A player finds an ancient PC in his closet and decides to upgrade the system. His most important upgrade is a hard drive with 1 TB of storage. And that’s enough to install all the games of that time.
A player reports on Reddit that he has dug out a very old PC and decided to give it a new life: I took it out of storage and decided to give it a new life.
The PC is from the year 2000, and correspondingly outdated the technology seems in today’s time.
What hardware is used in the system? The owner has restored the system to reflect the technology of that time and has remained faithful to the hardware from back then, apart from the large hard drive:
- Case: Lian Li PC-60
- RAM: Samsung 256 MB PC-133 (512 MB total)
- Mainboard: Intel D815EFV/D815EPFV
- CPU: Intel Pentium III, 1 GHz
- Graphics Card: EVGA GeForce 6200 AGP, 512 MB
- Power Supply: EVGA 650 Watt PSU
- Storage: WD 1 TB HDD
And the hard drive is more than enough to install all the games of that time. Because while in 2025 games are getting larger and often consume 100 GB or more on your system, games in 2000 were significantly smaller and only a fraction of that size.
In 2000, between 400 and 800 games were released, all of which were hardly larger than 2 GB
How many games were released in 2000? For the year 2000, there are no absolute numbers on how many games were actually released for Windows PCs. Estimates range from 400 to 800 games, depending on which games are counted and whether shareware is excluded (via IMDB.com).
What were the bestsellers back then? According to HP, which has compiled a list of bestsellers over the years, the best-selling PC game of 2000 was the simulation “The Sims” with 11 million copies sold. Other successful games included:
- Diablo II
- Counter-Strike
- Deus Ex
- Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn
- The Operative: No One Lives Forever
How large were games in 2000? Around the year 2000, games were rarely much larger than 2 GB. The bestseller “The Sims” was about 1 GB in size, while Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn was at 2 GB already the upper limit at that time. Most games were rather between 500 MB and 1.5 GB.
Many games were released on CD back then, and a lot of data remained on the disks and was played from there. Some installers also offered the option to copy all data to the game directory for shorter loading times. Otherwise, you had to switch the disk in the drive for certain games. Baldur’s Gate II was released on 4 CDs at that time, and with the expansion Throne of Bhaal
an additional CD was included.
A player wants to build her first gaming PC, but a friend strongly advises against it. A pre-built PC is the better choice. The player fears that pre-built PCs are significantly more expensive. What is the current state of the market? Player wants to build a gaming PC with her savings, but a friend says: It’s better to buy a pre-built PC
