reliving the games, tech and culture of the Win9X era

One of my motivations for producing the Smug and Play podcast is to replay the Win9X era's greatest games on period-correct hardware. Having chosen December 1994, when PC Gamer Magazine debuted the their monthly demo CD-ROMs, as our starting point, I wanted to put together a machine that could've be...

In our debut episode, we begin by recapping the historical, cultural and tech news of 1994 to prepare for our journey through the Win9X era! We then discuss the demos and random crap that PC Gamer pressed into their very first coverdisc, including Wing Commander III, DreamWeb, Detroit, Blackthorne,...

A recent trip to my local recycler yielded an intriguing discovery - a shrink-wrapped eVGA GeForce FX 5500 AGP graphics card straight out of 2004. I paid the $10 they were asking for it and, against my better judgement, recorded a cliche YouTube unboxing video to memorialize what is otherwise a rath...

As a high school student in the late '90s, I relied on a lovingly currated selection of pop, alternative, video game and techno tracks to endure the tedium of homework. From early afternoon to late evening, WinAMP kept my beige Micron Millenia's 233Mhz Pentium MMX occupied, pumping tunes through its...