The Year I Discovered PC Games

Posted by Rampant Coyote on February 6, 2012

I didn’t really have a DOS-based PC until 1991. By this point, the era of my beloved Commodore 64 was pretty much over, and while I really wanted an Amiga, its time was also rapidly coming to a close. This weekend, I stumbled across some music from Falcon 3.0 – the Spectrum Holobyte game from 1991. I was surprised how it brought back feelings, nostalgia, and excitement from that era of gaming. Sense memory and all that, I guess.

It really was an incredible time to be a PC gamer. The PC was in the midst of a surge of titles as publishers decided that it was the horse to bet on. It enjoyed four significant but then-recent changes that had turned it into the ultimate gaming computer. First of all, VGA had become standard. Suddenly, games could explode with sixteen times the number of colors of the previous standard, and of most previous computers. Secondly, the Adlib and Sound Blaster sound cards had also become ‘standard’ enough that even their competitors maintained compatibility. This meant pretty decent sound, for once, and even digitally recorded sounds or voices could be used in games for the increasing base of Sound Blaster users. Thirdly, the 386 CPU was really pretty dang powerful and overshadowed much of what had come before. Finally, expanded or extended memory managers had become common as most computers shipped with more than 640K.

All of these combined to make the DOS-based PC (the earlier versions of Windows was simply a layer on top of DOS that slowed down performance) the best non-console gaming platform. A couple of years earlier, and most titles simply included the PC as a platform for a port, but by 1990 the PC had become the lead platform for almost all computer game companies. With all the new technological power, game developers were able to really push things as they hadn’t before.

Then, even as today, I tended to pick up games a little late. Back then, it was mainly because I was a poor student with little money, so my games often came from the discount rack, or borrowed from friends when they were done.  I got to play catch-up on some really incredible titles from the late 80’s through 1990, marveling at how much things had changed from the Commodore 64 era. I was able to discover a few older games like Neuromancer, Ultima V and Ultima VI, Wing Commander I, Loom, Monkey Island I, Mechwarrior, and Pool of Radiance. I learned about shareware, and played a couple of amazing roguelikes.

1991 also saw a ton of great releases that are still remembered as classics. While I didn’t play them all as soon as they were released, this was clearly a time to be excited. Check out this list of the goodies that came out in 1991 (clearly skewed to my own personal preferences):  Civilization, Gunship 2000, Space Quest IV, Out of This World (1991 for DOS, I’m pretty sure…), Leisure Suit Larry 5, Wing Commander 2, Defender of the Crown, Chuck Yeager’s Air Combat, Eye of the Beholder 2, Might & Magic III: Isles of Terra, Scorched Earth (another one of the awesome shareware games that were really starting to kick butt in this era), Catacomb 3D (the largely unknown predecessor to Wolfenstein 3D), The Adventures of Willy Beamish, Bard’s Tale Construction Set, Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood (okay, nobody but me seemed to have played this one, but I loved it), Falcon 3.0, Lemmings, Police Quest 3, Spellcasting 201, Elite Plus, The Magic Candle II, Twilight: 2000 (again, I seem to be the only one who played it, and I did enjoy it up until the broken finale), Monkey Island 2, Commander Keen IV-VI, Duke Nukem, F-117 Stealth Fighter (Sort of a sequel to or deluxe version of the “F-19” game from a couple of years earlier), and some of the final games of the SSI “Gold Box” D&D series.

By 1992, I was hooked, devouring gaming magazines (mainly Computer Gaming World). The flood of  soon-to-be-classic titles kept coming: Wolfenstein 3D, Aces of the Pacific, Ultima VII, The Magic Candle III, Wizardry 7, Ultima Underworld, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Star Control II, Might & Magic IV (not that I played it back then, but everybody was talking about it), Alone in the Dark, Dune II (the prototype for the RTS genre),  and … well, you get the idea.

So I’m dropping a lot of game names here. The point is (if there is one) that there was a lot happening in this time on the PC. We hadn’t even arrived in the era of true CD-ROM distribution (let alone hardware accelerated 3D, or high-speed Internet outside of the college campus), but the games were already doing some pretty amazing things. And even then, there was some interesting cross-pollination between computer games and the console realm. The indies were beginning to make a good showing for themselves, under the “shareware” term. Games were literally driving hardware sales for the PC – a trend that continued throughout the decade.

It’s not as if the supply of games for the PC has really diminished that much – except for certain genres. Back in early 90’s, RPGs and adventure games were kings. Flight simulators of various kinds were all but a license to print money for the publishers. Civilization took the popular formula of Empire and turned it into one of the biggest games – and biggest franchises – in history. And of course, there was the Space Combat Sim, a genre that really hit its peak in the first half of the decade. But we also saw several games that would be termed “casual” sitting on the shelf next to the “core” games. There was no real distinction. Genres blended and expanded.

And yeah, there were plenty of crap games back then, too. Fortunately they are mostly easy to forget. For the most part, the actual experience of gaming is a lot better now. Besides the massive tech improvements, games today are generally an improvement on those older experiences. They are far easier to install and run, and have a lot fewer issues with configuration or compatibility.  They are generally streamlined in a good way, and much easier to “pick up” and play. They’ve been built with the advantage of hindsight, built upon the foundations created by these earlier games. But in a lot of ways, they’ve also lost a bit of that raw energy and creative experimentation that also characterized the era, in my mind.

That early era of PC gaming was what made me consider making video games my career. I wish I had a better way of tapping into the feelings and energy of that era today.  This was an era that really inspired me. When I think about trying to recapture that “old school” RPG experience, I’m really talking about trying to bottle that feeling.

Was 1991 or 1992 the best year to get started playing PC games? It really worked well for me. Although if you take a look at the indie scene today, with around EIGHT HUNDRED entries into the IGF this year (if you combine standard and student entries – although admittedly many of them are not for the PC), it seems pretty easy to argue that today, twenty years later, things are looking better than ever.

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