Desktop shortcuts for games instantly take me back to 2002

It’s 2002 and I’ve just unhooked my legs from the seat of the school bus, ran through the front door, climbed the stairs with all four limbs, and darted into the computer room. I press the power button, listen to the static hum, and as the blue sky and open field fill, my buffet of video game icons invites me inside.

In 2024, sitting down to play PC games is a little less romantic. First, there is no computer room; it’s all computers everywhere now, which is a nightmare that I thought would be a dream in 2002. I’m also not 7 years old anymore, so I spend my day working, in the same room and on the same computer that I transform into my gaming room in the evenings. But one thing is the same as it was then: when it’s time to game, I close all my programs and look at that smorgasbord of colorful shortcuts on my desktop.

There’s no real reason to use desktop icons at this point. I use search to find everything I need on all my devices, and the Steam library is a great place to launch games. But it isn’t pleasure. I want to see my nice collection of games, lined up and organized; I want to try to figure out what items or characters the designers chose for the icons. Just a sweet, nostalgic double-click and I’m in Baldur’s Gate or Arranger or Sims4 — and which is also a nice reminder that we no longer need to have CD-ROMs on hand to play certain games.

However, I think all of this is more tangible, and that is the reality that gaming platforms are constantly trying to sell you new games and DLC. I occasionally browse my Steam discovery queue or see what people are saying on forums, but when I’m really just sitting down to play, my gaming time can be eaten up by worldly context and big red sales and game updates and other enticing titles to to check out.

Using marketplaces like Itch.io, which almost exclusively offers games without digital rights management, and GOG, which is completely DRM-free, makes it easier to separate video game shopping from video game playing. If you actually own your games, you usually won’t have to deal with ads before you start playing the game – or at least you probably won’t see ads pushing you to download other games. My desktop shortcuts allow me to eliminate those distractions, because the publishers and studios – as well as players like me – have a vested interest in immersing you exclusively in the game you want to play, when you want to play it.

Launching games straight from the desktop makes me feel like my games are the escape I want, away from the ironically banal promise of more, new, better. So if you find yourself spending the first 10 minutes of your gaming time browsing your platform’s marketplace, try the old desktop shortcut again and join me in remembering the simplicity of those CD-ROM years.