// PC GAMER — GAMING
Modern gamers spoiled by Steam will never understand the joy of a MegaPak
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Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Ted, and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
It's easy to be cynical about the modern games industry, what with developers being laid off left and right and hardware prices skyrocketing thanks to AI datacentres gobbling up all the components. But it's also worth pointing out the positives too. For starters, games are more abundant than ever before. More games get released in a single day than most people could feasibly play in an entire year, and those games cover every genre and experience imaginable. If you can think of a game you want to play, it probably exists in some form. If it doesn't, someone is probably trying to make it.
As well as being omnipresent, games are cheaper than they've ever been too. This statement might seem spurious in the era of £70 games. But aside from the fact that, relative to inflation, games are technically cheaper than they were thirty years ago, it doesn't account for the endless stream of bundles and giveaways across all digital platforms. They're so frequent that, by the time you've finished playing your current game, there's a good chance you'll be able to grab what you want to play next on some form of discount.
In short, we're spoiled for choice in a way that's drastically different from how the gaming scene was thirty years ago, when games were significantly less numerous and generally less accessible financially. It's hard to estimate because everybody's experience varies. But I think, in 1996, if you were buying a new game every month, you would have been considered to be doing pretty well. For most people, new games would have been limited to Christmases and birthdays, and a lot of people would have experienced games through shareware demos or hooky copies burned onto a CD by your mate.
I don't want to turn this article into a Facebook post by your grandad, so let's stress that even if the number of game releases was far fewer, it didn't feel like that. Still, the idea of being able to hoover up a whole bunch of PC games for pennies was virtually unthinkable.
There was one big exception though—the MegaPak. The MegaPak was the closest thing we had to Humble Bundle (without the charity element), a big-box compilation of games that had typically been released one or two years prior. The MegPak was the production of Megamedia Corp, which has relatively little footprint online. But I can tell you that its handful of other publishing credentials include the Ukrainian Quake clone Chasm: The Rift.
The first Megapak was released in 1994, featuring eleven games. You can tell this because the box proudly displays the number 11 in massive yellow font, which I suppose indicates how novel the concept was. It has also led some database sites to label it as "Megapak 11", which was incredibly confusing for me when researching for this article because the Megapak line ended at number 10.
Nonetheless, it was probably right for Megapak to focus on the number of games for marketing purposes, because the quality of the titles in the pack is, shall we say, variable? The highlights of the first Megapak are Ultima spinoff World of Ultima: The Savage Empire, combat flight sim F-14 Tomcat, and Test Drive 3: The Passion—a title that makes it sound like a vehicular reimagining of Christ's crucifixion. Also included was Dinosaur Safari, an edu-tainment game that was halfway between an adventure game and Microsoft Encarta. I bring this up for no reason other than I played a ton of it on my dad's PC—Megapak notwithstanding.
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