to the 10s and around there you got the pivot to what we have now.
Tape is still around in computing; its cheap, it’s cheerful, dependable and has quite a throughput. Seeking on it is still horrible though. But anyway, watching a real mechanised tapelibrary do it’s thing backing up computer systems is still mesmerizing.
You left out 5 1/4 floppy disks that were actually floppy. Yes, I know there are 8" floppies but those were mostly business use and specialized drives that you didn’t really get in the home computer market. Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack, etc all had 5 1/4" floppy drives, and when I got my first box of floppies, it was $50 of early 1980’s money for 10 disks. And on my Atari they held about 90K worth of space.
Not only on tape, but some radio shows would transmit computer programs that you could record and use. I know of the UK and Finland, but I think other European countries did it too.
Definitely also a thing in Germany. Alongside magazines printing source codes of games for you to type off.
C64, for one!
The generation of Amstrad, Spectrum etc had the games on tape. I would say they were the closest thing to a console pre-NES, so 1980s. I had an amstrad that was handed down to me by a friend of an older sister and it had tapes like this.
Late 1970s / early 1980s.
Atari 2600:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger
Nobody had this, it was way too expensive for what it was. Everybody just kept saving for a msx or Commodore and skipped this.
I had one, I had the tape drive for the Commodore 64 as well.
The Supercharger back in the day wasn’t that expensive, about $70 or the price of 2 games, because you had to supply your own tape player, the supercharger just connected to it with a wire.