PC Zone

Mm-hmm.

He, he used to work at PC Zone, and now moved to America, and now he's like proper full-on massive tech journalistic.

The guy is, is very much got his head screwed on.

He's like a wildly anti-AI reporter, and he, but he's like breaking down why this will not survive as it stands.

Shop prices with today's money worked in.

PC Zone's Christmas buyer's guide lists Half-Life at thirty-nine ninety-nine, about eighty quid now.

But the game was only half the story because to hear it properly, you wanted a new sound card.

Creative's Sound Blaster Live came out at a hundred and forty-nine pounds, roughly three hundred today, and Diamond's Monster Sound MX300 with Aureal's chip inside was due at around a hundred, so about two hundred pounds now.

Was it the same story with the pictures as well?

Pretty much.

PC Zone's hardware pages that month were cheering a Voodoo Two graphics card for under a hundred pounds, which is still about two hundred in today's money.

So a game at forty quid could easily drag a couple of hundred more out of your wallet if you wanted it looking and sounding right.

To play Doom properly, you needed a decent PC, and they were dear, so I'll turn every price into today's money too.

These come from adverts in PC Zone, Dennis Publishing's PC games mag, in its January '94 issue.

Acer's cheapest 486 came in at 869 quid, roughly 1,950 in today's money.

If you wanted the full multimedia set up, a 486 with a CD-ROM drive and a Sound Blaster 16 cost 1,260, and that was before VAT, so call it 2,800 now plus the tax.

Pretty much.

A Sound Blaster 16 card on its own was 136 pounds, about 300 today, and you needed four megs of RAM for Doom, which a lot of home PCs simply didn't have.

And when PC Zone reviewed the full registered game a few months later, it listed it at 31 pounds 45 from British distributors, so about 70 quid now.

The shareware episode, of course, cost you nothing.