How often do you watch walkthroughs of popular video games, like The Sims, on YouTube? Pretty often, huh? Well, what do you think people did before YouTube existed to watch those videos of people playing games? The infographic below, provided by YouTube Downloader, shows just a few of the things people did online before the age of YouTube.
In short, we actually played the games! Sure, we had to download them from a CD-ROM instead of the Internet, but we loved those shiny discs and the hours of fun they represented. The first version of SimCity was designed for the venerable Commodore 64, but it wouldn’t be published until 4 years later.
The idea behind SimCity is that you are the mayor of a city, and are responsible for zoning and building the infrastructure of your city. Because the premise of the game, a game that could neither be won nor lost, was new to the gaming industry, many game producers thought it would flop. Brøderbund decided to take a chance on the game, and worked with Maxis to get the game published.
Several new versions came out in the following years, and were wildly popular among the personal computing crowd. A version of the game was published for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and versions of the game have even been released for the Nintendo DS and Nintendo DS2. In September 2008, SimCity Creator was released for the Nintendo Wii.
In February 2000, the popularity of Sim City led to the production of the even-more-popular game The Sims. In The Sims, you run a household of simulated people, and have to walk them through all aspects of their daily lives. The game has been a smash success, selling more than 175 million copies as of September 2013.
All of this stemmed from those shiny CD-ROMs we had in the early 90’s, but now we can either play the game or, what some people consider even more fun, watch others play the game on YouTube.
