Two absolute fucking classics I've wanted copies of for AGES arrive today.

Two of my favourite video games, and the boxes are in beautiful condition too.

#RetroGaming

Frontier comes with several books and, what still shocks me today... the single disk it came on.

It's amazing that using procedural generation such a MASSIVE game fits on a single damn disk.

Just amazing from a technical stand point.

One of the books is a collection of short stories set in the game's universe, which is amazing.

The lore book is all written dietetically, too.

#RetroGaming

Then there's Gabriel Knight. What a beautiful game. One of the books it comes with is the graphic novel prequel story to the game.

But the box also comes with a few other things...

#RetroGaming

But GK also came with two other pretty awesome things.

Firstly, it has a 5.25" boot floppy labelled "Sierra Boot Disk".

For those who didn't live through this period, it was common. Pre-dating even config.sys and boot menus in later MS-DOS versions, having custom boot disks to load ONLY the right drivers to still leave enough memory to run the game was... pretty standard.

I love that it's in the box.

#RetroGaming

And then? THE RECEIPT. From 1994.

$99.95 AUD in 1994.

That's $226.85 AUD in today's money.

Game prices have gone down hugely. No wonder we devs get so badly fucked.

#RetroGaming

@vampiress oof. i'm glad to know canada wasn't the only place with insane game prices in the 90s.

i remember paying $85 for BioForge in 1995

@vga256 I mean given the cost of game development these days that seems like a reasonable price now!

But games in general sold far smaller numbers back then I guess too so they just presumed you'd need to pay more to recoup prices.

But yeah just generally... that's stupidly expensive as most things were back then.

I remember seeing a US games catalogue once back then and just about cried.

@vampiress i learned many years later that a major portion of that was disk duplication and copy protection. i didn't appreciate at the time that adding an extra single diskette to a game might mean a loss of 5%-10% of total sales for the developer

@vga256 You can see why they were so eager to switch to CDs. Like, GK1 has 11 disks, and that's by FAR not the most disks I ever saw a game come on back then in the beginning of the CD era.

@vampiress ack, crazy. no wonder the high list price!

@vampiress @vga256
I had that famously 'quality' game Rise of the Robots for the Amiga on 13 disks (coz they were piddly double-density things.) It went through them in order when installing.. I think I had an error on disk *twelve*. Aaaaargh! 😋

Game prices here in NZ 🇳🇿 were similarly nuts. Typically around NZ$120.00-ish.

(Ugh.. Old rendered stuff looks pants.)

@nathan @vampiress gasp

@vampiress in 1982 I happily sold Vic 20 games at £5.95, £6.95, nobody complained.

I remember trying to do mobile games back in 2011 ish and people moaning when I tried to raise the price of a game from 69p to £1.99.

"Oh no, too expensive".

Somewhere along the way our art got utterly and completely devalued.

@MossRC @vampiress yes, that race to the bottom also helped spawn all the execrable monetisation practices that you see in mobile gaming today, and is the reason I simply do not touch mobile gaming at all, apart from one game, Zookeeper DX, which I paid for outright ages ago and never nags me to buy anything else.