Media Consumes Me does Fallout: History and Review

programmer.craig said:
Umm

First off, don't ever address anything to me that starts with "Umm". Ever. For one thing, it tells me you are a teenager. For another thing, it tells me you are a smartass teenager. And lastly, it tells me that you weren't even born yet in 1988 and therefore are doing what most smartass teenagers do and talking about things you have no knowledge of.

... actually he said HDD were rare FOR GAMING, and back then they were...

Makes no sense. The only floppy-only computers I ever saw in my life were the ones at schools, and nobody used those for gaming. Also, there wasn't any GAMING industry per se back then. There were people who had home computers, some of whom used them to play games as well as for other things. They cost a lot of money, and computer owners were virtually all adults... mostly techs and business professionals who used them for work. Again, you show your youth to assume the market was the same then as it is now. It wasn't. The information age hadn't happened yet. The World Wide Web hadn't even been invented yet. Broadband wasn't even a rumor.

He didn't say PCs with hard drives were rare, people just didn't use much of them for gaming. That is a fact.

That's a fact that isn't a fact. By the late 1980s the PC was far and away the most popular platform for computer games. By 1987 it became quite difficult to even FIND games made for any other platform.

And what are you trying to say, anyway? That other platforms were ,more popular? Without hard drives? And which ones would those be? :o
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Umm, what exactly are you going to do to me if I do? Also you're very wrong about my age, smartass.

I say the gist of his claim is still correct, otherwise Wasteland wouldn't have been using its own disks for saving the game. I'm also not saying that no one was using PC's for gaming, I'm saying that having games on the hard drive were still rare then. Try to keep up smart guy...
 
Umm, what exactly are you going to do to me if I do?

I shall taunt you a second time!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V7zbWNznbs


Also you're very wrong about my age, smartass.


Well, if you're an adult who acts with the maturity level of a teenager, that's not my problem.

I say the gist of his claim is still correct, otherwise...

In other words, you admit you are just speculating. Which is why I called bullshit on you before. How many more times will you put your foot in your mouth before you decide to give it a rest? And you claim to be an adult? :o

...Wasteland wouldn't have been using its own disks for saving the game.

I already explained why they did that with Bard's Tale and Wasteland. And, unlike you, I actually DO know.

I'm also not saying that no one was using PC's for gaming, I'm saying that having games on the hard drive were still rare then.

Which is an absurd claim to be making, considering it is entirely untrue.

Try to keep up smart guy...

Keep up? With what? The fact that you have no idea what was happening in the 1980s but try to pretend that you do? lol.
 
i remember playing games in 1988 on a friend's 8086, no hard disk there. Some games had a save feature which let you choose which drive to keep your save files, (and in case you did have a hard drive, you could use it) others didn't. PCs which came with hard disks like 286 did exist, but they were an expensive commodity back then, at least here in greece -and in most countries outside of the US, i would guess.
Also, i'm pretty sure you can copy Wasteland disks to a hard drive and play it from there, it just doesn't look like it was designed with that in mind. Maybe they did want to avoid abuse of saving, maybe they just designed the game primarily for Commodore 64 in the same manner that XBOX was the primary design platform for Fallout 3, who knows?
 
Beezilbub,

The first of the Gold Box D&D games came out that year as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pool_of_Radiance

On an MS-DOS computer, the game can be copied to the hard-disk drive.

For the clueless, MS-DOS means PC.

Other computer systems, such as the Commodore 64, require a separate save-game disk.

A SEPARATE disk for save-games. NOT the same disk. Which debunks your claims about why the Wasteland devs chose to over-write the original game data with your progress updates. If they had merely wanted to put your saved games on a floppy they could (and would) have prompted you to insert another floppy for your saves. As far as I know Bard's Tale and Wasteland are the only games to have ever permanently modified the game files during game play. And, I'd probably recall.
 
zag,

i remember playing games in 1988 on a friend's 8086, no hard disk there.


That's pretty unusual. It pretty much means your friend had an original IBM PC, because the PC-XT started shipping in 1983 and came with a hard drive as standard equipment.

Some games had a save feature which let you choose which drive to keep your save files, (and in case you did have a hard drive, you could use it) others didn't.


Those that didn't support saving to hard disk, did support saving to a second floppy. If you didn't have a second floppy drive, you could insert a different diskette into your A: drive. It was never required to save games on your play disk. Not in any game I ever played. Except Bard's Tale and Wasteland.

PCs which came with hard disks like 286 did exist, but they were an expensive commodity back then, at least here in greece -and in most countries outside of the US, i would guess.


They were expensive here as well. A decent PC used to cost $5000. You could get that down to $3000 if you built it yourself from parts, which is what I used to do. I don't even want to guess what that translates into, in today's currency. I think the average annual salary back then was about $12000 so that's some indication of just how much money that was, at the time.

Which is what i was trying to explain to that other guy. The home computer demographic was entirely different in the 1980s than it is now.

Also, i'm pretty sure you can copy Wasteland disks to a hard drive and play it from there, it just doesn't look like it was designed with that in mind. Maybe they did want to avoid abuse of saving, maybe they just designed the game primarily for Commodore 64 in the same manner that XBOX was the primary design platform for Fallout 3, who knows?

Well, I'm not really buying that theory though it is plausible. I think they made a conscious decision to irrevocably alter the game "world" as you played the game, to give people a feeling that there's no going back and that their actions can't be undone.
 
You're one obtuse fellow, aren't you. No one is saying that hard drives in PC didn't exist then, and that no one was fortunate enough to be using them. The point is that for a vast majority of people, we were on those machines where the floppy was still king...
 
programmer.craig said:
The game engine was crude, but that wasn't because of hardware limitations, it was because of development staff limitations. Those games in the 1980s were written by a couple people, not the dozens who work on today's games.
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So, basically, Wasteland was Avernum of late 80s?
 
Bixlebob,

You're one obtuse fellow, aren't you. No one is saying that hard drives in PC didn't exist then, and that no one was fortunate enough to be using them. The point is that for a vast majority of people, we were on those machines where the floppy was still king...

You're the main reason my tone in this thread has been unduly harsh. You keep saying things that are flatly untrue and claiming that people who actually know the truth are in the wrong. I was a working PC programmer at the time, and not only that I was a hobbyist PC tech and built/ upgraded/repaired/etc PCs for hundreds of people. I already stated that I never even SAW a floppy only PC during the late 1980s except in schools. What you have been saying doesn't match historical fact in any way, shape or form and anyone who was there could tell you so. Why do you keep pretending you know what was going on in the PC industry during the 1980s when you clearly don't? Are you a pathological liar or something?? I remember having a similar discussion with you about a year ago when you persisted with arguing about old PC games that you had obviously never even played. What's your deal?
 
programmer.craig said:
ethanquinn, I just noticed you are the original author of the article? Sorry for talking past you. I didn't realize. If you were playing on a C-64 at the time then your mistakes are understandable. And since nobody was doing computer game development for any platform other than the PC by the early 1990s maybe your speculation about what caused Interplay to make the decisions it made back then is also understandable. At least you were a gamer back then, which makes you more qualified than I assumed :)
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It's cool, I am just pleased there has been a big response to my article even if it is to argue points and correct mistakes. I am always open to debate, and I am sure I will run into many more circumstances since I already have plenty of History and Review articles and videos planned for this and next year. I will also try and be the student to people like yourself who are only trying to set the record straight from your own experience.
 
I just want to say that I loved that video and it made me want to play Fallout again.Great job and I am looking forward to second part very much.Now, where is that restoration project? : )
 
Oh wow this is VERY well put together! To be clear I'm talking about the video. I hate to be the "I like things that move and sparkle / can't read an article if there is an audio/video version" person but hell, just how well the video was put together is admirable.

noonehere said:
It was interesting, however, one thing i didn't like was that he didn't gave much information about Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. yes, yes i know, the game is crap and it's bad, it's an abomination and all but still, i would like to hear something other than :"I have never played it and i probably never will, let's just leave it at that".
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Hah, I actually felt he summed that up perfectly :D
 
Going "Yes it is" "No it isn't" back and forth isn't going to help anyone be convinced. Either bring some verifiable facts into this, or just drop it, because neither of you is getting any further than repetition now. And the bullshit personal insults stop.

And seriously, Craig, use the damned edit button, it's there for a reason. There's no need, at all, to reply in seperate posts to separate people, this is not a threaded board.

Lastly:
ethanquinn said:
Brother None, your history of Fallout here at NMA is impressive
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Actually, I wrote that. ;)
 
programmer.craig said:
You're the main reason my tone in this thread has been unduly harsh. You keep saying things that are flatly untrue and claiming that people who actually know the truth are in the wrong. I was a working PC programmer at the time, and not only that I was a hobbyist PC tech and built/ upgraded/repaired/etc PCs for hundreds of people. I already stated that I never even SAW a floppy only PC during the late 1980s except in schools. What you have been saying doesn't match historical fact in any way, shape or form and anyone who was there could tell you so. Why do you keep pretending you know what was going on in the PC industry during the 1980s when you clearly don't? Are you a pathological liar or something??
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no, sorry, you are wrong.

Tandy 1000 only had 1-2 sub-versions that had a HD on them, but 5-6 versions that did not have a HD, and they were sold from 83-93.

HDs in computers were not common untill the early 90s. stating otherwise is false.
 
In 1983 the standard XT originally came with 128KB of memory, a 360KB double-sided 5.25" full-height floppy disk drive, a 10MB Seagate ST-412 hard drive. PRICE $8000
Beginning in 1985, the XT was offered in floppy-only models without a hard disk.

This is every "home" computer i could find specs on that was released in 1988. Though most households were probably running something older. I'm sure there were others, but this does point to their being a general lack of hard drives on computers being released for home use in 1988.

APPLE IIc Plus - no hard drive
QI-300 - 50 MB RLL hard disk drive
Amstrad 512 - One or Two 3.5'' floppy-drives (720 KB)
Atari 4160 - 3.5 drive
Cambridge Computers z 88 - RAM cartridges of 32 KB and 128 KB
Fujitsu FM R 70 - Stock Configuration 2 5" Floppy's, or one 3.25 Floppy and one 5" floppy
Microdigital TK Extended - 2 x 5.25''. floppy drives or 1 x 5.25'' + 1 x 3.5'' low density
NEC PC 8801 FE - 2 x 5.25'' disk-drives (DD, 320 KB)
NeXT Cube - Magneto-Optical Drive (256 MB)
SCSI hard-disk, FDD (2.88 Mb) and CD-ROM were optional (too expensive, model failed)
RFT KC 85/4 - none; external cassette player required !!!
Robotron A5105 - 5.25'' floppy disk drive
Sanyo Wavy 45 - Cartridge
Sharp X1 - 2 x 5.25'' disk-drive
Sharp X68000 ACE / ACE HD - 2 x 5.25'' disk-drives (external hard drive add on???)
Sinclair PC 200 - 3.5'' floppy drive (720k)

Some information from the Census Bureau in 1989
Harware Components of Home Computers 1984 - 1999
(**Numbers in thousands**)
All Computers 13,683
Floppy Disk Drives 10,137
Hard Disk Drive 5,613
Telephone Modem 3,149
Lazer Printer 1,571
Dot Matrix Printer 7,812
Color Monitor 6,962
Joystick/Mouse 6,681
Plotter 719
Don't Know 1,127
 
Well done! There's couple obvious factual errors to be noticed there even for the not-so-"nitpicky" fans of series, like myself, but the sheer quality and content of the first video sweeps those hiccups away. Great material and it's all edited damn nicely too. I can't wait for the second video.
 
Great read and great video. Keep it up.


Regarding the separate discussion going on here, I remember playing most games directly off of floppy disks even though the 286 we had at the time did have a 40mb hard drive.
I reckon the save files must have been placed on the floppy.

Not a computer whiz at the time (still not) but I preferred DOS over Windows 3.0 because the graphic interface seemed so cumbersome :)
 
TheWesDude said:
programmer.craig said:
/snip/
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no, sorry, you are wrong.

Tandy 1000 only had 1-2 sub-versions that had a HD on them, but 5-6 versions that did not have a HD, and they were sold from 83-93.

HDs in computers were not common untill the early 90s. stating otherwise is false.
Click to expand...

I have to agree here. You never stopped to ask in which part of the globe someone lived Craig. I live in Serbia and during that period hard drives were as rare as purple elephants. I still have my old 8MB 5.25'' HDD.

It's nice that you were always in computer buisines but you have to remember that some countries have different markets and products. In the mid '80s computers were a contraband in former Yugoslavia, which Serbia was part of and yet we were so close to Greece geographically

And to stay on topic, the text and video are a nice read/view, though with some mistakes. It reminded me much on Gametrailers Fallout retrospective.

EDIT: typos
 
We're the European country that's closest to the US and we only got Coca Cola 35 years ago. Geographical proximity means nothing.

I'm too young to remember, but I agree with Cold Zero.
 
Thanks for the video. I enjoyed it a lot.

Made me fire up a new game of Fallout 1... also made me re-mourn the death of Van Buren.
 
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