The Decline of PC Gaming (as we know it) Part I

Notice the title doesn’t say the Death of PC gaming. The reason being is that if you were old enough to read PC gaming or enthusiast magazines in the early 90’s you would have read articles that covered the Death of PC gaming seemingly every other quarter. Yes, in what could now be considered the Golden Age of PC gaming, there were reasoned warnings noting the writings on the wall. The fractured sound and 3D card market, bug ridden releases and overdue patches and trying to tame DOS. Those were just some reasons which were valid then. The reasoning is somewhat different then than it is today, but nonetheless doom and gloom articles were there and sound reminiscent as to what we read today.

One constant that has always played out in the death of PC gaming was and is the platforms costs. In what seemed like an industry bent on pushing hardware requirements, game developers released titles that required the latest and greatest to get the best performance. It was always stated that developers planned their games for hardware two years out. When their title was released, it would match the state of industry - because no one wanted to play on dated graphics. So just as it is today, there was an emphasis on graphical appearance. The cost of achieving them was considered less detrimental than being knocked as dated or old. PC hardware was never static and benchmarks were always being broken, so games were developed to advance along the hardware path as well.

Multimedia PC

I know I personally helped sell so much PC hardware in the early 90’s, but the PC was still largely difficult to master. Playing with DOS and maximizing memory requirements was seen by the uninitiated as some form of dark art. Installing a PC game on a competent machine did not insure that it would run. Even though Multimedia PC’s as they were called sold well, DOS was not the most user friendly experience to work through.

In the mid 90’s Microsoft delivered Windows 95 and the phrase Multimedia PC actually became more relevant. The games that were once the domain of uber geeks were now more accessible to every day users. From 1996 through 1999 the PC gaming landscape was completely reshaped.

PC manufacturers and PC gamers jumped on it. Everyday personal computers could be networked together affordably and PC game publishers jumped on the capacity for Networked LAN and Internet gaming via modems and later even DSL. The promise of PC gaming for most everyone had actually come to fruition.

Part II

PC game Hardware Standards, PC Games Mature, Piracy and Xbox and PS2.

Part III

Quad what? SLI Video cards? Windows Gaming? The PC Desktops relevance in a multi-platform world