Starflight 12 inch6/9/2023 Throughout the book, we’ll alternate between sections covering dozens of games in brief and singular titles that set the stage for the PC to take over the market.Įven more significant than narrowing down the book’s focus was deciding where to cap off the timeline. I do mention many others as well, fitting them in context as the story goes on. By themselves, these could easily comprise a lifetime of gaming I’ve returned to many of them time and again even outside of working on this project. Nonetheless, after a very strenuous and considered process involving copious amounts of game-playing, coffee, guilt, and mental agita, I narrowed it down, but it’s still more than 100 key titles. Besides, my editor would have murdered me. I went with some of the most popular and significant, but given these criteria, there easily could have been hundreds, and I wouldn’t want to write or read that kind of encyclopedia. I can hear it now as some readers go through the book: Where is ? Why did you give this game two pages and this other one only a sentence? Making these decisions was the single toughest thing about structuring this book. The last, much shorter Chapter 10 closes the story. Chapters 2–9 each roughly correspond with one year. Nearly all the games I cover in depth were released during this time frame. We’ll look in detail at the biggest and most significant MS-DOS games that illustrate the progression of the platform in tandem with hardware and OS development, as well as key innovations that changed computer gaming forever and still resonate today. Instead, most of this book focuses on 1987–1994, when PC gaming found itself-and everyone else found it. We’ll cover this in the first chapter-it’s vital to understand how the stage was set, and we’ll detail a few key early titles that became a direct part of the story of PC gaming-but early IBM PCs and compatibles weren’t ideal gaming machines, so we’ll move through the period at a fast pace. Make no mistake: The years 1981 through 1986 were crucial for PC gaming, and hundreds of good titles came out. I’ve written other books about vintage computers and gaming, but this is the first time I included the range of years I’m covering in the subtitle. The story of computer gaming is complex, and to take an effective stab at explaining the dominance of the PC requires some zooming in and sharpening of focus. It’s both a celebration of the most sophisticated and significant DOS titles and a map to show how the PC went from one of the worst gaming platforms to the best. Why did this happen? How did it happen? What caused the PC to start as one voice among a dozen and to, eventually, dominate the industry for 30 years and counting? Starflight: How the PC and DOS Exploded Computer Gaming 1987–1994 tells the story of what it was like to play games then and how the hardware evolved to make it possible. All other competitors either disappeared soon after (the long-running Apple II and Commodore 64, and the newer 16-bit Commodore Amiga and Atari ST) or stayed niche forever (the Mac). By 1990, the PC had become the default game development platform-a title it still holds today. ![]() Suddenly, the PC was no longer a strange, vast land of overpriced business machines. The PC platform gained faster processors, better graphics, and sound cards, spurring new kinds of games matching and even exceeding what was possible on competing systems. Many game developers started with home computers and only later ported their best titles to the PC. Most people bought one for work and played video games on it as an afterthought, if ever. ![]() But it also cost much more, and it had relatively rudimentary graphics and sound capabilities compared with the 8-bit machines, which had dedicated processors for these tasks. With a 16-bit processor, it was much more powerful than popular home computers such as the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64. ![]() IBM didn’t introduce its own personal computer until 1981. But ask anyone what kind of computer they play games on now, and chances are it’s a Windows PC-or, to use the original terminology, an IBM-compatible PC. Back in the late 1970s, the Apple II and other 8-bit systems kickstarted the home computer revolution. This wasn’t always the case, and early PCs had little to do with gaming. ![]() Some play on Macs or Linux, but the majority are on Windows at least, that’s where all the cutting-edge titles show up first. Most people today play computer games on Windows PCs.
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