with a CRT’s characteristic display.
Good CRTs are hard to find now –
most have either been chucked,
broken, or taken to recycling centres
to fester away. Of those that appear
on eBay, most predate my target
Windows 98 era – there’s high
demand for Win95 screens and
earlier, it seems. They’re also heavy
all heck, which means delivery is a
real issue – there are specialist
couriers who deal with fragile items
and know how to handle a CRT,
however. Perhaps there’s someone
out there who’s cared for a Milano
monitor all these years, someone no
ready to part with it. Until I find
them, I must subject my retro rig to
the indignity of outputting on a
32-inch IPS.
Never mind. The beating heart of
the PC was just as it had been.
Likewise my peripherals. What a
perfect way to remind oneself what
PC gaming was really, truly like 20
years ago. That’s no small point – that
era’s been fetishised in recent years,
evidenced by Kickstarter-funded
odes to the Infinity Engine RPGs, and
reboots of
everything from
Thief to Outcast.
Not to mention
Black Mesa, of
course. What’s
clear when you
press the power
button on an old
tower PC, hear
the Windows 98 welcome chimes,
and load a game’s CD-ROM into the
tray, is that we’ve forgotten much of
the era’s reality.
For example: first-person shooter
control schemes were the wild west
in 1998. By default, Half-Life’s
controls are bound to the arrow keys,
of which left and right turn, rather
FIRST-PERSON
SHOOTER CONTROL
SCHEMES WERE THE
WILD WEST IN 1998Beige is the New Black
FEATURE
sasswfatmospheric for it. Although
hundreds of shooters have since aped
Half-Life’s setpieces, NPCs and
storytelling techniques, Valve’s vision
stands as tall and impressive on this
retro PC as it did on release.
Half-Life was, and is, a place you go,
rather than a game you play.
Perhaps the most profound
realisation that comes from building
an old PC and booting up a treasured
memory is that I’d advocate every
single PC gamer do the same thing.
The nostalgia hit is absolutely worth
all that e-trawling, but more than
that, sitting at a PC without an
internet connection (for goodness’
sake don’t try to go online with
Windows 98) reminds you how
easily distracting your modern
gaming habitat can be. There’s
nothing to alt-tab out to and no
Steam list of zero hours played
shame. That feels like an
important reminder.than strafe. At least mouselook is
enabled by default. Quake II, released
just a year prior, maps the mouse to
moving forwards, while A and Z
control your vertical view. Barbaric.REVISIONIST
HISTORY
On the technical
side, we’ve
forgotten much
about what
games looked like
when they
released – for
most people,
running on a software renderer in
640x480 and still not hitting
anything like 60fps. The Half-Life
you see in YouTube speedruns and
let’s plays, running at modern day
resolutions, bears little resemblance
to the one I lost myself in the
Christmas it came out. That game is
grainier, darker, and somehow moreTOP: The Voodoo 2.
Rolls-Royce of
pre-’00s AGP cards.LEFT: Look at those
subtle, sweeping
lines, reaching out to
your palm for a hug.