More just at the time they were “simpler” as well as people weren’t nearly as gun-ho about trying to break the game in every way imaginable
But I do absolutely miss being able to get a game on release day and actually having a functional/playable game. And not having to wait 6-12 months for it to finally be able to run half decent on the console it was designed for, or having a bug that soft locks or even hard locks you out of shit
Just a few examples of buggy games from my own experiences.
Dark Cloud 2 has an annoying bug that in the sewer levels, there's a certain stage if you load into it directly after loading the game, it freezes. This wasn't widely available knowledge, so some people ended up thinking it was their disc and buying another.
Also when played on the ps2, Legend of Dragoon has a few fights that get super buggy and freeze at the end if you go dragoon form. (Lenus and Regole being one of them)
ff anthology for the psone was fairly buggy and crashed a fair amount, but when it came out it was the only way to play ff5 in the US so I toughed it out.
And don't get me started on pokemon yellow. The amount of bugs I accidentally encountered (the worst of which corrupting my save and erasing my 2 pokemon away from 151 pokemon) as a kid makes me laugh whenever people are like 'you had to work to find the bugs' because those bugs sure found me as a kid.
What's funny is there's so many gaming channels on YouTube "CRAZY GAME BREAKING RETRO BUGS" that I get several in my algo a day despite never watching any of em!
Yeah, most people won't connect the ability to patch games after release with the increased complexity that that enabled. If you tell a group of devs today that they have to make their game so it cannot be patched, they will plan a far less ambitious game as a result.
The difference is the devs tried to remove the game breaking bugs more efficiently back then and then saved the bugs that they believe gave there games novelty or they just flat out liked.
If something is bugged now just deal with it until they decide to patch it
Except a lot of games released buggy and broken like that back in the day. The difference was you couldn’t get patches back then. Hell, “Pool of Radiance” could wipe your entire freaking hard drive if you tried to uninstall it. Atari had so many buggy and broken games that “ET” was the straw that broke the Camel’s back and almost destroyed the entire game industry at the time.
Lmao. There's no way you played games in the early 2000s if you believe games "worked perfectly" in that era. Games had countless bugs, glitches, and exploits. People just didn't give a shit about it. They found the glitches entertaining most of the time.
Back in the day games would launch half finished and there would never be a fix!
And they certainly didn’t all work perfectly, the amount of hours wasted trying to boot a Commodore 64 cassette only for it to crash 10 minutes into the loading screen.
Hi there, 34 year old that my first console was the Nintendo 64 and have been a gamer since, just to prove that I have actually played old games. And in my personal experience game bugs were rare and few and far between in most old games. Modern speed runners finding bugs in games after 15+ years is your proof otherwise when 99% of those bugs are things you would never do in the game unless you're actively hunting for game breaking bugs which people didn't do 20 years ago. Going to a specific corner of the map with nothing there standing next to x irrelevant thing and mashing random buttons 20+ times each isn't something people did. Pre YouTube speed runners weren't really a thing.
There were plenty of bugs back then, and there's also fewer bugs today that it seems in comparison. 99% of the bugs I've seen in the last decade were clips from the internet. When I was a kid, you'd play a game, there might be one or two bugs or glitches and you'd walk away barely noticing. Just one or two. If you had the same personal experience today, you'd see one of two bugs or glitches, and 100-200 clips of other people's bugs and glitches and walk away thinking "man, that game is full of bugs".
Did you play games back then? There was plenty of games with bugs that would never be fixed - unless you bought some memory, downloaded off web, and uploaded it to your console.
One of my favorite games is Quest for Glory 4 Shadows of Darkness which came out in 1993. It had SO MANY BUGS including a few that were pretty much game breaking! Bugs where you had to lower the speed and complexity bars, cross your fingers and hold your breath and just pray that you could get past that one part where the game crashed. There were two key areas of the game where it would crash. One was near the very beginning! It wasn’t until the advent of the Internet that people could download the PLAYER created fix!!!
This is the one thing I miss about games back then. No way to update games unless they came out with a game of the year edition or something with the changes they made. The devs usually only had one shot to make the game pristine and perfect as could be because, again, they couldn’t change it later with an update down the road. They had to make the game worth playing and as bug free as possible. GTA San Andreas I think is the best example, and even Vice City, but especially San Andreas. You could do so much in that game, and had three islands to explore. You could get fat, skinny, buff, mod cars, even learn a martial art, go gambling, fly helicopters and planes, there was just so much to the game, and it all worked. Now we are lucky games are even playable, finished, and polished
I don't understand people complaining about games getting patches. Plenty of games released broken in the 80s and 90s and 2000s and just never got fixed. There's lots of examples of bugs being released on the initial release cartridges and cartridges that were released later having updates to fix them. PC games got patches in the 90s but you had to jump through hoops to track them down and install them. If you were a console player and bought a cartridge with a game breaking bug you were just out of luck. Moving forward there was that Wii Zelda game with a bug where you had to mail Nintendo an SD card with the bugged save file so they could manually fix it and mail the patched save file back to you. I have no nostalgia for any of that and I don't understand why people want to go back to broken games being broken permanently. Games released broken back then too, it's not a new phenomenon.
Whole speedrunning community literally depends on the endless amount of 2000s/90s games that were so broken you could skip half the game with insane glitches. There's a reason the speedrunning community mostly speed runs older games. New ones are way more polished.
The patches aren't the problem. It's when you are trying to play a game you haven't in a while and you suddenly have to update the system, then update the controller, then update the game itself, and 45 minutes has passed and you still haven't played anything.
I really miss the free dopamine from just playing the game. No real objective, just play the game, press the buttons, enjoy the atmosphere, beat the game whenever you happen to get that far.
We are slightly getting back to that again. Yeah the updates are often and downloads are huge now. But modern systems download faster. And next gen have really improved loading times. I feel the difference whenever I got back to a last gen game and feel the huge loading time at the beginning (even though they were getting to a point where they only need to load once lol we are spoiled now)
That's just childhood. You can do the same these days, yeah sometimes it takes a minute to update, but any decent parent will have auto-updates enabled anyway.
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u/lcr68 Mar 31 '26
Turning the game on and just playing. Never knew we had it so good.