I remember my dad bringing home a BBC Micro when we were kids. I knew just enough to get Chuckie Egg running.
Later we had a PC running Windows 3.1. I was an expert in crashing the plane on F-19 Stealth Fighter. One day I deleted the OS and that was the end of that computer..
Some years later we got an old Elonex PC that dad's work were getting rid of. It was just good enough to run Windows 95. We had dial-up internet from Freeserve for a time - we would have I think 2 hours in the evening to use it.
I remember
- Trying and failing to download shitty quality videos from wwf.com (I was a huge Attitude-era Wrestling mark...)
- Playing questionable games on Newgrounds
- Trawling Yahoo directories and webrings for random weird stuff
- Trying to download a low-bitrate rip of the Macarena from Kazaa and giving up when it estimated 2 days DL time.
- Terrible browser-war era websites. Broken Javascript/HTML. BLINKING TEXT. Incompatible flash videos.
I broke our family computers so often that I knew the Windows licence key without having to look. I learned how to fix the computer out of sheer terror for what my dad might do if he came home from work to find the PC broken again.
After we got rid of the dialup I would go the library pretty much every day. I had literally boxes of floppy disks that I would stuff into my pockets so that I could download stuff to take home. Mostly old emulators, ROMs and text adventures from ifarchive.
Crazy to think the lengths I would happily go to for things we take for granted now.
Some of them didn't make it easy. Not all games were laid out on a strict grid (in fact, the very first one had numerous curving connections), and more than a few of the early games included a maze to intentionally make graphing difficult. Back then it was a lot easier to plug away for a couple months on a game like that, since there were so many fewer games and they were such a novelty.
The dungeon crawler games like Wizardry made the same assumption about the player ("Of course they want a big challenge! How else will they get their money's worth?"), and look how many people play that series today. Very, very few people have the patience in a saturated game market.
I think later text games corrected those initial assumptions and the parsers became very good, and many even added graphics, but by then most people had moved on.