PC
The Rise of the PC.
Today’s PCs can shift an incredible amount of polygons at higher and higher resolutions. A top-end PC will deliver the best quality visuals of all the current generation of gaming formats. But things were not always this way.
In the late 80′s and even into the early 90′s, the PC was a business machine. Spreadsheets and word processors were the format’s bread and butter. Early graphics were embarrassingly basic – CGA delivered resolutions of 320 x 200 with a palette of 16 colours displaying only four at a time and EGA, its successor released in 1984 did little to improve the situation managing resolutions of 640×350 with 16 colours from a 64 colour palette. In 1987 IBM phased out EGA by releasing the VGA cards and finally technology had caught up.
After the great video-games crash of 1984, console buyers had been running scared. This shifted the onus away from dedicated games machines and back to computers with the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64 leading the games development charge through the 80′s. Their 16-bit successors were powerful computers with dedicated graphics and sound hardware, the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were gaming powerhouses. The PC lumbered on with crappy graphics and a tinny, internal speaker delivering beeps and whistles. Dedicated PC development was still rare and games that were ported from the Amiga & ST paled in comparison, despite a higher resolution.
There were two reasons for the PC’s rise as a gaming format – 3D and disk capacity.
Gamers’ demand for more accurate realisations of the real world, drove the 3D revolution and the raw processing power of the PC began to show through. When it came to shifting polygons around, the PC was king. Driving games and flight-simulators were achieving enormous breakthroughs in simulation technology, much of it borrowed from the military – early examples include Indianapolis 500 and Falcon. Though these games were released on other formats, their frame-rates were half that of the current PCs and this gap only increased.
As graphics became more complex, disk capacity became an issue. Amigas and STs were only equipped with floppy drives and though hard drives were sold as after-market accessories, they lacked the market penetration that would drive publishers to release for them. PCs, by the early 90s were supplied with hard drives as standard features. Sierra had already made a name for themselves with the popular King’s Quest, Police Quest and Space Quest series and the sequels were shipped on more and more diskettes. With no optimisation, endless disk swapping on the hard-drive-less formats became tiresome.
Many gamers were finally sold on the PC as a desirable gaming format with the release of Wolfenstein 3D. Though the smooth 3D was a 2.5D ‘trick’, this was gripping stuff possessing the immersive quality that had been lacking in games to date. Early soundcards from Soundblaster and AdLib and plenty of hard-drive space meant that speech and sound effects were now possible on an unprecedented scale.
Some gamers clung on though, non-PC development continued, particularly on the Amiga with native titles like Skidmarks and Project X continuing to shine in terms of gameplay. The general rule was that the PC had the ‘simulators’ and the Amiga had the ‘games’. In the early nineties Sega added another player – the Megadrive. Soon after it became clear that the Megadrive was better at ‘games’ than the Amiga and it’s processor couldn’t keep up with the PC. The Amiga’s days were numbered. The PC’s credibility was sealed for me with the release of Ultima Underworlds. A complex role-playing game in a full 3D environment with complex physics, impossible on any other format.
And it went on from there… Doom, Falcon 3.0, Grand Prix 2, Descent, Civilization, Quake, Warcraft and many, many more.