Been wondering about this for years.
In: Technology
Those game cartridges were essentially portable disk drives, with the game already pre-installed on it. Unfortunately, it did have space limitations which could be an issue at time.
PC games had no reason to do this once hard drives became mainstream. Installing to the hard drive allowed for much larger, more elaborate games than were possibly on console.
But earlier PC programs actually DID work this way. Programs(including games) were on a cassette tape and loaded each time you played them and later games were played directly off of a floppy disk with no installation involved because there weren’t hard drive to install them to. Hard drives changed everything.
Console games eventually did the same thing, but it just took longer.
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