i just remembered one time in the 2000s when some pop culture website i read was like "watch this Batman fan film. trust us" and there was a hyperlink to a file download for what i believe was a QuickTime mov, which for you post-youtube readers was basically the highest quality video you could get back then that wasn't also super huge in terms of file size, but also, it was still very huge in file size compared to anything that was usually way smaller and looked way shittier. anyway the point is i guess i trusted these writers or was intrigued enough by the mystery that i downloaded the file, which took maybe something like an hour even on my DSL connection, and then settled in to watch. lo and behold, it's a 10-minute live action short, admittedly very slickly produced, about Batman fighting the fucking Predator, a premise i find so bafflingly pointless to consider that i think then and there i turned against the nerd industrial complex for the rest of my days
i remember when Sonic X came out i tied up the phone line for a full 24 hours to torrent the first fansubbed episode (which was like ~300MB)
and getting disconnected every night. i think it was like, 200 MB
i know im OP but that was a DSL story and since the prompt specified dial-up i got to thinking back beyond my Batman Disappointments. so a few years prior to that, probably because i was a very very weird kid (did you think Hannibal fandom was born with the TV show? haha no), i became obsessed with obtaining a high quality version of Angela Hewitt's performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations, which is about 80 minutes long, and yes, i set it to download via Kazaa one day before i left for school and then had to fight to keep my sister off the landline when we got home that afternoon. and it still took several days to complete (thank god kazaa could pause downloads). anyway it turned out it was a mistitled copy of Glenn Gould's performance of the Goldberg Variations, which, trust me, is a pretty funny punchline
I used to download realvideos of anime over 56k dialup and you need to be committed to spend 4 hours plus downloading a 160x100 video of sailor moon that's ninety percent jpeg-like artifacts and audio that sounds like a potato inside a tin can
torrents really were a god spend, first time I ever downloaded anything and didn't have to worry about the weather breaking it and having to start over
Like it wasn't until 2010-ish that companies that sold you stuff online started doing it in a way where the download getting interrupted didn't mean starting over, and most of the time it was through their own proprietary program that was hot garbage. And sometimes they made you log into a program that couldn't resume downloads since fuck you
the reason steam took over that era of PC gaming is because their program mostly worked and had an ok-ish IM client in it lmao
it was not Thief, it was like a dude in a hood, i think he had a knife... cant remember the name of the game
edit: FOUND IT, GOD THIS ONE HAS BEEN BUGGING ME FOR SO LONG
I'm a bit younger than most folks here but I grew up in the late 00s/early 10s in a country with infamously bad internet, and didn't get anything faster than 300kbps (and even then it didn't always reach that speed) until well into the age of downloaded games and Steam. There were games I literally spent several days, up to a week even, downloading on there
