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First post, by Mike 01Hawk

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Back in the day I was putting around w/ a 110meg HD in the mid 90s. After DOS6.22, Win3.1 and a few office type apps installed, I had about 90 meg free.

I distinctly recall a point when the 'great games' started to pass the 10meg install mark!!! I could only have maybe 4 or so 'big games' installed at any one point. So I did the famous, delete, install, delete, re-install shuffle.

So.. is there a list of the install size of games from back in the day? I was particularly impressed that Out of this World was able to fit on a single 1.44meg floppy.

Reply 1 of 11, by Kiwi

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I looked at a list I've made of games I never played, or didn't play enough, when they were current, that I have some interest in playng now, and published system requirements apparently didn't start including storage space numbers until the late 1990's, and even then, it wasn't a universal inclusion.

Baldurs Gate wanted 600 MBs, Might and Magic 6 wanted 200, and those are just about as old as there was (1998) with such a published number (from those I have listed, and I never had any interest in action, adventure, or arcade / shooter, titles).

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Kiwi

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Reply 4 of 11, by ADDiCT

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Well, when you look at the files being installed for modern games, you'll notice that much (most, in many cases) of the space is used by video and audio files. Of course, today we need highres video and high bitrate audio, which takes up a lot of space. Old games usually played a/v content from CD.

And then there's this unfortunate tendency to not optimize anything in a game, though it's probably too late to complain about that (should've done that at the end of the 90's or so). Multi playtform and extremely short dev cycles (and/or short deadlines) lead to a situation where it's more important to release a game as it is instead of trying to "clean up" data, compress files, etc. .

Reply 5 of 11, by Xian97

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When I think of size in reference to older games, the one that always comes to mind is Strike Commander, which was HUGE for it's time, over 40 megs. I had a Syquest 44m removable hard drive and it took up an entire disk cartridge for a single game. My 386 had a little over 100 mb hard drive, so if I had installed it there it would have taken nearly half of it.

Reply 7 of 11, by vasyl

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IIRC, Baldur's Gate is an interesting case. The first release came on 5 CDs, then there was an expansion (Tales of the Swords Coast) that came on 2 CDs, and then there was a "complete" edition including both on 3 CDs. I think the development team reinvented compression somewhere along the way.
Wing Commander was famous for its size at the time, it was close to 40MB. These days nobody even counts in megabytes anymore. John Woo's Stranglehold requires 15GB of disk space -- probably more than all pre-CD era DOS games together.

Reply 8 of 11, by HunterZ

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I remember when I had to beg a BBS sysop to give me more daily time on his BBS because I wanted to download the shareware episode of Wolfenstein 3D on my 2400 baud modem, which would take just over an hour due to being a bit over a megabyte (and the BBS didn't have the newer download protocols that supported resuming aborted downloads).

I also remember having to uninstall and reinstall Win 3.1 a lot on my 286 because it took up a huge chunk of hard disk space. I only installed it when I wanted to check out a Windows-only game.

Baldur's gate was huge because all of the maps were beautifully hand-drawn instead of composed from repeating tiles. They also didn't compress the graphics or sound much because lower-end computers weren't quite powerful enough for that yet. CDs were also getting cheap to produce by then I think.

Reply 10 of 11, by leileilol

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Yeah, and it's nothing more than a bland shooting game. Probably console-itis full of redundant caching blobs for fast loading off disc...which makes no sense for fully installing it.

Same went for Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance for PC which was released in early 2003 and had 11GB of disk use. 😳

Another one is Just Cause, which is 9gb but doesn't offer much content over their 300mb demo.

All of these are ports of console games.

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