Today the gaming world is the order of the day (worth the redundancy), and everyone knows the term or even considers themselves a gamer . Ray Tracing, 360 Hz monitors, RGB peripherals … the list of products and technologies geared towards gaming is endless, but do you know what gaming was like in the year 2000 ? How did gamers of that time manage with the tools we had?
Even if you didn’t live at that time, you have probably seen even images of those bone-colored computers with Turbo buttons and the “tube” CRT monitors of the time. But I have to tell you that that is nothing, because gaming arose even before those times, for example with the well-known Amstrad CPC464 Plus that worked with cartridges and, be careful, with audio tape to save the data. A game on those computers took minutes, sometimes hours to fully load.
But in this article we are not going to look back so much, but we are going to try to pay tribute to all those who have already been in the industry for more than two decades and who have gone through each and every one of the phases in which This world that we are passionate about, gaming and hardware has been involved.
Gaming in the year 2000, what hardware did we use?
In those days, 486 computers had already begun to become outdated in pursuit of the much more modern Pentium MMX in the case of Intel and Athlon in the case of AMD, who were already competing for hegemony in the CPU market at that time.
Back then having 64 MB (megabytes) of RAM in EDO format was almost a luxury, and you had to deal with many games because they needed to make use of the ” conventional memory “, of which there was only 640 KB (even if you had 256 MB of RAM, you still had the same amount of conventional memory and the rest was extended memory) and you had to use tools to optimize the RAM like Memmaker to free up resources and make the games work.
Likewise, having a 20GB capacity hard drive was already a luxury, and most mortals had to settle for smaller capacity drives. The PCs generally used Windows 95 as the operating system, although in many cases it coexisted with MS-DOS 6.22. The power supplies were barely 200-250 watts of power and was plenty for the most gaming graphics cards of the moment, such as the GeForce 2 GTS.
Although CD-ROMs already existed at that time, many times we had to deal with cumbersome 3.5 ″ and 1.44 Mb floppy disks, and we had to install games using a huge amount of them (for example the first The Command and Conquer version occupied 11 floppy disks, compressed using the ARJ (ZIP was still in its infancy).
Let’s not talk about the monitors. Surely you have seen images of CRT monitors that took up a huge space on the table, they got hot and you had to put a filter in front of them so that the radiation would not hurt your eyes (in a way this was almost an urban legend). These monitors were between 14 and 17 inches, and the resolution was just SVGA (800 x 600 pixels), of course with 4: 3 aspect ratio. Gaming in 2000 was quite an adventure, of course.
The “gaming” peripherals
Today we have a huge number of gaming peripherals, designed specifically for games. Gaming in 2000 was done with conventional peripherals and, in fact, with the famous “ball” mice, which you constantly had to remove and wash with soap and water because they were filled with filth and the device did not work well. The peripherals were analog and were already connected with the modern PS / 2 connector, of course.
Gaming headphones did not exist, and in fact since at that time if you wanted your PC to have sound you had to install a dedicated sound card, walkman “headsets” or any other type of headset with an analog minijack connection were frequently used. . In fact, it was common for the sound of these gaming computers from the year 2000 to literally consist of one or two speakers installed in the box itself.
What was it like to play in those days?
Although many of you will fondly remember the titles of those times, gaming in 2000 was much easier than today (except for the part of installing the games and getting them to work, which was quite an achievement). In 2000 we had gems like Descent 3, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Gabriel Knight 3, Aliens vs Predator, Alpha Centauri, Dungeon Keeper and many more, like the famous Counter-Strike in its beta versions.
But the most interesting thing about those times is that flat Internet rates began to establish themselves as something normal, and in fact they were the first years of broadband. If right now you have a 50 Mb symmetric optical fiber and it seems little to you, I will tell you that at that time the broadband connections had 512 KB and that to download 500 MB it took approximately 3 hours.
Back then a new revolution also came… 3D graphics! And they came with the world’s first graphics processing unit (GPU) (or at least that’s how it is considered), the GeForce 256 that cost a whole salary, but in exchange for providing all the graphics power you needed to be up to date. Back then it was like buying an RTX 3090.
Do you think you spend too many hours playing WoW, Fortnite or The Witchger? A “gamer” from the year 2000 spent hours, hours and hours with a game of this nature, and it was not uncommon to meet your friends to take their computers to your house (imagine carrying that) and set up a home LAN Party to spend a whole weekend playing without rest.
How much did a gaming PC cost in 2000?
To give you an idea, a PC with 64 MB of RAM in EDO format, an Intel Pentium 233 MMX, ATA 3.2 GB hard disk, CD-ROM reader, floppy disk reader, Yamaha sound card, a graphic ATI ProTurbo 8 Mb and including a 17-inch Hitachi CRT monitor, two 60W stereo speakers and without even a keyboard and mouse, it cost 349,000 pesetas (about 2,100 euros).
If to this we add the inflation of the last 20 years, today this hardware would cost a whopping 3,100 euros. Of course, with that budget, you could build a gaming PC with a monitor and all the great peripherals, right?