IBM did not design its Personal Computer for games. The machine it launched in 1981 came with a monochrome text display or the Color Graphics Adapter, whose best colour mode showed 320 by 200 pixels in four colours. Its only sound was a small speaker meant to beep when something was wrong at start-up. PC Review remembered it in 1992 as “nothing but a business machine with all of the glamour of a small gerbil”. Yet by the late 1990s the PC was where Doom, Quake and Half-Life were made and played. It got there in a way no console could. Nobody owned the platform, so players upgraded it a card at a time, and publishers had to support whatever combination of graphics, sound and memory each buyer had put together.
Fast facts
- IBM PC: 1981, with MDA and CGA graphics and a beeper for sound
- Graphics: EGA, 16 colours (1985); VGA, 256 colours at 320×200 (1987), the standard for games by 1991
- Sound: the Ad Lib music card, then Creative Labs’ Sound Blaster (1989), which added digitised sound
- 3D: 3Dfx Interactive’s Voodoo chipset, shown in 1996, began the age of add-in 3D accelerator cards
- Distribution: shareware in the late 1980s and 1990s; Steam from 2003
A business machine
The PC sold to offices, and games came along with it. Some early ones became tests of the machine itself. When other companies began selling IBM-compatible computers, buyers checked whether a clone was truly compatible by running Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft’s Flight Simulator; a 1984 advertisement in Byte listed “Games like Flight Simulator” next to the business programs. IBM itself commissioned King’s Quest from Sierra On-Line to show off the colour graphics of its home model, the PCjr, in 1984.
Every new graphics standard kept the old ones working, Fabien Sanglard explains in his history of Wolfenstein 3D. The Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) of 1985 offered 16 colours, and the Video Graphics Array (VGA) of 1987 a mode of 320 by 200 pixels in 256 colours. By 1991 VGA was the standard. It made the PC a good-looking games machine but not an easy one to program: VGA could not double-buffer its display, and its pixels were not square.
Hardware became something a game could sell. Computer Gaming World named Origin’s Wing Commander its game of the year in 1991, saying it had “singlehandedly encouraged more readers to upgrade their current computer systems than any other product we can remember”.
Sound had to be sold to publishers
Most PCs of the 1980s had nothing but the speaker. It could produce only square waves, and Sanglard calls the result “a bunch of ‘beeps’ which were more annoying than anything else”.
The first sound card that games supported widely came from Ad Lib, “a Canadian company”, as Paul Rigby told the story in PC Review in 1992. Its card made “rather pleasant sounds” with an FM synthesis chip, “produced, many suspected, by Yamaha (although Ad Lib always scratched the name off the chip for some reason)”. It was in fact Yamaha’s YM3812, the OPL2. Selling the card meant selling it to software houses first. Ad Lib “had the audacity to approach the large American games software houses, and ask them to support this relatively cheap sound card by inserting Ad Lib drivers into their games, the US being the stronghold of PC games players at that time.” Sanglard names Sierra as the publisher that did most to spread it.
Competition followed. Roland, Rigby wrote, sped past Ad Lib “like a Ferrari passes a Morris Minor”, at a price. Creative Labs’ Sound Blaster of 1989 used the same Yamaha chip, so it played Ad Lib music, and added a converter for digitised sound and speech. It became the standard. Even so, Sanglard notes, most PCs in 1991 still had no sound card at all, though Creative sold a million Sound Blasters that year.
Making it work
Freedom of choice had a cost, and buyers paid it in set-up time. The sound cards, Sanglard notes, each had “different capabilities and expectations”, and a game had to cope with all of them. Memory was the hardest part. A PC running DOS could address only 1 MB directly, and using more needed one of two incompatible drivers, EMS or XMS. Sanglard describes customers who had paid for megabytes of expensive memory and could not understand why the game they had just bought refused to start with “Not enough memory”; id Software had to publish an explanation of the “640KB barrier” with Wolfenstein 3D.
Shareware and the shooters
The PC’s games did not all come from shops. Scott Miller’s Apogee sold games as shareware: the first episode was free to copy, and players paid for the rest. It published id Software’s Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D that way, and id used the same model to publish Doom itself in 1993. Doom also kept its levels in files anyone could replace, and started a boom in player-made levels (see Modding).
3D cards
In 1996 3Dfx Interactive showed its Voodoo graphics chipset, designed for PCs and arcade machines. Edge saw it demonstrated in the spring of 1996, and reported 3Dfx’s claim of a fill rate of “more than 45 megapixels [45 million]” a second. Graphics cards built on it took the work of drawing textured 3D polygons off the processor, and Quake, released the same year, gained a version, GLQuake, that used such cards.
Online, mods and Steam
Quake let any owner run a server and play over the internet. Valve’s Half-Life (1998) came with a development kit, and its players made Counter-Strike with it, one of several mods that ended up as Valve’s own games (see Modding to Industry). To update Counter-Strike, Valve built Steam, which came out of testing in September 2003 and grew into the dominant shop for PC games. In February 2022 Valve began shipping the Steam Deck, a handheld PC; Wireframe reported early buyers delighted to have “their existing Steam library to hand” on the move.
Sources
- Fabien Sanglard, Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D (2nd edition, 2018), chapters 1 and 2: the 1991 PC’s obstacles (no double buffering, the PC speaker’s “beeps”, non-square pixels, a fragmented sound market); MDA and CGA (1981), EGA (1985) and VGA (1987); BIOS video modes; the PC speaker; Ad Lib, Sierra and King’s Quest IV; the YM3812 (OPL2); the Sound Blaster (1989); a million Sound Blasters sold in 1991 and most PCs without a sound card; EMS, XMS and “Not enough memory”.
- Paul Rigby, “Ad Lib Gold”, PC Review issue 7, May 1992, p. 26: the PC as a business machine, Ad Lib’s card and the scratched-off chip, the approach to American publishers, Roland, and the Sound Blaster.
- Byte vol. 9 no. 5, May 1984, p. 206: Visual Technology advertisement (“Games like Flight Simulator”).
- Computer Gaming World issue 88, November 1991: 1991 Games of the Year, Wing Commander, as cited in the Wing Commander entry.
- Edge issue 33, June 1996, news: 3Dfx Interactive’s Voodoo graphics chipset for PCs and arcades, its demonstrations at ECTS and its claimed fill rate.
- PC Zone issue 60, February 1998, graphics card test: GLQuake on Voodoo cards.
- Wireframe issue 61, March 2022, p. 20: the first Steam Deck units.
- The King’s Quest, Shareware, Apogee Software, Doom, Quake, Half-Life and Steam entries, and the period sources they cite, for the IBM PCjr commission, Apogee’s shareware model, GLQuake, the Half-Life development kit and Steam’s launch in September 2003.