IDK why people think that games having bugs / patches is a new thing.
Yeah, back then (on consoles at least) devs/publishers did in fact update games, by issuing newer cartridges or CD/DVDs.
even PS1 games had multiple revisions
Yeah even console games in the cartridge days (talking 3rd-gen through 5th-gen) had multiple revisions. For example, v1.1 of
DKC2 is too hard for me to beat due to game balance changes, but v1.0 I have no problems going through the game. I have a v1.1 cartridge and my friend has a v1.0 cartridge. There's like 3 different versions of the original
Star Fox (v1.0, v1.1, v1.2) and I don't even know the differences between all of them (except that v1.2 fixed some exploits against certain bosses and whatnot).
Zelda: OoT had later revisions on cartridge that censored the blood (changing it from red to green), changed music (mainly in the Fire Temple), and made other changes.
And then moving on to the CD and DVD days, yeah there's a bunch of games that had multiple revisions as well. This happened a lot more with optical media because that was much cheaper to produce than issuing new cartridges. Still I'm surprised by the number of games on cartridges that had multiple revisions. If you go looking for ROMs or ISOs you can usually find them for all the different versions of a particular game. And yeah often-times the newer revisions had bug fixes, not just game balance changes. Sometimes there were additional bug fixes during localization as well.
Sega Rally Championship on Saturn had an original Japanese version, then the USA version which had improvements and bug fixes, and then a 2nd Japanese version that incorporated all the improvements and bug fixes from the USA version plus more, and they also added support for the analog controller.
So yeah, patching/updating games is nothing new, it's just got a lot easier during the Internet days, and consequently devs also got lazier. Most slipped into the bad habit of just pushing the game out the door and trying to fix it later. But back before the Internet really took off, a dev and publisher had to seriously weigh whether they were gonna issue new cartridges or optical discs to push out newer revisions of games. There was a much stronger effort to make sure the game was in decent condition
before they pushed it out the door.
I do remember grabbing patches for PC games mainly from websites even back in the dial-up days, or from new demo discs that came with computer gaming magazines. Hahahahaha
@MadMummy76 did what I use to do, using the school networks to grab patches (and demos too, though I got most of those from demo discs that came with magazines, and that goes for 5th-gen console games too). I remember in my grade school days that another common way of getting patches (or demos, new content like levels and mods, or even retail game expansions) was to grab them from friends who already had them. There was a lot of trading and borrowing of discs going around (and copying of discs...).
Yyyeeeaaahhh, the exact opposite was happening at the schools I went to. I mean how else were we gonna LAN
Duke Nukem 3D in the computer labs (especially when there was a substitute teacher who had no clue or gave no sh1ts what we were doing)?
Anyways, back in the cartridge and CD/DVD console days, you couldn't choose what revision you got if you were buying new from the store. It was a lottery. It all depended on when the cartridge/disc was manufactured, and when you bought it. My friend got
DKC2 at launch. I did not, so I got f*cked. By the time I got it, they had already made changes to the game. Even if you could look at the cartridge before purchasing, you had to hope that the devs put markings on the rear labels to denote what version of the game was on that cartridge.
If I recall correctly from Digital Foundry's testing, the version of
God of War 4 on the disc has an unlocked framerate, but a day-1/early patch put a cap on it (I think by activating VSYNC). So DF often uses the unpatched disc version for certain testing scenarios. Sadly that kind of stuff is not an option with digital-only releases. But yeah we live in an era now where games change over time and it can be hard to get earlier versions. Pre-Orange Box HL2 was quite a bit different from post-Orange Box HL2, for example. No way to get that original version unless you "pirate" it I guess. I have the discs with the original version, but those discs require Steam, which automatically updates the game to the latest version anyways. Not that I care to go back to old HL2, just using it as an example.
Actually, I was just reminded of how CS2 replaced CSGO, and there's no way to get or play CSGO through Steam now. A lot of people are very unhappy about that.
I remember the good old days of coming home with a new game and just putting it in the console and playing it from the get go. Now it's a huge download/update before you can even think about playing.
My brother complains about the modern era where games are tied to accounts and few things are truly offline anymore. It's not like going to the store, buying a Super NES game or Saturn game or whatever, coming home and sticking it in your system, powering the system on, and then boom you were playing. No user accounts, no patches to be downloaded, not even console OS home screens. Just boots straight into the game. He misses that. I do too sometimes.