Meme transcription: A table comparing the steps to start a game ‘then’ vs. ‘now’.
Content of the “Then” column:
- Double-click GAME.exe
- Play game
Content of the “Now” column:
- Launch Steam
-
Steam updates
-
Steam opens
- Close Steam’s ad window
- Select Game
-
Game launcher starts
-
Game launcher launches Game launcher updater
- Yes
- Yes
- Yes
- Ok
-
Would you like to sign up for our newsletter?
- No
-
Our EULAs have changed. Please review them before continuing
- Scroll
- Scroll
- Scroll
- Scroll
- Yes
- Yes
- Yes, sell my soul
- Start game
- Skip vendor intro
- Skip vendor intro #2
- Skip vendor intro #3
- Sit through nVidia The way it’s meant to be played
- Skip opening cutscene
-
Main menu opens
-
Would you like to connect your Steam account to account?
- No
- Press play.
- Play game.
The meme clearly isn’t about installing games, it’s about starting them. And I seriously doubt OP is referring to any sort of floppy games at all. They’re most likely referring to many of the cd rom based games that literally were “click exe to start” and they just did. Everyone here is focusing on their experience with floppy games and completely ignoring that there was a time where games did work like this.
The meme’s is that it was better back then.
It truly really wasn’t.
I know. I was there. There was no “just clicking an exe” in the nineties. Pc’s where work machines. Made for boring stuff like excel and typing letters. Getting them. To play a game was a task on its own.
To play games on them you really had to go through several burning hoops. Every time. Because game A used xms, game B didn’t care, game C must have ems. Etc. You where reconfiguring your pc for each game in a different way.
Later, win vista and XP solved a lot of problems but caused several others just as worse.
It was with win7 it finally all started to work like it more or less should.
And really, I meant it: I take current day tracking and ads any day. 3 steps forward, one backwards.
I’m saying that OP might not be talking about the 90s. They literally might be talking about windows vista or 7. You have no way of knowing.
In 7 and vista you already used steam and battle.net. The last time you clicked on an exe really was a long time ago.
Every installer ever since windows 95, made an item in your start menu. No clicking an exe.
unless you pirate your games, but then you’re still just clicking an exe and this post doesn’t make sense.
But hey, he made fun with his meme, I had fun typing my response, that’s all there was to it, no?
Yeah I don’t really think they meant actually clicking an exe file, it’s just that’s a lot shorter than saying “click the shortcut in your start menu”. It’s a meme, not a diatribe. But yeah it’s a joke so we can just move on. Thanks for the conversation.