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Comment by hnick | Hacker News Reader

I remember as a kid I went to someone's birthday party in the 80s and we wanted to play a karate themed game on something that used a cassette tape. It took so long to load we went and played outside!

To be fair to GTA V, I don't think my installation was on a SSD because it was 50GB or something at the time (now it's 95GB?), but that said when it released SSDs were not as cheap or widespread as they are now so that's their problem. The linked article shows the initial load to be much shorter which did not match my experience.

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Not to one up but we didn’t have any storage for our c64 for the first year or so. We would team up to enter a game from Byte or whatever (one reader, one typer, one proofreader) and then protect that thing with our lives all weekend to keep people from unplugging it. The machine code games were the easiest to type but if they didn’t work you were kind of hosed lol.

Oh, wow! This was some real hardcore sh*t! :-)

C64 tape with turbo was actually faster (~500 Bytes/s) than non turbo Floppy (~400 Bytes/s).

Many 8bit Atari owners will have horror memories of aborted Tape loads. After over 20 years someone finally discovered a bug in original ATARI Tape loading ROM routine resulting in randomly corrupted loads, no amount of sitting motionless while the game loads would help in that case :)

Oh gods, now I'm reminded of a cassette based game where there was one enemy where if he got a solid hit on you, you got bumped back to the beginning of the level.

Which meant the game displayed "rewind to mark 500 and then hit play" and you had to do that to restart lolsob.

Maybe this is what they really meant by "GOTO considered harmful".

That we can say the install bundle is 50 gigs with a straight face though? I remember not long ago games that were 8 gigs caused mayhem.

I suppose devs dont care about that as long as their QA allows it.

I read that after patches GTA V is now around 95GB.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is around 200GB fully installed with all features (HD textures etc).

Some people have insinuated this is intentional to crowd out other games on console hard disks and make moving away from CoD have an opportunity cost. It's probably just laziness.

I haven't looked into it in the past but some prior offenders had a lot of space wasted from uncompressed multi-lingual audio. Instead of letting us choose a language it installs them all so you can switch in game, and uncompressed for saving the CPU for game logic. For CoD the optional HD texture pack is 38GB so that's still a lot unaccounted for.

Titanfall did this. If I recall correctly, the full install size was about 48GB, 35GB of which was just uncompressed audio. And that was back in the days when 120GB (or less) SSDs were common. A total self-own and never fixed or understood.

It's not like decoding audio takes enough time on any modern multi-core processor to disrupt the game loop. It's not even on the radar.

I mean. Jesus christ. Devs used to be proud they could optimize and run their programs on slow machines. What happened? Thats like making a game for casual players but only < 5% of the global population can even afford to play it. How does this make business sense?? I'd understand if it was a game breaking new ground with some hectic VR or something like that but it isnt.

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