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?
I almost went that route, but kept moving my disc drive from one PC to the next just for Morrowind. I didn’t have room for it in my latest build, though (I put in a tower cooler for the first time), so I bought an external DVD drive.
So, how far can you throw those DVDs?