Quake is 10
cyclomedia writes "Late on 22nd June 1996 Quake was uploaded to cdrom.com's archives in the form of 7 1.44MB floppy disk images. Though it wasn't until the 23rd that everyone realised (or at least, that's my excuse for being a day late with the news submission). Cue much aggravation on the newsgroups as eager downloaders experienced glorious 2 FPS gameplay."
Specially if you realize that today's multi-giga games don't offer much more, neither in fun, gameplay, and even content.
factor 966971: 966971
Seriously, what is it with the grouch crowd on Slashdot that lvoes to hate on any game newer than 1980s? Look man, I'm big on old games, really big. I play onld NES and SNES games all the time, I've worked hard to get my DOS emulator working well on XP-64 so I can play X-com, Castles, Darklands, Epic Pinball and such. I really enjoy classic gaming. However, I play new games too, and let me tell you, there's been major improvements.
There are plenty of great new games, if you haven't found them it is because you are being willfully blind. Some are nothing more than updates of old games, but wonderful ones at that. Civilization 4 is a good example. As the name implies it's the 4th in the series. Each game is just the old one made anew. The fundimental premise of the game doesn't change. However each one is a worthy successor. The gameplay and mechanics take a huge step up, as well as graphics and sound. Some are more orignal, such as Knights of the Old Republic. Jedi Knight meets NWN.
Also, I think you'll discover that if you take off the rose coloured glassess of memory you'll find that many of those great old games, well, aren't. I've found that games that I just loved as a kid are not nearly as good now. I remember how tought Final Fantasy used to see, how a group of us would get together on the weekends and play it as a team. Now it's trivial, formulaic even. If enemy if type X, do strategy Y, etc. Still cool, but no comparison to, say Baldur's Gate 2. Of course I doubt I'd have liked BG2 as a kid, too high level, too much reading.
So please, let's stop with this "new games don't bring anything to the table". Yes they do. They aren't all great, of course, but you would be positively amazed at the utter crap released for old systems. Ever play Captian Novilon? I thought not, it was an SNES game about diabeties. Yes really. A huge pile of shit and it's just one of a massive list.
There are plenty of new, good games. There are plenty of resources to help you find them, or you can ask on Slashdot. However if you can't find any good modern games, the problem is not the state of games, the problem is you.