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Welcome to Computer Gaming Yesterday!

Computer Gaming Yesterday is a YouTube channel dedicated to honoring, remembering, and playing old-school PC games—especially those from the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

Retro PC gaming documentries

The channel features in-depth documentries that dig into the development and legacy of PC gaming's most influential titles. The latest documentry takes a close look at the development of Will Wright's classic city builder franchise, SimCity, and compares its simulation to Colossoal Order's modern alterantive, Cities: Skylines.

Read My Book

My book on the history of EverQuest, published by Boss Fight Books, is now available to fund on Kickstarter and slated to release this fall.

EverQuest Book Cover

“You’re in our world now.”

This tagline led Sony’s 1999 ad blitz for EverQuest, the year’s most anticipated massively multiplayer game. Though just five words long, it challenged players to live in a virtual world beyond anything they’d experienced before—and delivered. The game that proved the MMORPG’s potential, EverQuest outsold all prior entries in the genre and was the most popular subscription game in North America for five years until Blizzard’s World of Warcraft overthrew it. Yet EverQuest lives on, with tens of thousands of players logging in every day.

Based on new interviews with EverQuest developers and veteran MMORPG developers, I explore EverQuest‘s unlikely creation at a studio built to develop sports games, a rocky release which overwhelmed the game’s ill-prepared datacenter, the enticing game loops that placed EverQuest in a media firestorm around gaming addiction, and the real-money black market for EverQuest items that foretold the future of digital goods.

Coming Soon

Who is Computer Gaming Yesterday?

The channel is a pet project and persistent habit of Matthew S. Smith (that's me!). I'm a freelance journalist and occasional YouTube madman who grew up with a keyboard in one hand and a mouse in the other. My professional writing usually veers towards consumer electronics and more technical topics (like AI-powered microdisplays), but I've penned dozens of articles about game history over the past year. Here's a few highlights.

The 40-year history of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

You Died of Dysentery: 50 Years of Traveling The Oregon Trail.

Streaming Games to Your TV Actually Started in the '80s.

My first book, an unoffical history of the hit MMORPG EverQuest is coming in 2024. More info soon!