Saturday, September 30, 2006

GASEOUS GAMES, or A PLACE FOR MY DIGITAL STUFF

When I first started playing games, way back in 1990 on my Dad's Commodore-Amiga 2000, every game fit on only one or two 3.5" disks. These disks, you may recall, hold only 1.44MB of data, so these games were all simple games: Solitaire Royale, a clone of Atari's Missile Command, and perhaps my favorite at the time, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? And as he switched over to to a Windows 3.0 and then 3.1 system, not much changed. A lot of shareware games I had found came on no more than 3 disks, with full versions being not much bigger.

Commander Keen, ca. 1990: 3 disks, 2.37 MB

I don't remember when it was that the shift was made, but once CD-ROMs became more than just a luxury item for the home user and games switched over to the CD as the medium of choice, the games, like gases, expanded to fill all available space in the container, which started at 600MB then expanded to 660 and then 700MB.

Warcraft I: Orcs and Humans, ca. 1994: 1 CD, ~70 MB

Some game companies stayed within the limits of one CD, and offered the game both as a CD version and a floppy disk version.

Quake, bootlegged beta version, ca. 1996: 16 disks

Others went to more than one disc, although this wasn't necessary. We were no longer constrained by the miniscule space constraints of those pissant floppies anymore.

Total Annihilation, ca. 1997: 2 CDs, ~600 MB

Now that it's hard to find a new computer without a DVD-ROM drive, and that said drives sell for as low as $20, games are now expanding to fill entire DVDs, a whopping 4.7 GB for single-layer and 9.4 GB for dual-layer.

Command and Conquer: The First Decade, 2006: 1 Dual-Layer DVD, 7.7 GB

Some companies must be a bit hesitant about offering games on DVD, since they have increased the number of CDs to nearing-unwieldy numbers.

Half-Life 2: Game of the Year Edition: 5 CDs

And some have offered both.

Unreal Tournament 2004: 6 CDs or 1 DVD

Bearing all this in mind, here are a few predictions of the milestones we will eventually reach:

No game will ever require is 7 CDs. All games that need that much space (7 x 700 MB ~= 4.9 GB) will likely be DVD-only. We might already have games on two DVDs; I'm not sure if we have or not. With the development of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray technology, we might not even need to move beyond more than one disc for a game. By the time we've reached the 9.4GB limit of dual-layer DVDs for one game, we'll likely have hard drives of more than one terabyte, and Blu-ray technology could offer 50 GB on one disc.

Science fiction writer Neal Stephenson wrote in his essay In The Beginning There Was The Command Line about how his Linux system doesn't boot directly into a windowing environment, but to a text shell, to remind him how far Linux has come in development.

Likewise, my current computer, and the next one I plan to build, has a utility I don't often use, but have for the sake of reminder: A floppy disk drive. It used to be that I would load the latest, coolest shareware from these discs. How long will it be until these drives too fall into disuse, like their floppier, wider older brothers, the 5.25" diskettes? Most computer manufacturers don't offer the option any more.

Staples, so I have heard, now sells 64MB flash drives for around $8 at the checkout counters, to fill the niche floppies are slowly leaving empty. I now have a flash drive that is 2GB in size, large enough to contain several full games: the complete Doom series, Commander Keen, OpenTTD. I could play these on any windows PC, and probably any linux PC if I decide to download the linux versions of ZDoom and DosBox. Good for destroying productivity anywhere.

As long as we're talking about virtual space, here's a comparison: My computer before the one I currently own had one 60GB hard drive. The one I currently own has two 160GB drives. The one I plan to build next will have a 36GB 10kRPM drive for operating systems, and a 400GB (or maybe even 500GB) drive for everything else.