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PC Gaming: Where Are We and How Did We Get Here?
When the second-generation Steam Machine, aka the GabeCube, was announced 12 months ago, I realised we had reached a point in PC gaming history that has been coming for some time. About 30 years, actually.
The PC gaming experience is already fairly indistinguishable from that of console gaming: you boot your hardware into a user-friendly(!) operating system, which reveals your game library, where you choose which game you'd like to play via your gamepad, enjoying high definition graphics and audio. This is true whether you're doing this on a PC or a console by Sony or Microsoft (and Nintendo I suppose). The only notable difference worth acknowledging is that most people would have their PC in their bedroom or study (with a monitor, keyboard and mouse attached), while console gamers are based in their living room. Many people are doing both.
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| The latest Steam Machine. Source: The Lode |
Digital distribution has been the key to this homogenisation of modern gaming, including the hardware, the peripherals and the user interface. Though 'games-on-demand' has been with us in some form since the '80s, 2003 saw the launch of Valve's Steam platform, which established itself as the de facto digital storefront for games on the PC. It has taken a while, but Steam now stands as technically its own gaming platform and arguably the dominant force in gaming at the moment, having the broadest and most diverse selection of games. When the Steam Machine arrives in early 2026, we will have reached a point where console gaming and PC gaming are one and the same thing. I can only see things going badly for Microsoft and Sony after this point, possibly within one generation of hardware. I predict that once the third-gen Steam Machine is released, it will be the best-selling console of that generation. The PC will live on, however, because people like custom rigs, they like to build them and they like to upgrade them.
So how did we get here?
I had a fascinating experience recently after setting up some vintage computers for an event. Although the hardware only spanned a period of 4 years, from about 1992 to 1996, I realised that the games I was playing on these computers covered the most important era in PC gaming: the era that established it as a legit gaming platform in the first place. It's known as The Golden Era of DOS Gaming. If you look up when this era took place, you can find out a range of years, but it's not easy to find out why.
I thought it would be interesting to go back to the beginning and chart how this happened through the eyes of someone who was there (me). None of the 'eras' I've defined here are widely recognised: this is simply my perspective and experience of how PC gaming has evolved over the last 40-ish years. It's not meant to be in any way exhaustive or definitive and none of the views expressed are intended to be controversial. I guess that doesn't mean they won't be...
The First Era (1981 - 1990):
The IBM PC and Compatibles
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| The IBM PC 5150 with 5151 monochrome monitor. Source: Ruben de Rijcke via Wikipedia. |
In 1981, IBM released their PC. It was not the first personal computer and it certainly wasn't the best, but it became a standard completely by accident. You know when you open up your PC to add a new graphics card and you remove those little metal plates that fill in the gaps where the cards go? They're exactly the same as those that fit in the original PC and vice versa. The general composition is also the same: there is a motherboard, which has a CPU from Intel or AMD and some RAM. It needs a power supply to provide various voltages and functionality can be added through expansion cards. Storage devices can also be added depending on the needs of the user. When these components become obsolete, they can be individually upgraded.
The PC and its 'compatibles' (machines from rival manufacturers that could run the exact same software, also called 'clones') were business machines, first and foremost. They were usually equipped with an Intel 8088, an 8-bit CPU running at 4.77MHz, 256KB RAM, no hard disk and one or two 5.25" floppy drives with 360KB capacity. Graphics were either mono, or a 4-colour Colour Graphics Adaptor (black, white, magenta and cyan), plus a bleeper for sound. They also used a command prompt as an operating system - no GUI here.
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| Flight Simulator (1982) by Microsoft. |
Games were a novelty at first and developers often employed software hacks to get the machine to do things it wasn't designed to do. Microsoft licensed Sublogic's Flight Simulator in 1982, paving the way for the PC's number-crunching abilities to be repurposed as a popular platform for simulators, but you could only achieve colour graphics by plugging your CGA card into a TV. This was provided as an option because monitors were expensive. The gaming experience of this time was usually black & white text, which lent itself to the adventure game genre that was already established on other micros of the era and the minicomputers that preceded them. As few people had their own PC at home, but many used one at the office, games often had a 'boss key', a key combination an illicit office gamer could use to switch their screen from a game to a pseudo business screen or command prompt so that they wouldn't be caught skiving.
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| Grand Prix Circuit (1988) by Accolade. This is Monaco. The scenery never gets closer. |
1984 brought us the IBM AT and some new features. The 286 CPU could access more RAM and introduced the Enhanced Graphics Adaptor with 16 colours (more like 8 colours but light and dark versions of each). I came into PC gaming at some point in 1992 and not a huge amount had changed since 1986. PCs still weren't common in the home as they were expensive - compared to other home micros such as the Amiga 500 or Commodore 64 anyway - and Windows 3.1 was the latest version of Microsoft's operating system. I say expensive: you can buy a modern computer for the same price (~£1,000) that comes equipped with a mid-range motherboard and CPU, an RTX-capable graphics card, 1TB of flash storage and a 4TB hard drive. Back then our PC, purchased from a stationery shop called Wildings, had a 386SX CPU which ran at 25MHz, had 2MB of RAM, a 40MB hard drive and a graphics chip with half a megabyte of RAM and a monitor that could do a max resolution of 640x480. It didn't even have a sound card or CD-ROM drive at this point.
When you looked at the specs for games of this time, they didn't differ a huge amount at all. Usually "IBM PC or 100% compatible" was still the basic requirement. Accolade’s Test Drive II: The Duel (1989), for example, could run on an 8088 CPU with 384KB of RAM and CGA graphics. Such games also did not require a hard drive and could be run straight from the 5.25" floppy disk they came on, as it wasn't until later in the '80s that 3.5" drives became more commonplace on the PC. We also had to wait for the '90s until high density disks capable of storing 1.44MB became standard. This is typical of the kind of games I was playing in 1992, even though hard drives, albeit small ones, were standard by this point. New standards were slow to be adopted at this time because they were usually extremely expensive and there was a lack of software available that supported these new features.
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| F19 Stealth Fighter (1988) by Microprose. The realism was in the gameplay. |
The PC’s aptitude for flight simulators continued. Microprose's F19 Stealth Fighter (1988) was critically acclaimed for its realism and still only required the same kind of PC as Test Drive II. I've never played it, but its sequel, F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter 2.0 (1991), was one of the most immersive games I played at the time. Of course, with a better PC, the experience improved: it did also add support for the new Video Graphics Array, which we'll come onto soon. PC gaming could still be a dour affair at times. Serious games on a serious machine. Conversions from other more fun systems such as the Amiga, Atari ST and some consoles did exist, but they were often less good than the original.
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| Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement (1990) by id Software. An early tech demo on the PC. |
Until someone got it right, of course. The early '90s did bring a shift in the right direction and it was one company, id, who arguably triggered it. They invented "Adaptive Tile Refresh", in September of 1990, a method of smooth horizontal scrolling graphics on EGA-equipped PCs. As a demo of this tech, they replicated the first level of Super Mario Bros 3 on the NES. The result was Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement (released freely by John Romero a while back). This was the first silo from a company that would lead the cutting edge of gaming technology on the PC for years to come. Out of this one event, arcade-style platformers became a presence on the PC for the first time, id's own Commander Keen (1991) being the first. Titles like Bio Menace (1993), Duke Nukem (1991), and Jill of the Jungle (1992) followed. Pushing the latest hardware has always been a hallmark of games development on the PC.
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| King's Quest: Quest for the Crown (1984) by Sierra On-Line. Tricky. |
The text adventure made way for the graphic adventure in the mid '80s such as Sierra Online's King's Quest from 1984, the first of its kind on the PC. Although the environment was now represented visually for the player, the keyboard was still used to type commands. Later, Lucasfilm Games' Maniac Mansion (1987) made mouse control a standard for the genre, spawning the phrase 'point-and-click adventure'. Where text adventures relied on the player to fill the 'imagination gap' between what was described on screen and what it looked like, graphic adventures didn't have that luxury, and had to rely on the technology of the time to deliver as best they could an imaginative and captivating world for the player to immerse themselves within. It makes sense, therefore, that developers of these games in particular would try to keep pace with the development of graphical and audio technology on the PC in order to maximise players' enjoyment.
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| Duke Nukem (1991) by Apogee Software. |
As a result, this was a time when audio in games evolved significantly. The bleeps of the PC speaker could still be heard from titles in 1993 if you didn't have a sound card, but Sierra's King's Quest IV (1988) was the first PC game to support multiple synthesisers that were available at the time. These included the AdLib, Roland's MT-32 and IBM's Music Feature Card. Uptake was not rapid, however, as such hardware was expensive and was primarily aimed at musicians. The already-mentioned Duke Nukem and Commander Keen only supported PC speaker, for example. This changed rapidly as sound cards came down in price and became more commonplace.
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| The Gravis Gamepad (1992). Source: Tosiabunio via Wikipedia. |
Owing to this new prevalence of platformers on the, er, platform, Advanced Gravis released the first (as far as I'm aware) gamepad for the PC in about 1992, inspired by the SNES controller. I still own one mine. Up to this point, traditional joysticks were the standard controller used by gamers. This pretty much brings us to the end of the first era: basic hardware requirements, simple audio, support for the earliest graphics standard and newer ones if you're lucky, floppy disks all over the place.
We can look at some stats for context. These are taken from Mobygames which is currently the best record we have of released games over the years. There is a margin of error, with re-releases and such, but it's within tolerance for the purposes of this article and accurate at the time of writing. In the 8 years between 1981 and 1988, approximately 1,750 games were released for the PC. From 1989 to 1990 alone, 1,192 were released, more than are recorded for the Amiga in the same period (1,062). The PC had nearly 3,000 games available for it by the end of 1990. Clearly the it was a popular gaming platform and a big reason for this was the Shareware business model. Developers would release a limited version of a game for free, usually as a first chapter or episode, and you could mail order the rest of the game if you liked it. And we've only just got started.
For a fuller list of games I played in this era, see my Game Gallery of 386 games.
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| Game releases per year on the PC. Data source: Mobygames. |
The Second Era (1991 - 1992):
The 386, VGA & Digitised Audio Make Things Better, XMS & EMS Make Them More Complicated
Shit's about to go nuts.
Although I was playing mostly older games on my first PC, it was capable of so much more. The 386 had become more affordable, but storage was limited on the hard drive, I had no audio capability, and nowhere to plug a joystick in yet (even if I had one). But it was capable of something that had become a standard feature: VGA graphics. To keep things simple, I'm going to say this was a standard introduced by IBM in their PS/2 computer in 1987 (it's slightly more complicated than that) and it enabled 256 colours on screen simultaneously: quite the improvement over EGA. This was probably the single most significant development in the IBM PC hardware standard that led to its status as a gaming platform and was the standard mode until well into the mid '90s. Even at its most commonly-used resolution of 320x200, this was enough detail to produce graphics that could, for the first time, be described as 'photo-realistic'.
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| Lemmings (1991) by DMA Design, cutesy and addictive. |
Though some games messed with more advanced video modes quite early on (there's that hacking again) 688 Attack Sub (1990) by Microprose is regarded as likely the first to display 256 colours simultaneously (thanks to Jim Leonard for his research on this). EGA games were still much more common than VGA in the early '90s and there certainly weren't many games that required the new standard - often you had a choice. Lemmings (1991) is one example as it supports all three established standards. It's also happens to be the first game I played on PC because it was bundled with my first system. If there were millions of CGA- and EGA-capable machines and hundreds of thousands of VGA-capable machines, you're going to sell a game to all those people rather than the smallest group.
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| Wolfenstein 3D (1992) by id Software, because killing Nazis is never not fun. |
VGA didn't just bring more colours, though, it brought new capabilities. id Software were at it again, this time working on the newest challenge: a smooth scrolling 3D environment. Commander Keen had been a very successful, technologically innovative series but, in 1992, Wolfenstein 3D was released. It was the culmination of an engine id had been developing which had a 3D, texture mapped environment. Before it came id's own Catacomb 3-D (1991) and Ultima Underworld (1992) from Origin, but the key with Wolf 3D was that it was fast. 3D environments were far from uncommon on the PC at this time, however, particularly in flight simulators as mentioned. Indianapolis 500: The Simulation (1989) by Papyrus was an early driving simulation to render the environment using polygons but it was texture-mapping that was making these newer games stand out (arguably to the detriment of game development) not just in their visuals, but also in their system requirements.
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| Dune II (1992) by Westwood Studios, perhaps the daddy of the RTS genre as we know it. |
The real-time strategy genre began gathering significant pace on the PC around this time, marked by the release of Dune II (1992). By bringing together all the best features of its forerunners and making mouse control central to gameplay, it set the standard for nearly every RTS title that would follow. Unfortunately I don't like RTS games. At all (except Bullfrog's Syndicate from 1993, which I reviewed). Too much going on, no chill, a nightmare for my brain. A number of technically impressive titles appeared around this time. One such example was Car and Driver (1992) by Looking Glass Technologies. Another driving simulator, it was created by the same folks that brought us Wing Commander (1990) and Ultima Underworld (1992) and it wouldn't be the last time we'd hear from them either. Around the same time, Microprose released Geoff Crammond's Formula One Grand Prix (1991) on the PC, another polygon-based simulator following in the steps of Indy 500. Both these games also offered multiplayer via modem or direct cable connection, a feature that was becoming increasingly common. Phone tariffs in the UK made modem play expensive, but I know things worked differently in the US. This similarly influenced the prevalence of BBS (bulletin board systems, which had become a place to acquire 'warez' aka stolen games or cracks to remove copy protection from games, a subject beyond the scope of this article.
We also had Alone in the Dark (1992) by French studio Infogrames. The approach they took was to use beautiful hand-drawn backgrounds and superimpose polygon-based characters rendered in a 3D engine. This was groundbreaking for the time and is also said to have established the 'survival horror' genre.
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| Car & Driver (1992), by Looking Glass Technologies. Like The Need for Speed, but earlier. |
Going back to hardware, digitised audio was pretty much a gimmick when the Sound Blaster was originally released in 1989 by Creative Labs, and game developers didn't really know what to do with it. It was primarily marketed as an accessibility tool for text-to-speech, though there were some entertainment applications. An earlier piece of hardware offering digitised audio was the Covox Speech Thing, for example (Jim Leonard tells the full story of sound card history here). There were some early cases of games using the feature for sound effects in games, but any new feature tended to increase the cost of game development and the storage requirements, at a time when 720KB floppy discs were still the norm for distribution. Considering how long it usually took the majority of game devs to adopt new tech, however, digitised sound was adopted relatively quickly, finding support in many games within the next three years and establishing itself as the standard for game sound. Such was Creative's hold on the market, superior cards such as MediaVision's Pro Audio Spectrum (1991) and Advanced Gravis' UltraSound (1992) not only failed to make a significant impact, but also had to offer some form of Sound Blaster compatibility. This was in the days when game devs had to write drivers for each individual sound card so the most popular options were usually chosen. Later, third party tools were used to simplify the process.
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| Wing Commander II (1991) by Origin Systems. Source: The King of Grabs. |
As a result of these advances, games had started pushing system requirements beyond the 640KB limit of 'conventional memory' on the original PC - gaming was growing up! Although the programs themselves still had to run within that memory, additional RAM could be used to cache audio and graphical data. In 1985, a standard called Expanded Memory Specification had been invented to facilitate the ever-increasing demands of databases, spreadsheets and other data structures on PCs. 1MB was the limit for the original PC and compatibles, but EMS allowed physical expansion boards of RAM to be installed. These were very expensive, however - one with half a megabyte cost $500 in 1986 (source: Byte Magazine). It took about 5 years but games that could use this extra RAM had started to appear, Wing Commander II (1991) being one example. Though it wasn't a requirement at this stage, an enhanced game experience could be had with it. There was a cost - this game came on eight(!) 5.25" floppy disks originally. With a 40MB hard drive you'd have space for that, Windows and not much else. Wolf 3D, for example, offered not only Sound Blaster support, but also eXtended Memory Specification (a parallel standard) and the aforementioned EMS. Some games, however, only supported one or the other. This meant that a system configured only for XMS couldn't run games that required EMS games and things became somewhat complicated for users.
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| X-Wing (1993) by Lucasarts, a flight simulator in space with an epic cinematic intro. |
Memory management, one of the true dark arts of owning a PC in the early '90s, had become a major issue. Some games also required over 600KB of the 640KB available, but it was increasingly common for this memory to have already been partially eaten up by software that made sound cards, mice and other features work. Some games provided a facility to create a 'boot disk', where gamers could start their PC from a floppy disk tailored to the requirements of the game in question. X-Wing (1993), for example, would run without EMS but you would be missing digitised audio and MIDI music if you had the gear. Some games wouldn't run at all. These new games weren't just taxing the wallet, but also the mind and patience. The release of DOS 6.0 helped matters as it included a memory manager and the ability to have a 'boot menu'. Gone were the multiple floppy disks for booting with - you could set up multiple configurations on the hard drive and choose which one you wanted on startup. These are the kind of extra skills gamers had to pick up.
So that's the 2nd era. Games we using every technological advancement available to them and this created an experience that was both highly rewarding and somewhat complicated.
Thankfully, things were about to become more straightforward.
The Third Era (1993 - 1994):
Multimedia & the 486 Make Things Better, DOS Extenders Make Things Simpler
PC Gaming was suddenly great, but it was also a pain in the arse: the 640KB limit was holding things back. Yet again, advancements in the business sector would unleash new capabilities for developers. Methods of mitigating the 640KB barrier had been around for a while since 1986 but it wasn't until around 1992 that a 'DOS extender' was bundled for free with the software many devs used to compile their games. This didn't make things any easier for existing games, but it was the way forward. Now the true power of the 32-bit CPUs of the day could be unleashed, which is how we ended up with Doom. Released in December 1993, it represented a landmark in PC gaming. Suddenly the PC was a legitimate gaming platform of its own and wasn't just trying to emulate what consoles had been doing, or receiving increasingly faithful ports of Amiga games. The price of this progress for gamers was not insignificant. Doom was a typical example of a game that required a 386, VGA, 4MB RAM and a hard disk.
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| Doom (1993) by id, with a border: the experience if you owned previous-generation hardware. |
We need to stop for a minute. This was December 1993. Commander Keen had been released almost exactly three years previously. Compare the two games side by side, with Wolfenstein 3D almost exactly in-between in May '92 and the difference is mind-blowing. Because of a lack of funds generally, I didn't buy a lot of games at the time and tended to enjoy shareware titles on magazine cover disks or buy older titles from the market in my town. Doom, however, was a title I was willing to splash out for. I went into Game (RIP) in the Liberty 2 shopping centre in my home town of Romford and bought the retail version with my Christmas money. I still have the floppy disks.
Doom massively popularised network gaming, along with support for direct or dial-up connections as were common in games at the time, but the ability to play across a local area network such as an office or university campus wasn't a standard feature. Some simulators included such functionality but, again, networks were generally expensive and the preserve of business or academic environments. Multiplayer Doom aka 'deathmatch' became so popular that it was famously banned on many campuses due to the way it overloaded networks with traffic (fixed in a subsequent version). My first deathmatch was when I was on work experience in the summer of 1994. I was in the IT department of a double-glazing firm and the staff were fragging each other on their lunch breaks and after they had clocked off. It was nice to play on a 486 for once. The experience also taught me that people were using mouse and keyboard to play, while I'm still there using keyboard only. This was well before the days of WASD, when the arrow keys were king.
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| Major Stryker (1993) by Apogee Software, a fast-paced vertical scrolling shmup. |
id wasn't the only company producing first-person shooters, though. Blake Stone (1993) was extremely unlucky to have been released 5 days before Doom, but was still great fun. A certain Ken Silverman brought us Ken's Labyrinth in early '93, a game not dissimilar to Wolfenstein 3D, but with an engine he single-handedly built from the ground up. He would return later. One of my favourite games of early 1993 was Major Stryker, a vertical-scrolling shoot-'em-up by Allen Blum, who also had a big hand in Duke Nukem. It also must be one of the last games to only use EGA graphics, something that was very much atypical at this point. Some of these games had music written by the late Bobby Prince, one of the best composers for games on the PC at the time.
We had reached a time when the gap had started to widen significantly between what a 'standard' PC could do and what a 'cutting edge' PC was capable of. Mine was most definitely 'standard' at the time. When Doom was released, I still had my Ambra 386, equipped by now with an AdLib-compatible sound card and a joystick (again, purchased from a stationery shop). To emphasise how behind the times this was, one of the bundled games of this 'multimedia' package was Knights of the Sky (1990), a World War I flight sim, and the sound card only managed FM synthesis with no digital sound. I also only had 2MB of RAM, which was upgraded at some point to 4MB at significant expense (1MB was £36 at the time). Even then, I could only run Doom in a postage-stamp-sized viewport, in low quality mode. The ideal platform for Doom to perform as best it could was a 486DX2/66 CPU, with 16-bit digital stereo audio, General MIDI music, and 'local bus' graphics. This was a significant upgrade from what was considered standard at the time.
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| The 7th Guest (1993) by Trilobyte. Source: The Adventurers Guild. |
The latest PC games were no longer for mere mortals, and things only got better for those with the right hardware and worse for those that didn't. It was around this time that the term 'multimedia' started to appear around PCs. A moderate number of CD-ROM titles existed before 1993 but the medium was slow and expensive. Most releases had been edutainment or reference titles, or discs rammed full of shareware and public domain software downloaded from bulletin boards. Most of the games that had started to become available were enhanced versions of games that already existed. The 7th Guest (1993) changed all this as one of the first CD-exclusive titles and certainly the most visually impressive at the time. It showed people what they were missing and gave them a reason to invest in a CD drive. These cost in the region of £250 at the time and used a non-standard connector, so you couldn't just plug it in to what you had. Most were bundled with an interface card, but sound cards also started to offer this as a feature. Such packages cost north of $400.
My first experience of CD-ROM gaming was when I went round a friend's house and saw Rebel Assault (1993) by Lucasarts. To be interacting with a what looked like live video on the screen with a glorious digital soundtrack from the actual films was jaw-dropping at the time, though it hasn't aged at all well. We didn't even care that the gameplay was clunky - it was the most technically-impressive thing we'd ever seen. What a time to be alive.
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| My first CD-ROM drive, the CR562B. Source: PC Zone Issue 7, October 1993, page 101. |
1993 also brought us the PC's first gaming-only magazine in the UK: PC Zone. From issue one I was hooked, and would spend my pocket money on the latest issue as soon as it came out as it was the main opportunity I had to acquire shareware titles and try out the latest game demos. The reviews and hardware group tests provided hours of reading and drooling over the things I could never hope to afford. It was some time during 1994 that I managed to talk my dad into getting such an upgrade for our PC. The price had come down a bit and I spent months scanning the ads in magazines for the best prices. Looking back at those ads now, it would have cost well over £300 so I have no idea how I managed to convince him. I remember one of the main selling points I put forward at the time being that a hard drive upgrade would be more expensive, but that having the CD drive meant that less data needed to be stored on it, so it saved money! He seemed to think I knew what I was talking about and, to be fair, being able to run a game from CD was a common feature at the time. So now I had a Sound Blaster AWE32 and a dual-speed CD drive from Simply Computers in Walthamstow. We drove down there one weekend and it's possibly the most excited I'd been since I won a Game Boy by eating lots of crisps.
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| Beneath a Steel Sky (1993) by Revolution, the only adventure game I've completed (twice). |
My gaming experience had been changed forever. I replayed every game I owned with a glorious wavetable soundtrack and immersive digital sound. Doom, X-Wing, and Raptor: Call of the Shadows stood out as benefitting particularly from the enhancements compared to before. The intro of X-Wing was the first time I heard digitised speech coming out of my speakers and it was like watching the film being rendered on my PC in real-time. But I was still on a lowly 386.
The trend for existing titles to get a release enhanced by CD-ROM continued, particularly for point-and-click adventures. It was now possible to employ a cast of actors (or use staff members) to voice each line of dialogue and all the popular publishers such as Sierra, Revolution, Lucasarts and others set about producing bigger and better graphical adventures. Releases that would have otherwise required tens of floppy discs were suddenly possible on one CD and developers were only just starting to realise the potential of the format. Titles like Under a Killing Moon (1994) brought us full motion video and, just as wavetable soundtracks had started to be enjoyed by a wider audience of gamers, CD audio started to become more common. The CD release of X-Wing featured a soundtrack straight from the original film rather than a synthesised score. It seemed that every month a new innovation was pushing PC gaming forward to new levels of realism.
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| Creature Shock (1994) by Argonaut. Pushing technical boundaries. Source: Mobygames. |
There was, of course, the bad side of progress. I strongly remember the controversy surrounding Argonaut's Creature Shock (1994) which, despite being groundbreaking in its use of technology, wasn't a very good game. I seem to have similar memories about MegaRace and Cyclemania from the same time. I played demo versions of all three and found them fascinating as tech demos, but lacking in appeal other than that. This follows the pattern of developers wanting to get the latest tech into their games rather than making a great game and enhancing it. I think it's games like these that have aged the least well.
Following the vast success of Doom, a game that was released as shareware believe it or not, 1994 became the year of the first person shooter. System Shock (a Looking Glass title - I said they'd be back), Dark Forces, Rise of the Triad and Heretic were all pushing things in new directions in their own way. Doom II was also released commercially to capitalise on the success of its predecessor.
The golden era of DOS gaming was very much here, and we had reached its peak.
The Fourth Era (1995 - 1996):
The Pentium Goes Mainstream, Windows Gaming on the Rise
As I've mentioned, I was no longer able to deny that my humble PC was far from up to scratch following the release of Doom. It soldiered on through 1994, however, and being unable to play any of the latest games adequately became unbearable. There was only one thing I wanted to do: build myself a new PC. Lots of planning went into this. I studied articles in magazines like PC Zone, PC Pro and PC Plus on a monthly basis and scoured the ad pages for the best deals nearby to where I lived. I can't remember the exact date but I think it was early-to-mid 1995 when my dad agreed to buy me the components I'd need to build an up-to-date computer. There was no way I could afford the latest, greatest CPU - Intel's Pentium - as it was still painfully expensive. But there was a next-best-thing in the 486DX4. We ended up purchasing the parts from two different places, as I recall. The first was Simply Computers again and that was the case, the RAM, hard drive, graphics and various bits and bobs. The motherboard and CPU were acquired from a random little place out in the depths of Essex near Basildon. With a 1.2GB hard drive, it felt like I had all the space I could possibly need for games, and I could throw anything at 8MB of RAM. The monitor, sound card and CD-ROM were carried over from the previous PC.
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| Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity (1995) by ICOM Simulations. Source: Adventure Gamers. |
Gaming under Windows was very much a casual affair in version 3 - how much fun can you have clicking buttons inside of a Window, after all? Many DOS games had compatibility and memory issues being launched from within Windows, so gamers generally kept the two separate, using DOS for gaming and Windows for productivity. Some enhancements, such as DirectX-precursor WinG, had been introduced into Windows 3.1 to make gaming a more appealing prospect but the future of gaming as we now know it perhaps began when Microsoft's Gabe Newell began development of a version of Doom for the platform. This was ultimately cancelled owing to performance issues and the impending release of Windows 95, but Doom 95 was subsequently released in November of that year and was used as a showcase for serious gaming on the platform. I actually never encountered it somehow, but I do remember early experiences of gaming under Windows 95, as I managed to get hold of a copy from a friend not long after release and installed it on my PC. Playing the latest games was fun and all, but installing a new operating system? Completely mind-blowing. Early experiences of gaming in Windows at this point were Beavis & Butthead in Virtual Stupidity and The Hive, both from 1995. It was a strange experience as it felt sub-optimal and a bit cursed, so I continued doing the vast majority of my gaming in DOS.
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| PC Zone Issue 20, November 1994. I still have the CD. |
Magazine cover disks graduated from floppies to CDs and instead of one or two games per month, it was possible to not only include multiple demos of the latest titles on one disk but also productions from the demoscene, music, random shareware utilities, videos and anything else they could fit on there.
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| Descent (1995) by Parallax Software. The first 'fully 3D game'. |
Over 1,300 games were released for the PC between 1991 and 1992 but it peaked from '93-'94 when over 1,600 games were released for DOS. 3D was very much in-vogue at this time. Bullfrog's Magic Carpet (1994) and Terminal Velocity (1995) by 3D Realms blurred some genre lines by bringing flying into the FPS genre, giving us something that wasn't a flight sim but also wasn't a typical first person shooter. The onslaught of continued gameplay and technical innovation was perhaps best represented by Descent (1995). This was the first game on any platform to offer complete freedom of movement in a 3D environment and, like Doom, was enjoyed by many across networks. Tools had begun to emerge that made it possible for gaming to take place across the increasingly-popular Internet, breaking multiplayer out of the LAN and into the world.
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| Bioforge (1995) by Origin Systems. A (difficult) graphical adventure game. |
The development of adventure games continued with Origin's BioForge (1995), similar to Alone in the Dark in terms of its pre-rendered backgrounds, but with much more of the environment being rendered in real-time 3D. This game felt so futuristic to me at the time but I found it really hard to decipher - the whole game is a puzzle. The original Rayman (1995), did a similar thing graphically for the platformer genre and was also one of the first ports from the PlayStation to the PC. A landmark title for me was Screamer (1995). As a lover of Sega Rally in the arcade, it felt incredible to have a fully-fledged 3D arcade racer on the PC.
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| Blackthorne (1994) by Blizzard. Yes, that Blizzard. |
At the same time as all this, people were still taking joy in the simpler side of things. Games like Sensible World of Soccer, a game I went out and bought, and Worms, both from 1995 and Amiga ports, showed that gameplay was still massively important to people in an era dominated by 3D. I enjoyed Blackthorne (1994) for the same reason, a moody and slower-paced platformer with a haunting soundtrack. It performed badly on my 386 so it was one of those games I had to wait to play. I think there were a lot of games in this category and many of them, such as Indycar Racing (1993), The Need for Speed (1994) and Dark Forces (1995), I never actually ended up playing at all, even though they were my kind of game. Again, unless a friend had a copy, I was unlikely to be able to afford a copy myself.
CD established itself as the standard medium for distributing games and installer programs offered the option to install more data for speed or less data for saving space - hard drives were still expensive at this time with ~500MB being £120 (source: PC Zone Issue 29, page 73). There was particular quirk of this era of CD audio in games. For some, their PC was their CD player so it was possible to start a game up with the wrong CD in the drive by accident. This led to an unexpected soundtrack in some games. I remember playing Bullfrog's Hi Octane (1995) with the Prodigy's Firestarter single in the drive. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it really didn't, but it was always funny.
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| Quake (1996) by id Software, a very important shareware game. |
This era was gaming nirvana for PC gamers with the variety and the advancements being made. But, even with a high-end 486, the latest games were becoming increasingly demanding on the hardware. Not more than a year after building my brand new system from scratch, Quake (1996) was released. My heart both soared with joy and sank with misery. To see id's latest game was obviously incredible, but to experience it at 10fps was not fun. It was optimised for the Pentium processor which was gaining in popularity in homes as prices had come down from its initial release in 1993. Quake's importance is well documented, so I'll just mention for now that it popularised fully-polygonal 3D environments, machinima, speedrunning, total conversions and Internet gaming on a massive scale and also gave birth to Team Fortress.
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| Duke Nukem 3D (1996) by 3D Realms, the most fun FPS out there. |
Thankfully, Quake establishing the pinnacle of technological advancement didn't prevent other awesome games from emerging that could still run comfortably on an average system. Duke Nukem 3D, released earlier in 1996, put its own spin on the FPS genre thanks to Ken Silverman's return with the Build engine. Developed by the same people that brought us the original platformer, Duke was now a fully fleshed-out character and gave us a down-town environment that was more relatable and more interactive than its predecessors. It was also my first experience of LAN gaming. Well, actually we used a parallel port link cable that I'd constructed on work experience years earlier but a friend would bring over his entire PC and hi-fi system so that we could have deathmatches in the loft with a whole group of us. It was pretty awesome.
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| Formula One Grand Prix 2 by Geoff Crammond (again), published by Microprose. Source: Spiele Archaologen. |
>One game I probably spent the most time playing in 1996 was Formula One Grand Prix 2 by Microprose. I had been anticipating this game for years and it was the most realistic racing sim there had ever been thanks to official F1 licensing. I spent countless hours driving practice laps to find the optimal setup for my car in qualifying and get as far up the grid as I could. But, being impatient as I was, taking shortcuts and causing crashes when it came to the race was the real fun. Looking back now it seems weird but I used a CH Flightstick to play this game. The keyboard or a gamepad could only provided digital control, but a joystick was much more refined and steering wheels were an expensive rarity at the time. It eventually broke I used it that much.
Many games of this era included support for SVGA resolutions i.e. 640x480 but this was extremely demanding on the CPU, as consumer graphics cards didn't yet support 3D rendering in hardware. The aforementioned F1GP2 couldn't even run smoothly at full detail and high resolution with the fastest available PC at the time. Luckily the next innovation was just around the corner.
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| They were 100% right, though not everyone wanted it to be true. Source: PC Zone, Jan '96, p. 16. |
By 1992, the PC was seeing over 800 games being released per year, all of them in DOS. By the beginning of 1996, Windows had eclipsed those figures, seeing nearly 1,000 games released for the platform that year alone. By the end of 1996, over 10,000 games in total had been released on the PC since 1981. That's more than was released on the Amiga, the ST and all Atari, Sega and Nintendo consoles combined in the same time period (9,700).
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| Game releases per year on the PC. Data source: Mobygames. |
The Fifth Era (1996 - 1999):
3D Hardware, DirectX and Platform Homogenisation
This is actually where I sign off it's the first era I didn't properly experience first-hand at the time. I was still running my 486DX4 and there was no way in hell I was going to be getting a Pentium or a 3D graphics card anytime soon. Of course I do own a bunch of them now, including the 3Dfx Voodoo, which changed everything. One memorable experience was when the original Grand Theft Auto dropped at the end of 1997. This was a game that included an installer program for both DOS and Windows, by the way - that's how late DOS lived. PC Zone included a demo on their Christmas edition and I was immediately hooked. It also ran quite comfortably on my 486 so it was another game I went out and bought (and completed). I even wrote a review of it at the time as part of a job application to join them as a staff writer.
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| Grand Theft Auto (1997) by DMA Design. Insanely good fun. |
It wasn't until 1999 that I was able to upgrade, by purchasing a Pentium III system with an nVidia TNT or something like that. In the meantime, I was back to vicarious enjoyment through magazine reviews and articles. Some of the only authentic experiences I have from this time are from when I got a job at Special Reserve (RIP) in summer of 1998. They had a store in Upminster, which was a bus ride from where I lived. They had PCs on display that I regularly 'tested'. This enabled me to at least sample the latest 3D games such as Motorhead and Unreal. Seeing proper lighting effects and transparent water rendered on a PC for the first time was an absolutely mind-blowing experience.
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| Unreal (1998). Source: user redwarp10 on Reddit. |
Sure, I could speak about the history of the era, but that wouldn't fit with the purpose of this article and has been covered to death by many others. The bottom line is: there was a huge battle for supremacy in the 3D graphics card market and only ATI and nVidia came out of it alive. There was also a huge battle for CPU supremacy, which saw clock speeds climb from 200MHz in 1996 to 1GHz by the first quarter of 2000. Only Intel and AMD came out of that alive. In the battle for sound card supremacy, only Creative Labs emerged from that, albeit on their knees. As technology improved, more and more components were integrated into motherboards and, while it wasn't great, it was 'good enough' for most people, so they saw no need to invest in a separate sound card.
While all this was happening, PC games just got better and better. Most notably, games that were ported to Windows from consoles such as the PlayStation actually looked better, because Sony's console didn't have dedicated 3D hardware. Obviously it wasn't game over for consoles, but the PC was a different beast now, and it was getting plenty of its own platform-exclusive games to boast about. Windows and DirectX had made running games on the PC a triviality. No more memory management, no more boot disks, no more complicated sound card setups. The PC had arrived and it was the best gaming platform in the world. I'm going to pick Half Life (1999) as the bookend for this era. Created by Gabe Newell's Valve, it represents a true turning point in gaming on the PC, and the beginning of the next era that led us to Steam and the ecosystem we recognise today (the 6th era).
I'm going to let Chris Anderson, deputy editor of PC Zone, have the final word, as he summed up the PC's ascendancy quite well back in 1997.
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| "PCs aren't crap" shock. Source: PC Zone, Feb '97, page 60. |
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed it, I hope you might consider a Ko-Fi donation to keep me writing such things, as I really enjoy it but struggle to find the time (this has been in the works for a year).
(Unless otherwise mentioned, screenshots were captured by the author, using DOSBox. Also, as a footnote, I mention Doom 17 times during this article, such was its influence.)