History

Main article: History of video games

Early growth

Spacewar!, developed for the PDP-1 in 1961, is often credited as being the first ever computer game. The game consisted of two player-controlled spaceships maneuvering around a central star, each attempting to destroy the other.

Although personal computers only became popular with the development of the microprocessor, mainframe and minicomputers, computer gaming has existed since at least the 1960s. One of the first computer games was developed in 1961, when MIT students Martin Graetz and Alan Kotok, with MIT employee Steve Russell, developed Spacewar! on a PDP-1 computer used for statistical calculations.^[3]

The first generation of PC games were often text adventures or interactive fiction, in which the player communicated with the computer by entering commands through a keyboard. The first text-adventure, Adventure, was developed for the PDP-11 by Will Crowther in 1976, and expanded by Don Woods in 1977.^[4] By the 1980s, personal computers had become powerful enough to run games like Adventure, but by this time, graphics were beginning to become an important factor in games. Later games combined textual commands with basic graphics, as seen in the SSI Gold Box games such as Pool of Radiance, or Bard's Tale.

By the mid-1970s, games were developed and distributed through hobbyist groups and gaming magazines, such as Creative Computing and later Computer Gaming World. These publications provided game code that could be typed into a computer and played, encouraging readers to submit their own software to competitions.^[5]

Industry crash

Main article: Video game crash of 1983

As the video game market became flooded with poor-quality games created by numerous companies attempting to enter the market, and over-production of high profile releases such as the Atari 2600 adaptation of E.T. and Pacman grossly underperformed, the popularity of personal computers for education rose dramatically. In 1983, consumer interest in video games dwindled to historical lows, as interest in computer games and the MTV-fueled music industry rose.^[6]

The effects of the crash were largely limited to the console market, as established companies such as Atari posted record losses over subsequent years. Conversely, the home computer market boomed, as sales of low-cost colour computers such as the Commodore 64 rose to record highs and developers such as Electronic Arts benefited from increasing interest in the platform.^[6]

The console market experienced a resurgence in the United States with the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System. In Europe, computer gaming continued to boom for many years after.,,^[6]

New genres

Increasing adoption of the computer mouse, driven partially by the success of games such as the highly successful King's Quest series, and high resolution bitmap displays allowed the industry to include increasingly high-quality graphical interfaces in new releases. Meanwhile, the Commodore Amiga computer achieved great success in the market from its release in 1985, contributing to the rapid adoption of these new interface technologies.^[7]

Wolfenstein 3D, released as shareware by id Software in 1992, is widely regarded as having popularised the first person shooter genre of computer games.

Further improvements to game artwork were made possible with the introduction of the first sound cards, such as AdLib's Music Synthesizer Card, in 1987. These cards allowed IBM PC compatible computers to produce complex sounds using FM synthesis, where they had previously been limited to simple tones and beeps. However, the rise of the Creative Labs Sound Blaster card, which featured much higher sound quality due to the inclusion of a PCM channel and digital signal processor, led AdLib to file for bankruptcy in 1992.

The year before, id Software had produced one of the first first-person shooter games, Hovertank 3D, which was the company's first in their line of highly influential games in the genre. The same team went on to develop Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, which helped to popularize the genre, kick-starting a genre that would become one of the highest-selling in modern times.^[8] The game was originally distributed through the shareware distribution model, allowing players to try a limited part of the game for free but requiring payment to play the rest, and represented one of the first uses of texture mapping graphics in a popular game, along with Ultima Underworld.^[9]

While leading Sega and Nintendo console systems kept their CPU speed at 3-7 MHz, the 486 PC processor ran much faster, allowing it to perform many more calculations per second. The 1993 release of Doom on the PC was a breakthrough in 3D graphics, and was soon ported to various game consoles in a general shift toward greater realism.^[10]

Many early PC games included extras such as the peril-sensitive sunglasses that shipped with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. These extras gradually became less common, but many games were still sold in the traditional over-sized boxes that used to hold the extra "feelies". Today, such extras are usually found only in Special Edition versions of games, such as Battlechests from Blizzard .^[11]

Contemporary gaming