I mean, there was a lot of reason to feel that way. My friends were struggling with DOS and autoexec.bat/config.sys and IRQ settings and sometimes didn't even have sound cards (still remember when my friend's birthday gift was a sound card lol), playing 320x240 resolution games. Meanwhile I was gaming away at 640x480 256 colors, with 16-bit stereo 22khz or 44khz sound. Yeah, we didn't have quite the same selection of games, but we had some damn good exclusives. Bolo, Escape Velocity (and everything else from Ambrosia), Marathon, Battle-Girl, Realmz, so many others I can't remember the names of.
http://www.stuartcheshire.org/rants/latency.html makes a reference to how it worked under the hood. It turns out that it didn't take a lot of home modems in the game to make the game unusable.
30 years later any computer system I control is still named after something in that game. Investors in 4 countries pump millions of dollars in orders through a cluster named marathon. The roots grow deep ;)
The first computer I built from scratch contained a completely superfluous sound card. It was 2008, my motherboard could handle audio completely fine. But growing up during the era of NEEDING a sound card for sound, I just mindlessly put one in.
