History of PC Games
Games for computers have existed almost as long as computers have existed. Even the giant machines used for computation in the fifties and sixties were able to run simple games such as Tic-Tac-Toe. Enterprising MIT students created what would be known as the most popular game of this era, Spacewar. Spacewar was distributed on paper tape so that two players can go head-to-head in intergalactic combat with the help of a university's computer system.Smaller computers started entering the home in the late seventies, mostly for tech-minded hobbyists. Game codes were published in periodicals so that gamers could just type them in and play. With the release of the Apple II in 1977, the IBM PC in 1981, and the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum in 1982, personal computing as we know it today began. Text adventures were popular at the time, since the ability of early computers to display graphics was limited. Zork, a text adventure developed in the seventies for an MIT mainframe computer was adapted for the home computer market and released on floppy disks.
As technology improved rapidly, games became more and more advanced with every year. Ushering in a new era, King's Quest was one of the first popular games featuring true graphics as well as text. With the rise of the mouse, point-and-click adventures hit their peak with games such as Leisure Suit Larry and Maniac Mansion. The Commodore 64 boasted an immense game library in the eighties, featuring a wide range of sports, racing, and platform games.
In the early nineties, personal computers were more powerful than dedicated gaming consoles at the time, allowing for far more innovation. Myst, an adventure game featuring the ability of the CD-ROM to handle more graphics and music than ever before, became the best-selling game of the nineties. Myst featured a deep, cinematic story that stood out from the hokey sci-fi and fantasy themes that had dominated computer games. By the mid-nineties, 3D was king, and players clamored for a more immersive world in games, such as in the best-selling Tomb Raider and Quake. This trend continued throughout the late nineties, with games such as the first-person shooter Half-Life.
The new millennium began with the release of the best-selling PC game in history, The Sims. A spinoff of the insanely popular simulation game SimCity, The Sims allowed players to control the minutiae of virtual everyday people, attracting a large female audience compared to the largely male-dominated world of computer gaming. Online gaming became much more prevalent due to the rapid increase in internet speed, allowing for phenomenons such as World of Warcraft. Also, online casual games opened up the game world to a much wider audience.
Now, computer games are more graphic-intensive and cinematic than ever. Nobody knows what will come in the future, but we've come a long way from paper tape fed into machines.
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