A Look At How Far PC Gaming Has Come

Bit-tech is running a feature examining the progress PC games have made over the past couple decades. The article highlights aspects of modern games we often take for granted or nitpick, and compares them to earlier games in which such features were implemented poorly or not at all. Quoting: "Doom's legacy is still being felt today in fact and it's a fair bet that you can take any shooter off a shelf, from America’s Army to Zeno Clash, examine it, and list a dozen things that those games owe to Doom. Things like the wobble of the guns and the on-screen feedback that tells you which direction you are being shot from — these were things that id Software invented. On the other hand, from a story perspective, Doom was absolutely rubbish. You start in a room, no idea what’s going on and you are surrounded by demons. You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all — something modern games would get heavily slated for doing. Yet the idea that plot was optional caught on and the same flaw was replicated in other games of the era, such as Quake and (to a lesser extent) Duke Nukem 3D. There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."

Comments

Doom

[Burnhard]

This guy goes all the way back to Doom. It's almost as if he was, you know, in his mid-twenties!

Re:Doom

[slim]

I dunno. You're absolutely right, and yet... I think DOOM! was probably the first time I perceived a PC as a proper gaming machine.

I mean, Wolfenstein was impressive, and in retrospect (I didn't play it much) a great game -- but it was very much a matter of "well, we've got this PC for business apps, I can make it play this game". At that time, if you had games in mind when you bought a computer, you got an Amiga. Or a console.

Prior to DOOM!, most decent PC games were available for Amiga / Atari ST, with better sound and graphics. Wolfenstein looked like a poor Amiga game.

DOOM! though, came out just as VGA was becoming mainstream, and sound cards were becoming available and affordable. Most PCs didn't have a sound card, and you'd add one as an afterthought, often to improve your DOOM! experience. It looked *amazing* in comparison to an Amiga game, and that was a first.

OTOH the article's author should still consider the 25 years of non-PC videogaming heritage leading up to DOOM!.

Re:Doom

[Canazza]

It's not so much as a history of PC gaming, but a history of PC FPSes. It makes only a passing mention of other genres, like platforming (Braid, which, ironically, was released on consoles first) and based adventure games. It makes mention of hybrid FPS/RPG games like System Shock, Deus Ex and Bioshock, but no matter what genre the guy is talking about he always winds up back at an FPS.

Where are the RTSes, like Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Total Annihilation? Where are the God Games, Civ, Black and White, Evil Genius? Totally ignored. RPGs are mentioned in passing and the main focus was on MMO vs MUD rather than the likes of Diablo and Baldurs Gate.

as for Gun wobble, that may have been an ID invention, but I'd quite like to know who first put a gun in the players right hand, rather than in the middle bottom.

Re:Doom

[cafard]

Prior to DOOM!, most decent PC games were available for Amiga / Atari ST, with better sound and graphics.

A few years before that, my Amiga/Atari buddies were already salivating when i could play Wing Commander II, Falcon 3.0 or Civilization.

I'll grant you that Doom put the final nail in the coffin, but the PC had already taken the edge for high-end quality games when it came out.

Re:Doom

[The Grim Reefer2]

What about Myst? I'd say it was a pretty significant PC game in it's day.

Re:Doom

[PopeRatzo]

...Total Annihilation?

Man, I loved that game. And it taught me how to spell "Annihilation", which is no small feat. So if I ever have to write something with the word "annihilation" in it, I'm ready.

You can't say computer games aren't educational.

Re:Doom

[PopeRatzo]

Almost everything traces back to the original Atari console

Actually, everything traces back to a rock and a stick. Or in the case of the Inca, a head and a stick.

Re:Doom

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure you've seen it; even played it, but perhaps not enough attention has been given to it yet:

http://www.springrts.com/

The guys started out with the Total Annihilation game, built an open-source implementation of the engine so you could play it with the original game-packs, and then went on to 'generalize' the engine somewhat so that you can create other 'games' for it.

In one word: AWESOME. All that was good with TA (gameplay) and all that is good with modern graphics (3D, shaders, realistic water, nice explosions, deformable terrain.. etc).

Check it out, if you havent yet.
(ofcourse there's linux binaries)

Re:Doom

[mdwh2]

Indeed, I feel old. But wait - actually on the first page, he goes all the way back to Wolfenstein!

I also love this ill-defined statement that he starts the

The father of modern gaming is, I hope we can all agree, Doom.

So like, any game before Doom is too old to be "modern", but any game after Doom isn't the "father", as it didn't come "first" (it's an "Apple first" - first, except for all the ones before it).

I presume he means the first FPS, though he's still wrong (e.g., Wolfenstein).

One could just as easily declare Quake to be the father of modern gaming. Or I don't know - Civilization or Alien Breed 3D.

He goes onto say:

It took us from the age when games were monochrome, squinty affairs played by people with milkbottles for spectacles, to a time when it was actually cool to spend ages hooking up a modem connection between two PCs

Complete nonsense! Why does someone who obviously has no idea of the history of computer games (as if he was in his mid-20s, as you say) get to be a tech writer? By the early 1980s, games were leaving the monochrome era.

Re:Doom

[hairyfeet]

I don't know about that. Sure Doom was nice, but it was the original Quake that had everybody I know crowded around a monitor going "oooh!". From the awesome graphics, to the soundtrack by NiN, to the fricking huge levels with lots of secrets to find, Quake was the one that had all my friends rushing out to buy PCs and Voodoo cards.

So while Doom got many folks to try a PC for the first time, in fact I got my first Intel PC from a guy who had last year's top o' the line P-100MHz and gave it to me for the $150 he owed me because it would only run Doom "stock" and gave him an excuse to get a tricked out gamer rig, It was Quake that had folks running out and shelling out what was serious money at the time for gaming PCs. Hell I would say that Quake and the Voodoo is what created the whole idea of gaming PCs, as a stock business rig just wouldn't give you the "oooh!" factor in that game.

And look at how far we progressed thanks to everyone wanting the "oooh!" factor. In a five year period I went from that P-100 to a P233Mhz, a PII-400MHz, a P3-650Mhz, a P3-733Mhz, to a P3-1100Mhz which I still keep around as a Nettop. Lets be honest-Windows and the office apps of the day certainly didn't use anywhere near that much juice, and even today that 1100Mhz with Win2K and MS Office 2K makes a good little Net appliance, but of course if you want to game it just don't cut it, hence the dual core AMD with 8Gb of RAM and another 1Gb on the GPU I have for gaming. And that can all be traced back to Quake, which even today is still damned fun to break out. While Doom may have implanted the idea of 3D gaming in the heads of the masses, I would argue that Quake drove that idea home with all the power of a nailgun and made it a "must have" for the masses.

Re:Doom

[Chaos Incarnate]

People try to credit Doom as the first 3D first-person shooter (where Wolf3D was decidedly 2D). They tend to forget that Doom's verticality was faked, and it wasn't until Quake that we got a true 3D FPS.

Re:Doom

[hairyfeet]

41 and started on a VIC-20 myself. Remember when Shatner had his TJ Hooker hair and was touting how the VIC was "more than just games"? While I admit I though the original Doom looked nice, it was Quake where I went "There is NO WAY that is running in somebody's house. That is like....some sort of super arcade machine!". And of course then came one kick ass after another, but I'll never forget everyone dropping their jaws over the original Unreal. That opening screen with the 3D pass over the castle...wow. We just sat there letting that thing run for a good 5 minutes just watching it.

Of course to show my age the first game in the arcade that really made my jaw drop was when I went to see Return of the Jedi in theaters and there was the original wire frame Star Wars machine, complete with Obi Wan telling you to use the force. I thought back then that we would NEVER get anything that good in our homes, and sure enough it was over a decade before we saw that kind of 3D in the comfort of our living rooms, and that was thanks to Quake making 3D accelerators mandatory. Like I said, any halfway decent office machine could play Doom, but to get the "ooh" factor in Quake you HAD TO get a 3D gaming card, and thus an industry was born.

Remember how quickly after Quake that reviews were talking about how a game ONLY had software acceleration, with the reviewers looking down their nose at anything that didn't hit the GPU? To me that is what changed it from something you could do on an office box during lunch break to something that had to have decent gaming hardware to run. And of course by making 3D acceleration affordable to the masses we now have some truly insane hardware for cheap. I remember when a hardware DVD decoder would seriously hurt your pocketbook, and now 3D surround sound, hardware video acceleration of multiple formats, hell we just take these things for granted now. My first game of Doom was played on an office machine from Compaq, but my first Quake? I had a Voodoo and a Soundblaster stuffed in there and the machine Oc'ed just so I could squeeze out every FPS while still getting the "ooh".

To me that was really the turning point, and really caused gaming to explode and become its own industry, when you couldn't just throw the game onto an office machine and expect it to run decently.

Re:Doom

[lennier]

"Suddenly, all the industry wanted was shoot'em-ups and blow'em-ups, catering almost exclusively to the lowest common denominator. Gaming became like television, a way to waste time in some brain dead activity that reduced you to a twitching zombie-like state. "

"Suddenly"?

I think you're forgetting some history.

doom didn't need a story noob!

[bronney]

I admit I am a carmack fanboi but damn that's how good doom was. It didn't need a story. It didn't need a manual even. Heck it didn't even need a mouse. There's also the important open source aspect of the game that gamers can create their own WADs which later turned into an integral part and the games themselves in Quake TF, and for the real CS:S and TF2. All because of doom.

Doom isn't a game, it's an attitude.

Re:doom didn't need a story noob!

[slim]

Exactly. Let's face it, DOOM! is basically first person Robotron. Which is Asteroids with walls.

Those games have no story to speak of, and they're fun to play.

The big problem with stories is, you usually have to interrupt the game in order to tell them.

Re:doom didn't need a story noob!

[slim]

Hey, what you do mean no story?

No story to speak of. You just broke the rules! Ssh.

Re:doom didn't need a story noob!

[bronney]

Agreed, that's why when Half Life came it was so nice. Story in the game flow. I still remember the first time I loaded it up and didn't touch anything when the cable car was running through mesa, and knocked the mouse by accident, wow I started already?

Re:doom didn't need a story noob!

[commodore64_love]

Funny how a comment that's flat wrong gets modded "insightful". Not every IBM PC game was a sim. Ever heard of Lemmings? Or Populous? Or Shadow of the Beast? Or Wolfenstein? Or Hostages? There were tons of games before Doom that were simple enough to just pick-up and play them.

BTW I agree a good game doesn't need a story. Use your imagination.

Duke = Citizen Kane

[Hasney]

A lesser extent Duke Nukem? That game was writing gold. I shed a tear as the main protagonist (Duke) said it was time to "Kick ass and chew bubblegum.... But I'm all out of gum". It felt like it was a commentary on the human condition; "It is time to do 2 things, but I can only resonably do one of them right now"

Without Duke Nukems thick layer of metaphors and social commentary, Kojima would never have been inspired to make Metal Gear Solid.

Re:Duke = Citizen Kane

[Stormwatch]

That line is ripped from John Carpenter's They Live, and some others are taken from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead. Homage or plagiarism? You decide.

Re:Duke = Citizen Kane

[Hogwash McFly]

I think it's fairly obvious that the numerous cultural references found in Duke Nukem 3D were intended to be homages instead of being passed off as original. These comprise one of the main reasons I was looking forward to Duke Nukem Forever - the gags, the easter eggs, the nods towards low culture. Without all that you miss the essence of Duke and have just another generic FPS.

Re:Duke = Citizen Kane

[natehoy]

Duke Nukem Forever is a homage to Zen. It's the sound of one hand clapping. It's the tree that falls in the forest with no one around. It's the rock that falls in the puddle and makes no splash. It is, therefore, the purest form of gameplay. The ability to get your heart rate up and feel the excitement of playing a game with no actual game.

It is the ZPS. The Zeroth Person Shooter.

Eventually, it will deliver, and people will be unsurprised to purchase it, take it home, and have it be an empty box. And it will get good reviews, for the game will have ended as it began.

Doom's gameplay

[Lord Lode]

Doom's gameplay is very fun, and there are only few modern games that are similar to it. The original Serious Sam games were similar. Games with good stories are good, but games like Doom are too. Does every game need to have a story? A movie or a fiction book without story, that is bad. But for a game it shouldn't be a negative criticism if it doesn't have one. Depending on the style and purpose of the game, just being fun is enough. Many modern games feel too heavy and slow paced to match the fun of fragging monsters seen in Doom.

Re:Doom's gameplay

[javilon]

Doom is like tetris. You learn the game mechanics and you play and play and never get bored.

If it had a story, once you go through it and learn how the story ends, that's it. you are not going back to play. This may be good for the publishers that can sell you a new game with a new story, but I contend that a game that is as enjoyable as Doom without a story is better.

Re:Doom's gameplay

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Does every game need to have a story? A movie or a fiction book without story, that is bad. But for a game it shouldn't be a negative criticism if it doesn't have one.

It's an old but true quote that story in video games is like story in pornography. It's expected to be there, but really only the flimsiest pretense of setting is necessary. Many early video games got on quite well with a handful of paragraphs in the manual.

I can recall playing Sonic 3 in 1994 and thinking it had a great "story" for a platformer, as in addition to the manual paragraphs, it used in game "cut scenes" to advance what shred of a plot there was. Interestingly, the game told its micro-tale without using a single word of text. The on-screen actions and emotions of the characters were like those from a silent film, without the captions.

Nevertheless, I did and still do consider the "story" in that game to be more than sufficient and moreover very suited to the type of game it was. I imagine it's similar for other games like Doom.

The watershed for storytelling in video games was probably Metal Gear Solid in 1998. After Hideo Kojima blew everyone away with his storytelling, developers started offering ever more elaborate and "cinematic" storylines in their games which ate up ever larger portions of the budget. The trouble came from two important flaws
1) Hideo Kojima never made a "cinematic" game. The resulting end product of MGS was a very different form of entertainment from a film. People focused too much on the cutscenes,(which were still quite different from raw film) and missed out on the wider package offered. It became usual to see ever more pompous and over produced cut scenes strapped on to games that never lived up to the "epic" tone set in them.
2) Most directors are not Hideo Kojima. This was probably the more pertinent point. Developers wanted to make epic (action)storylines in the mould of Metal Gear Solid, but simply lacked the writing ability to pull it off. Even Kojima himself managed to foul this up in MGS2. The end result is a pretentious and overbearing plot that gets in the way of the game and severely reduces enjoyment and playability.

I think a good example the benefits and pitfalls of story in games is given by the juxtaposition between Gears of War 1 and 2 on the Xbox. The first game has a minimalist story. Characters are barely introduced and have almost no development, detail on the setting is shamelessly scant, and where the plot is not entirely one dimensional, it contains gaping holes. Yet it works in the context of the game that Gears of War is, and I would argue works very well.

Gear of War 2 by contrast, suffers from an overblown and overproduced story that makes a mockery of the proceedings. Attempts to develop characters are almost comically absurd, the setting is wildly different tending towards the spectacular, the plot is incohesive and convoluted throughout and leaves loose ends everywhere. The end result, while eye candy laden, detracts significantly from the game. People just wanted to play as Marcus Fenix and shoot aliens; instead they ended up unsatisfied and confused. The developers desire to create an "epic" story instead created an epic farce. Smaller was definitely better in this case.

Obviously, the same rule does not hold across all video games. RPGs require a significant story. But even here, overproduction and poor writing can create an epic farce that taints the whole game. The prime example is Final Fantasy VIII; Your characters are all teenagers attending assassins' high school, and you fight the sorceress who was actually your matron in the orphanage where you grew up, who was actually being controlled by another sorceress, so she could rescue another sorceress and cause "time compression", and when that failed you simply allow the second sorceress to take over a party member who happened to be yet another sorceress so that they could go back in time to allow the third sorceress to cau

Crazy DRM and Phone home games

[Aceticon]

For the last 5 years the evolution in mainstream PC gaming has been all around fancy new graphics.

The only new original gaming style that poped-up was MMORPGs (not really new, but it did became mass-market in the meanwhile).

[This point was really hammered down for me when "Supreme Commander", highly hailed as innovative, came out and it turns out it's an almost 1-to-1 copy of the old "Total Annihilation" from 10 years ago only with better graphics]

The other grand "evolutions" have been the not releasing of demos anymore, the crazy DRM + phone home features, the rise of the "major game publisher" and the death of the small independent software house.

Re:Crazy DRM and Phone home games

[linzeal]

MMORPGS came from MUDS in the 1980's which came from tabletop RPG which came from Sci-Fi writers like Paul Anderson's 'psychodrama' stories from the 1950's. The idea being that grown ups act like they are something they are not and interact with each other through roleplaying. That would be an interesting article to read, not some 20 some year old who can't bother to at least Google a bit further back than his comfort zone.

Totally disagree

[mccalli]

"There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."

Nonsense. Doom wasn't supposed to be story-driven game, it was an action game. You grabbed your minigun, charged into a room you'd never seen before and blasted away. You even had a chance of surviving. There are no story lessons from Doom because there weren't supposed to me.

It's exactly the lack of immediate mindless action that's put me off gaming for a long time after. I want gaming, not cinematic experiences. If you prefer cinema that's fine and there's room for both, but for me all the plot-driven stuff is a turn-off. I still want to grab a minigun and charge into a room blasting widly in a totally unrealistic fashion as strange creatures fall in front of me. Shortly before being overwhelmed by ridiculous odds, of course.

When I do play acrade games, I tend to head MAMEwards. Plot-driven stuff just doesn't do it for me at all - if it does for you then that's fine and I'm certainly not criticising it, I'm just saying there's more than one type of gamer and Doom appealed to me in a way that almost none of the other FPS stuff has. That's precisely because it has little story or plot.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Shame it's dying

[grumbel]

A quick google turned up this:

US PC Game Software Sales
1998 - $1.8 billion
1999 - $1.9 billion
2000 - $1.78 billion (84.9 million units)
2001 - $1.75 billion (83.6 million units)
2002 - $1.4 billion (61.5 million units)
2003 - $1.2 billion (52.8 million units)
2004 - $1.1 billion (47 million units)
2005 - $953 million (38 million units)
2006 - $970 million

Who needs a story line?

[tgv]

PONG didn't have a story line either, and what's good enough for PONG is good enough for me!

Hold on there, Tex

[DNS-and-BIND]

On the other hand, from a story perspective, Doom was absolutely rubbish. You start in a room, no idea whats going on and you are surrounded by demons. You have to read the manual and supporting media to get a grip on it all something modern games would get heavily slated for doing.

OK, he lost me there. The entire idea of DOOM was that it was an incredibly technically advanced shoot-em-up. Being able to run around in the levels and shoot realistic-acting guns was great. All that you really had to know was to shoot the demons - the player has no other way to interact with the world other than shooting. Who needs a plot? That always baffled me about the old Japanese Nintendo games...they always had these incredibly convoluted unncessary plots that I read the first few lines of and then forgot it and went on to saving the kingdom or whatever. And I was a manual-reading completist.

When, exactly, did computer game snobs decide it was cool to call DOOM 'rubbish'? What happened to computer game snobs being polygon and FPS guys? What makes this guy look down his nose at something that he doesn't understand and apparently has no desire to understand?

Re:Shame it's dying

[Anonymous Coward]

From that link:

"The stats are based on retail sales. Online game subscriptions and digital distribution are not included. And that online gaming market is increasing rapidly, especially with PC gamers."

Just look at here:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/07/20/develop-09-is-digital-distribution-the-pc-saviour/

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Spring is buggy as hell

[iYk6]

Spring is buggy as hell. I reported several bugs on the forums, and I got
* denial
* accusations
* "if you aren't using Ubuntu, you have no right to complain that it doesn't work in your distro"
* "if you don't like the manual, change it yourself, it's a wiki." Except that it is buggy and that the devs are pretenious pricks, I don't know anything that I could add to the wiki.

Spring is not worth anyone's time.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion