What was PC gaming like in the early 2000s?

diablo 2 + star craft and then warcraft 3 when it came out in 2002

I got all sorts of emulators and learnt how to do all sorts of shit with the computer by tinkering with it, I has to send it for repairs several times until I learnt how to completely fix a computer by myself, hardware and software. Also old DOS games, pirated game CDs, and slow internet.

While others may talk about types of games from that era or some of the things we dealt with, I'd like to focus on the social aspect:

A lot more small-community driven. Every game server was its own community of people who would regularly play there. There was more of a modding community for multiplayer games usually in the form of custom weapons and maps.
LAN parties were a thing. Energy drinks and junk food weren't memes and were just part of the lifestyle. Noone was really 'depressed' and cried about not having a girlfriend or being a virgin or dumb shit.
Politics were non-existent really except for people saying they hated bush or didn't support the war.
>MMOs were insanely popular
>lots of people had crappy internet
>not a lot of people had mics

Awesome install screens to read when a game takes 20 mins to install.

Inserting multiple discs during installations

>early 2000s
Lots of RTS games, lots of people played them and discussed them from StarCraft to CnC.
Lots of quick moving shooters, like Quake, while there also existed older games like Delta Force or the early Rainbow 6 games.
More LAN gaming, which meant playing with your siblings or inviting people over, as the internet was shit to play with and you racked up a huge phone bill if you used the internet a lot.
This meant that people were a bit more knowledgeable with setting up LANs.
I think I recall my brother telling me he copied CD keys from retail stores and pirated the game.
The styles of games were very colorful, and the designs were wacky. There wasn't a standard for games, but the devs have found their sweet spot of developing games. After 2000s, everything became very streamlined from controls, QoL improvements and UI.

On the rare occasion where I got to go to my mom's work, I'd use their internet to download freeware games from Home of the Underdogs, and copy them to floppy disks to play on my Pentium II.

>inject the CD to continue
>download pirate stuff straight from websites
>clean the ball mouse every day
>RTS everywhere
>getting @ in IRC channels gave you authority

Nearly all of that is nostalgia and everything that you listed still happens.

Beautiful, but I'm still using XP and playing the same games so things didn't change much for me.

>that kid at school who took all the mice balls and flung them at people

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>Clean the ball mouse

Kek I forgot about this.

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computer at my parents house still has limewire installed

that's because your dad's a pedo

my only experience with pc games in that era was whatever they sold at my school's bookfair. I remember getting rct and some I spy games.

na theres no real community anymore its just discord groups of random people who post unfunny shit

matchmaking has fucked server communities
modding is better, but the scope is much larger. noones just churning out a bunch of maps anymore. Most games don't support mods anymore either

Politics everywhere. All ironic shit.
MMOs are dead
Every autistic fuck boy has a mic

Ragnarok online and replacing exes.

i installed it retard, i'm the pedo

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LiNkEnPaRk_nUmB.exe

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>CS servers where people sprayed porn
>56k friendly porn clips floating around on realOne that you left on accidentally for your dad to find when he wanted to use realplayer to listen to a CD later
>Getting legitimate crushes on girls you meet in runescape and being okay with them being hot when they send pics because their tits are still huge and your standards are none
>Feeling gratified as fuck when 100 people read your Maddox-format-ripoff geocities page
>Finding better shit about vidya on geocities than most official sites at the time
>obscure geocities comics
>geocities

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fat* not hot

I remember fapping to fully clothed hentai. The absolute horror.

>na theres no real community anymore its just discord groups of random people who post unfunny shit
That's because you've willingly joined those communities since they aren't as transparent. Everything that you listed still exists in as great as numbers that you remember. You're just blinded by the normalfags and their numbers.

>visitor counters on websites
>flaming gif headlines