PC Gaming in the Early '90s

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Originally Posted by JumpingRyle

A quick google search brings the funny:



Here is a quote from A Black Falcon from April of this year, on this forum:



http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...ers-of-the-80s

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That quote there is about the crash era, as you'd know if you read that thread. Like, 1983-1985 or so. Here I am talking about the period after that, ~1986-199x. The two posts are entirely complimentary and do not contradict eachother. During the crash, most American gamers gave up on gaming, as the industry went down. Those relative few who stayed in played computer or arcade games, so that's where the few developers who survived went. The arcade market was shrinking, as I pointed out, while the computer market was expanding, so more went to computers, apart from longtime arcade devs like Williams/Midway or Atari Games.

Then, console gaming came back thanks to Nintendo and the Japanese games on the NES. Some people, mostly slightly older audiences, continued playing Western computer games, but a whole generation of children grew up on Japanese games, and played few Western games for years. By the early '90s computer game publishers were getting over their aversion to consoles, and after being forced to deal with licensing restrictions (either by choice or through the courts, as with Accolade and Tengen), and American console game development gradually grew. However, computers had a huge lead, and it took many years, and finally Microsoft's entry into the console wars and that budgets in the late '90s were expanding more than the PC gaming userbase was so publishers were looking for new sources of revenues, to wear that down.

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Anyway, you're crazy if you think early DOS games from the 80s had any sort of mass appeal. They appealed to a very specific niche. This is commonly known and I don't know how you can argue otherwise. (Note: I love early DOS games and have no problem with slower games, but I'm not blind enough to see that they didn't have mass appeal). In the words of Sierra Online co-founder Roberta Williams (1999):

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Once again, what American-developed games had more mass appeal than those in the mid or late '80s? There were none. Arcades were fading. American console game development was near-nonexistent except for terrible licensed junk and Tengen arcade ports. The quality end of American game development, apart from those few arcade developers, was almost exclusively in the computer gaming field. There just weren't anywhere near as many American game developers as there would be later, I think...

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Yes, there were a lot of PC games published in the 80s, but almost all of them were essentially homebrew: developed by 1 or 2 guys in their spare time with 0 budget. Calling them "developers" is being generous. The unpolished quality of 99% of games from that era is testament to that. If they were lucky and made a good game, they might it picked up by Origin or Sierra (probably for a few thousand dollars, too). Of course, that's one of the beautiful things about the PC: anybody could make a game! However, major developers/publishers like Atari, Midway, Acclaim, Accolade, EA (after they realized the Amiga wasn't taking off) were not interested in the PC in the late 80s because of its small user base and graphical limitations.

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Atari Games - made arcade games, later supported NES and Genesis (Tengen). Never made computer games themselves, it is true. This was true through the '90s as well.
Atari Consumer - only supported their own consoles and computers of course (2600, 7800, Lynx, Jaguar, Atari ST, Atari 8-bit/XEGS).
Accolade - Started supporting the PC in 1987. Most of their major '80s releases have PC versions as well as other computers (Atari ST, Amiga, Apple II, C64). In 1989-1990 PC games start to outnumber games for the other computers.
Williams/Midway - Exclusively made arcade games until 1995, when they started making console games as well. Midway released very few PC games in the '90s, but they did have a couple. They had some more PC releases in their last few years before closing.
EA - Similar to Accolade, except they were founded several years earlier. Started supporting the PC in 1984. Also like Accolade, it's in 1989 when PC games become the platform with the most releases, but they had PC versions of at least some major releases before that.
Acclaim - Acclaim has to be one of the first console-focused American developers after the crash. They didn't branch out into PC ports of their games until the mid '90s.
Activision - Pre-crash Activision mostly supported consoles, but after the crash they mostly shifted over to computers, though they had a few bad 2600, 7800, and NES releases here and there. Their computer games are scattered across many platforms, but some are on PC. In '92-'93 Activision shifted focus almost entirely to consoles, before returning to the PC in the mid '90s as the PC market continued to expand.

I don't see how this does anything other than prove my points entirely. Even if companies like EA didn't LIKE the PC as much as other computers in the mid '80s, they released PC versions of their important titles anyway because they knew that they had to in order to reach the largest market.

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Do you know how many copies Dungeon Master, released in 1987 and considered a groundbreaking game on the PC, sold in its first year? 40,000! How many did Mario sell? I have a feeling a few (million) more.

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Sure. But Mario is not an American game. It was made in Japan. Have you continued to entirely ignore that my main point right now is about what platforms American game developers were mostly developing for? Or that I've said all along that the NES was the most popular platform overall? But American games barely existed on the NES. There were few European games either, because computers were the primary gaming platform in Europe into the '90s (it was the PS1 that really made console gaming huge there), but Rare made a lot of NES games, and they're European, so maybe Europe actually rivaled the US in number of NES releases mostly because of Rare...

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Please, name some of the amazing action games that were released on the PC in the late 80s.

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They're ports of Japanese games and not exactly American, but Sierra's PC versions of Thexder and Silpheed are pretty good! They are Western ports of Japanese games originally for MSX and such. I don't know '80s PC games as well as I do '90s PC games because we didn't own a computer until early 1992 and I mostly played more recent games, but I know stuff existed. There were also plenty of bad ports of Japanese games as well, such as the awful PC Bionic Commando or Ikari Warriors, but when your choices are those or nothing, I'm sure people chose those! I didn't say "amazing" action games, after all. There are some PC knockoffs of classic arcade games that are perfectly competent, though. I remember playing fine '80s versions of stuff like Space Invaders and Pac-Man on our first computer. I know you're surely dismissing games like those as irrelevant or something, but back then they weren't.

Of course though, for American-developed games, it is true that the '90s saw vastly more Western action games on the PC than the '80s had, exponentially more for sure. It probably also helped when the PC finally won in Europe and European PC games became a thing (in the early to mid '90s), because that meant more US releases of European games than you had seen previously. But even so, the roots for that lie in the '80s. As I said I didn't have a computer in the '80s so I don't know those games as well as I should, but I know that '80s PC action games do exist. Look through Activision's library of '80s PC games, for example. You'll find some action and racing games. Tongue of the Fatman, Apache Strike, Motocross, Deathtrack, sports games like baseball, golf, football, and boxing, Ghostbusters II, Die Hard... sure, it ramps up in the late '80s as I've said all along, but before VGA (or even just EGA) and sound cards became popular, the PC clearly lagged behind other computers for games beyond text stuff. Once sound cards and EGA/VGA graphics happened in the late '80s, PC gaming started taking off. You would not have the PC-dominant situation I saw back in the early '90s without the late '80s laying the groundwork.

Anyway, those slower-paced games were popular too. Sure, of course the PC gaming userbase expanded over time, that is very obvious! But more PC-focused, more strategic and less actioney, games continue to be more popular on PC than on consoles. This has been true ever since the beginning of computer and console gaming. You're saying this as if this is some limiting thing that held the PC (or rather, computer gaming in general ) back, but it isn't at all; it's just a difference. In the mid to late '80s people who wanted the best action games played Japanese console games, or maybe American or Japanese arcade games. People wanted the better strategy or adventure games played PC games. The console audience was probably larger of course, but the PC audience was sizable too, and had most of the American developers in it as well. This was mostly true in the early to mid '90s as well, except that more American publishers started supporting consoles in addition to computers.

When I was mentioning the S3 ViRGE i'm not talking about performance with Windows Direct3D games, i'm talking about DOS mode games. Seriously, the virtues of these cards (fast performance in DOS/2D modes and have a rather good VESA 2.0 BIOS) are often overseen because it was labled as a "3d accelerator" and jokingly "3d decelerator" card. If you wanted to game in Direct3D games, you'd buy a Direct3D accelerator card.

Also as I said, by the time the Saturn and Playstation came out Pentium's had already entered into peoples homes. 100Mhz Pentium could run a true 3D rendered game such as Quake just fine.

Sega Rally Championship only required the following to run:

Code:

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CPU Type: Pentium
CPU Speed: 75 MHz
RAM Required: 16 MB
Hard Disk Space: 30 MB
Graphics Type: SVGA
Graphics Resolution: Multiple Resolutions
Color Depth: True Color

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Daytona USA only required:

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CPU Type: Pentium
CPU Speed: 90 MHz
RAM Required: 8 MB
Hard Disk Space: 30 MB
Graphics Type: SVGA
Graphics Resolution: Multiple Resolutions
Color Depth: 256 Colors

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I had a 90 mhz Pentium that didn't struggle with Quake at all.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

That quote there is about the crash era, as you'd know if you read that thread. Like, 1983-1985 or so. Here I am talking about the period after that, ~1986-199x.

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Originally Posted by A Black Falcon

Of course there are exceptions. Computer gaming has always been popular in the West, and lots of us, including me, grew up on computer games; the only console I owned before 1999 were Game Boys, after all. And late '80s to early '00s PC gaming was AMAZING. But in terms of sales? It was clearly eclipsed by console games. The PC games are just as good, but that's not the point -- the point is about success and how many people were actually playing the games. This is the same for either the '80s or the '90s, except that computer games were far more successful overall in the '90s because of the growing omnipresence of PC compatibles.

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It doesn't matter what the thread is about, you clearly said that PC games were not as successful and popular in the late 80s. I don't know why you are suddenly trying to claim that the PC was some gaming monster back then.

And yes, I understand that Mario is a Japanese game, but that does not matter to developers who are choosing systems to develop for. All they see is the potential market for console vs PC, and console completely and utterly destroyed PC in the late 80s and start of the 90s. That's why we got Genesis exclusives from EA and Acclaim. Released in 1993, Mortal Kombat 2 brought in over $400 million. That's a lot of zeroes. In comparison, the wildly successful Commander Keen on the PC, released in 1991, brought in about $1 million in a year. No, there weren't many North American console developers, but the ones that did exist completely stomped the PC developers at the time in terms of sales.

And, since you may have forgotten, my whole point was that PC gaming was niche until ~1992/3 when Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were released. Sales numbers pretty much confirm this. Yes, there were PC developers, but they operated on a whole lower level from console developers. But with Doom, suddenly id was bringing in $100,000 per DAY in sales. We go from 1991, when John Carmack created one of the first PC games with scrolling (Commander Keen) which didn't hold a candle to a Genesis game graphically, to 2 years later when people could not believe what they were seeing on the screen with Doom. A single game pretty much ushered in the reign of the PC in the mid to late 90s.

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Originally Posted by JumpingRyle

It doesn't matter what the thread is about, you clearly said that PC games were not as successful and popular in the late 80s. I don't know why you are suddenly trying to claim that the PC was some gaming monster back then.

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I don't understand, how can you not recognize that in the late '80s the PC became one of the top platforms of the time, and in the early '90s the best gaming platform ever? Before the late '80s the PC was definitely not quite there yet, but in the late '80s, it was. It got even better afterwards, of course (you keep totally ignoring that I've repeatedly said this, stop that!), but the late '80s had a lot of great stuff for the PC.

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And yes, I understand that Mario is a Japanese game, but that does not matter to developers who are choosing systems to develop for.

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What? Of course it does! Otherwise, you'd have seen lots of great American-made NES games. You don't because developers DO consider things like that. Can you think of any great North American NES games from anyone other than Tengen? Or many European ones from anyone other than Rare? Meanwhile lots of developers and publishers were publishing good and great games on the PC.

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All they see is the potential market for console vs PC, and console completely and utterly destroyed PC in the late 80s and start of the 90s.

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This is a total misreading of everything, but I'm repeating myself...

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That's why we got Genesis exclusives from EA and Acclaim. Released in 1993, Mortal Kombat 2 brought in over $400 million. That's a lot of zeroes. In comparison, the wildly successful Commander Keen on the PC, released in 1991, brought in about $1 million in a year. No, there weren't many North American console developers, but the ones that did exist completely stomped the PC developers at the time in terms of sales.

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Well at least you finally admit it. Several problems, though. First, that game is from 1993, not the '80s. By 1993, the PC gaming market was larger than it was in the '80s, or even 1991, also. Second, Commander Keen was successful, but that series was mostly shareware, not a retail game. I'm sure that retail PC games, with the larger budgets of retail software, were on the whole much more successful than shareware games from tiny teams. Of course, retail PC gaming was dominated by things like strategy games, adventure games, simulators, and the like, genres you're wrongly dismissing, but those games are every bit as important as any other kind of game is!

As I say in that quote there I know that the average console game sold better than the average PC game back then (this is probably still true), but there were many more releases on the PC, which helps balance things out. It'd be very interesting to look at the total size of the market for consoles vs. computers back then; when you just look at the sales charts the fact that console games sold better is obvious, but that obscures how many more games were releasing on PCs. That probably balances it out somewhat, but I don't know how much.

Anyway, enough people were playing PC games for there to be a strong market backed by most of the major developers of the day. If you were right, all of the major Western publishers would have followed Acclaim's lead in the early '90s and go to consoles. They did not do that until the '00s. This shows you that they knew where their audience was -- on PCs -- and that until Microsoft started pushing and game budgets expanded too much for PC sales to cover them, most developers were content sticking with the platform they knew, and with the fanbase who liked those kinds of games the best.

Combining several of my points above, in the '80s, most American publishers paid little attention to the NES. Sure it was popular, but they didn't want to deal with those restrictions, or make those kinds of games. But in the early '90s, the lure of money drew them in. But they looked at sales. They could see that most of the top selling console games were Japanese. So, publishers like Interplay did make console games, but they put more money and attention into PC games through the '90s. Clayfighter or Boogerman can't have had budgets like Descent, Stonekeep, or Baldur's Gate. Other publishers like Sierra didn't make console games in the '90s. Blizzard started out as a console developer, but once they had the success to switch, went over to PCs, where they stayed.

And they could look at sales, too. Yes, Mario for the NES sold tens of millions of copies, but what were the best-selling Western console games in the '80s and '90s? Looking at Wikipedia's (definitely incomplete) list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_selling_video_games , I see only one Western NES game, Rare's R.C. Pro-Am at 2.3 million copies. Donkey Kong Country on the SNES sold 9 million, which might be the most for a Western console game that decade; that edges Goldeneye by a million. On the Genesis, the best-selling Western game listed is Aladdin at 4 million. Most PC games sold much less than that, but the best-selling PC game of the decade, Myst, sold 6.3 million copies, showing that PC sales could get close to console sales. Myst is quite likely the best-selling North American game of the '90s as well -- remember, DKC and Goldeneye are British. Sure, not every PC game could be Myst, as all the people publishing Myst-clones learned to their chagrin, but it shows how you are wrong when you assume that the American PC market was not large. Oh yeah, and Myst, of course, released in 1993. You're significantly under-estimating the size of the Western PC gaming market in the early '90s.

Of course, the effect of all those developers going over to consoles was that in the '00s PC game variety plunged, and many of its top genres became shells of their former selves as developers all rushed to consolize and simplify their games. Sad stuff.

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And, since you may have forgotten, my whole point was that PC gaming was niche until ~1992/3 when Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were released. Sales numbers pretty much confirm this. Yes, there were PC developers, but they operated on a whole lower level from console developers. But with Doom, suddenly id was bringing in $100,000 per DAY in sales. We go from 1991, when John Carmack created one of the first PC games with scrolling (Commander Keen) which didn't hold a candle to a Genesis game graphically, to 2 years later when people could not believe what they were seeing on the screen with Doom. A single game pretty much ushered in the reign of the PC in the mid to late 90s.

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Oh yeah, I might have been kind of trying to forget this because of how flawed a point it is... Yes, Doom was a big hit. It led to the FPS genre boom, which was a big deal first on PC but then also on consoles in the mid '90s and beyond. But Doom, as the game which convinced people to develop for the PC? Of course not! Almost all the big American publishers were ALREADY PC-focused. They couldn't get more PC-focused than they already were. Yes, there was a lot of growth of the PC gaming industry in the early '90s, and yes, Doom was one part of that, but it was only a part. The most important part was the decreasing costs of buying computers; in the early to mid '90s PC costs started decreasing significantly, and it became much easier than it had been before to get a gaming-capable PC. The growth of CDs helped PCs as well. PCs were popular in the floppy disk era of course, but I don't think that there's any question that they were more popular in the CD era. "Multimedia PCs", meaning CD technology, were a huge thing. And with CDs came the best-selling American game of the decade, Myst. The FPS genre sparked by id helped PCs too for sure, but you are quite wrong if you think that that was the driving force behind the growth of PC gaming in the '90s. That growth started back in the late '80s, before Wolf 3D, and continued after it.

Apparently the original Starcraft has sold over 11 million copies worldwide, but I'm sure Myst sold more copies in the '90s, and quite likely more in the US as well given how SC was a smash hit in Korea in the '00s. Also I don't know if that number includes the sales of the expansion pack or not... if it's SC+BW+the collection including both, then you can't directly compare that to a game like Myst which was just a single release. Regardless though SC is also an American game, and including all sales, looking at platforms individually, looks like it outsold all North American-developed console games from before the 7th generation. The Sims, at 16 million sold, did this as well. It wasn't until the PS360 that you finally see American console games selling more than that. Regardless, I said what I did before (about consoles being more successful) because since there are so many more games on the PC, average sales are lower, so console games dominate the charts. But the problem is, as this paragraph shows, those were mostly Japanese console games -- and developers absolutely do care about what other developers in their region are making. This is why Japanese developers today mostly make cellphone and handheld games and abandoned the console market, or why Western developers have never taken handhelds seriously. People look at their home region, and what developers where they are are making, first.

So, sales of PC games weren't anywhere near that in the '80s, but they didn't have to be; all they had to be for the PC to be one of or the most popular platforms for development in the region was competitive to the sales of Western console games. And honestly, Rare aside, that's a bar I think they often met.

@A Black Falcon

In the 80's, PC [i.e. IBM PC] gaming was dead, like... dead dead, it was extremely niche and that includes here in the USA. Most of the games released for IBM PC's in the 80's were "PC Booter" games, there were roughly around 211 PC booter games released in total.

Gaming was booming for Commodore 64 computers though... thousands of games came out for the popular Commodore 64. However the Commodore 64 was not colloquially called a PC, if you owned a "PC" it meant you owned an IBM or IBM Compatible, period. It wasn't until around '88 - '89 that PC gaming market was starting to really stir-up. It wasn't until the very early 90's that PC gaming absolutely exploded onto the scene, and mainly the shareware business model is to thank for that.

Ports of games in the 80s to PC we're absolutely horrible. Download Castlevania and TMNT for PC... yikes is all I can say.

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Originally Posted by Gogogadget

Ports of games in the 80s to PC we're absolutely horrible. Download Castlevania and TMNT for PC... yikes is all I can say.

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I have TMNT, bought it back in the early '90s. It's bad, but so is the NES version! If not for that stupid jump you can't get past (in the US version, the one I have; it was fixed in the European release apparently), it'd be not too bad compared to the NES original... the addition of saving is nice. The PC port of Castlevania looks worse, because that's a better game... same goes for Contra.

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Originally Posted by Chaniyth

@A Black Falcon

In the 80's, PC [i.e. IBM PC] gaming was dead, like... dead dead, it was extremely niche and that includes here in the USA. Most of the games released for IBM PC's in the 80's were "PC Booter" games, there were roughly around 211 PC booter games released in total.

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Dead? Not dead, growing! The PC became the most popular computer in '85, but sure, it wasn't the most popular gaming computer until somewhere in 1988-92, I agree with that. But there were games on the PC released in the mid '80s. It was a supported platform, and most major computer game makers made PC games. And over time, the number of PC games compared to other platforms gradually rose, until at the end of the decade the PC was probably the most-supported computer in the US, gaming-wise.

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Gaming was booming for Commodore 64 computers though... thousands of games came out for the popular Commodore 64. However the Commodore 64 was not colloquially called a PC, if you owned a "PC" it meant you owned an IBM or IBM Compatible, period. It wasn't until around '88 - '89 that PC gaming market was starting to really stir-up. It wasn't until the very early 90's that PC gaming absolutely exploded onto the scene, and mainly the shareware business model is to thank for that.

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Sure, in the mid '80s the C64 was huge. As you say though, it faded in the later '80s in favor of the PC. The same thing happened to the Apple II, which is the non-PC computer I remember best.

Lol @ this thread.

From Wikipedia.

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As graphics boards of the time (1994) were not up to par with the system's needs, a pass-through using a VGA feature connector link was used, thus reserving an area on screen to be used by the 3DO Blaster card's output (on the Windows environment - running under DOS, full-screen was the only option).

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I suppose there was a little length of time until the Voodoo came out during which the PC couldn't match the quality of the hardware assisted 3D graphics of the Playstation, Saturn and 3DO. This speaks also to how monumentally computers changed from 1990-1999.

That's kind of interesting, the hardware acceleration we depend on everyday originated on specialized console hardware (and arcade hardware), not PC expansion cards.

No other technical advance came about like that.

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Originally Posted by Chaniyth

Why are you comparing a 1992 PC to a 1995 console?

Yes, in 1992 PC's could handle most 2D games that were on par with 2D Sega Saturn games.

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What? No. Even if you had a SVGA card with fast ram, vesa modes, running VLB slot, is still all boiled down to CPU usage. Except for a few windows 'accelerator' cards that started popping up and even then no DOS game used any said blitting features. Most action games didn't even have multiplane layers. That was just more overlay style blitting that the CPU had to contend with. And that means no abusing regs/memory layout for assisted scrolling either; 100% all out software scrolling at that point. So yeah, no - it wasn't even close to Saturn in the 2D department. Not for 2D objects on screen or the amount of parallax and multilayers the Saturn could do. Even the SNES was a head this department. Even with the fastest setup (DX-2 66mhz did hit the consumer market until late '92).

I built PC's from early 92 onward. Not all PCs were created equal. You wanted a top of the line PC, you had it built or built it yourself. Pre-build stuff ran 16bit graphic cards and 16bit controllers, no or slow cache (though cache modules came later on), slow ram with lots of wait states, etc. Slow setups; there were no 'gamer' PCs back then that I ever saw. A good setup had VLB slots with VLB graphic cards with fast vram, VLB IDE cards, fast cache, memory with almost no wait states, etc.

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Originally Posted by Blades

Lol @ this thread.

From Wikipedia.



I suppose there was a little length of time until the Voodoo came out during which the PC couldn't match the quality of the hardware assisted 3D graphics of the Playstation, Saturn and 3DO. This speaks also to how monumentally computers changed from 1990-1999.

That's kind of interesting, the hardware acceleration we depend on everyday originated on specialized console hardware (and arcade hardware), not PC expansion cards.

No other technical advance came about like that.

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That's not really true, the 3DO Blaster doesn't 3d accelerate PC games. It just runs 3DO games in a window on a PC.

A 1992 PC (except for the most ridiculously expensive), couldn't keep up with a Sega Genesis, much less a Sega Saturn. Parallax scrolling was a massive performance killer, those horrible 16 colour Apogee games only had it because the movement was ultra choppy, they "parallax scrolled" about as well as YS3 on a turbografx.

Yep. It wasn't until 1995 that PCs could pull off smooth platformers with console quality graphics. While I'm not too familiar with the game, the Rayman port to PC looks like it's no slouch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIewoDj36yw

The port of Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure for Windows 95 was advertised to run just like the Genesis version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t67UCPKJe6o

Note that both games needed at least a 60 Mhz Pentium CPU, which cost a hefty chunk of cash back then.

To illustrate what a difference a single year can make, here's Jazz Jackrabbit from 1994, which kinda looks like a souped-up Amiga game from 1991 (I've always hated the colors and art in this game).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxcdrkh0pFY

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Originally Posted by magicalsoundshower

Yep. It wasn't until 1995 that PCs could pull off smooth platformers with console quality graphics.

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How about the 1993 DOS port of Flashback?



Or Blackthorne from 1994? (note: the 32X version was released a year later with enhanced graphics)

Flick screen platformers even a ZX Spectrum can do ;).