Early PC gaming
· William Higinbotham created the first video game ever in 1958. His game, called "Tennis for Two," was created and played on a Brookhaven National Laboratory oscilloscope. In 1962, Steve Russell invented SpaceWar!. Spacewar! was the first game intended for computer use. Russell used a MIT PDP-1 mainframe computer to
design his game.
· In 1984, the computer gaming market took over from the console market following the crash of that year; computers offered equal gaming ability and since their simple design allowed games to take complete command of the hardware after power-on, they were nearly as simple to start playing with as consoles
· The Commodore 64 was released to the public in August 1982. It found initial success because it was marketed and priced aggressively. It had a BASICprogramming environment and advanced graphic and sound capabilities for its time, similar to the ColecoVision console. It also utilized the same game controller ports popularized by the Atari 2600, allowing gamers to use their old joysticks with the system. It would become the most popular home computer of its day in the USA and many other countries and the best-selling single computer model of all time internationally.
· 1989 and the early 1990s saw the release and spread of the MUD codebases DikuMUD and LPMud, leading to a tremendous increase in the proliferation and popularity of MUDs. Before the end of the decade, the evolution of the genre continued through "graphical MUDs" into the first MMORPGs (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games), such as Ultima Online and EverQuest, which freed users from the limited number of simultaneous players in other games and brought persistent worlds to the mass market. A prime example of an MMORPG MUD is the game Runescape created by Jagex.
· In the early 1990s, shareware distribution was a popular method of publishing games for smaller developers, including then-fledgling companies such as Apogee (now 3D Realms), Epic Megagames (now Epic Games), and id Software. It gave consumers the chance to try a trial portion of the game, usually restricted to the game’s complete first section or "episode", before purchasing the rest of the adventure. Racks of games on single 5 1/4" and later 3.5" floppy disks were common in many stores, often only costing a few dollars each. Since the shareware versions were essentially free, the cost only needed to cover the disk and minimal packaging. As the increasing size of games in the mid-90s made them impractical to fit on floppies, and retail publishers and developers began to earnestly mimic the practice, shareware games were replaced by shorter game demos (often only one or two levels), distributed free on CDs with gaming magazines and over the Internet
· Published in 1993, Myst itself was one of the first computer games to make full use of the new high-capacity CD-ROM storage format. Despite Myst’s mainstream success, the increased popularity of action-based and real-time games led adventure games and simulation video games, both mainstays of computer games in earlier decades, to begin to fade into obscurity.
· It was in the 1990s that Maxis began publishing its successful line of "Sim" games, beginning with SimCity, and continuing with a variety of titles, such as SimEarth, SimCity 2000, SimAnt, SimTower, and the best-selling PC game in history, The Sims, in early 2000.
· In 1996, 3dfx Interactive released the Voodoo chipset, leading to the first affordable 3D accelerator cards for personal computers. These devoted 3D rendering daughter cards performed a portion of the computations required for more-detailed three-dimensional graphics (mainly texture filtering), allowing for more-detailed graphics than would be possible if the CPU were required to handle both game logic and all the graphical tasks. First-person shooter games (notably Quake) were among the first to take advantage of this new technology. While other games would also make use of it, the FPS would become the chief driving force behind the development of new 3D hardware, as well as the yardstick by which its performance would be measured, usually quantified as the number of frames per second rendered for a particular scene in a particular game.
2000's in gaming
· As affordable broadband Internet connectivity spread, many publishers turned to online gaming as a way of innovating. Massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPGs) featured significant titles for the PC market like EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and Ultima Online.
· Beginning with PCs, a new trend in casual gaming, games with limited complexity that were designed for shortened or impromptu play sessions, began to draw attention from the industry. Many were puzzle games, such as Popcap's Bejeweled and PlayFirst's Diner Dash, while others were games with a more relaxed pace and open-ended play. The biggest hit was The Sims by Maxis, which went on to become the best selling computer game of all time, surpassing Myst.[97]
· Other casual games include Happy Farm and Zynga games like Mafia Wars, FarmVille, and Cafe World, among many others, which are tied into social networking sites such as Myspace, Facebook, and Mixi. These games are offered freely with the option buy in game items, and stats for money and/or reward offers.
· The multi-purpose nature of personal computers often allows users to modify the content of installed games with relative ease. Since console games are generally difficult to modify without a proprietarysoftware development kit, and are often protected by legal and physical barriers against tampering and homebrew software,it is generally easier to modify the personal computer version of games using common, easy-to-obtain software. Users can then distribute their customised version of the game (commonly known as a mod) by any means they choose.
The average gaming PC cost’s around 500 -800 and if you want a top of the line PC you will be paying well over 1,000 dollars.
· A new report concerning the PC gaming hardware marketindicates that computer-based sales will continue to grow at a rate of 11 percent from now until at least 2014. These figures are primarily based on the fact that over 250 million game-capable PCs will ship in 2011, compared to only 230 million PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 consoles that have shipped since 2005.
