INNOVATIVE GAMES, BLEEDING EDGE TECHNOLOGY AND NEW WAYS TO PLAY WITH OR AGAINST OTHER PLAYERS DEFINED WHAT IT MEANT TO BE A PC GAMER IN THE NINETIES, BUT WHAT WAS IT THAT MADE PERSONAL COMPUTERS – AND OF COURSE WINDOWS – THE LEADING PLATFORM?
hichever way you look at it, the Nineties was rife with technological advances for the games industry as a whole, and while some might point to the Playstation, 3D graphics in general or the burgeoning internet as some of the biggest leaps, the PC was at the forefront of this sudden shift in opportunities for gaming. The start of the decade looked completely different by the end, with well-known names like CPC, Spectrum and Amstrad seeing relative success at the turn of the decade only to be cast aside in favour of the behemoth that was Windows and PC gaming. “The PC was definitely not the hardware platform of choice for game makers or players,” explains Louis Castle, one of the founders of Westwood Studios and a developer that defined a large part of PC gaming in the Nineties. “As the PC became the dominant platform for home computing, game makers could not ignore the audience size.”
This was the key reason that PC gaming began to become so popular early on in the Nineties, because where Atari and Sinclair and the like all focused solely on gaming, Microsoft instead targeted a more well-rounded, functional and capable home computer. As those numbers grew, so too did developer interest in the platform and there were some benefits that came with it. “Windows owes a good deal of gaming platform success to Chris Hecker who created the original Wing libraries, which
allowed games to access some of the hardware acceleration that was built into PCS to make Windows be more performant," says Louis. "Direct Draw and the whole Directx Suite of
APIS followed, which allowed PC gaming to happen.” With these APIS, a lot of the development heavy lifting could be handled natively on PC that meant developing on PC – and its hodge-podge of potential hardware – didn’t require so much effort spent on compatibility.
Admittedly there were other areas that needed work for the PC platform to take off, so when IBM released its video graphics array (VGA) at the turn of the decade, supporting 256 colours rather than the previous 16 colours, the PC could really start being taken seriously. “Until then, PC couldn’t really compete on a graphics level,” says David Brevik, the man behind one of the decade's biggest releases: Diablo. “It just wasn’t considered to be much of a platform until that point. But it wasn’t long after this, with the advent of the very first 3D cards that came out, and that was right around the time of Quake. You had the 3dfx cards that could do 3D, polygonal rendering.” This new hardware opened up great potential for the PC platform, but David points instead to the algorithms that could better utilise these new 3D cards as the most important aspect that turned PC gaming into the leading platform for visual fidelity. “Especially things like the BSP tree from John Carmack,” adds David, “and being able to draw faked 3D things with Doom and true 3D polygons in Quake on a high frame rate on a computer … Those kinds of things were the biggest influences on PC gaming in the Nineties.”
And on top of all this was this newfangled ‘internet’ thingy coming into prominence, which didn’t just enable PCS to send emails and browse the web, but even play games with other players in real-time. Neverwinter Nights (1991) was the first online RPG that used graphics, however primitive they may have been, to allow players to connect to others within the game. It was monumental for gaming, and a concept that was used further and further until the seminal release of the first ‘true’ MMO, Everquest, in 1999. “A wave of consumers now had access to the internet, which transformed the way multiplayer games could operate,” says Louis. “Prior to Windows 95, getting any game to work on the internet was a challenge. Our game Monopoly used the Windows 95 internet APIS to have a multiplayer launch event in Japan, the US and Europe.” It’s hard to imagine if the likes of Quake, Diablo, Starcraft and the RTS genre in general would have had the massive appeal they did if it wasn’t for the opportunities that the internet presented to PC gamers – and in that sense it was likely the key reason for the Nineties being seen as the Golden Age of PC gaming. “Being able to do multiplayer gaming was a huge factor and the big difference maker for PCS,” adds David, “and consoles were way behind on that.”