What Has Happened With PC Game Installers? February 7, 2011

I read a comment on a forum where a guy was lamenting over the loss of the highly detailed game installers that were popular during the early CD-ROM era of PC gaming. It made me realize just how great these classic game installers were and how long it’s been since I’ve seen a modern game have one.

Back in the DOS days companies had to build their own installers. As games got more complex the installers had to do more than a simple copy/paste and be able to detect things like sound cards and joysticks. They would need to be calibrated and tested, and if done wrong you might not be able to hear sound, or worse, not be able to play at all. Installing a game was a long and boring process to someone who wants to just play a game.

To make all this feel like less than a chore and a bit more fun, (these are GAMES we’re talking about here of course) the developers would make these installers unique, and a lot of the time they would fill in the player to the background of the game, feature audio or music clips during the install, or just show pretty game art. They really knew how to draw a player in during the early days of multimedia PCs (between 1995-98).

I don’t really know who to blame here for their fall. It all pretty much ended when the Internet took the place of the CD-ROM encyclopedia. By Win XP the Windows Installer was pretty much used in everything. It is included as part of all copies of Windows and is one of the programs that Windows will automatically update. My guess is MS must make it’s tools available to developers and I figure developers nowadays don’t see the need to fix what isn’t broken. Even back in the day, To save time, developers would frequently reuse their installers and just re-appropriate them game to game. Game development is a lot more expensive now than it used to be, and time spent on anything costs more money.  Of course, in some cases people are no longer installing games, but instead purchasing them online through services like Steam, which skip the installation process altogether.

There is something positive at the end of the tunnel. The Playstation 3 has the ability to install games that are designed for it, and many Playstation 3 games have some classic installers that harken back to these earlier days where the installer pumped up the player for what was to come (Metal Gear Solid 4 anyone?)