The Death And Return of PC Gaming (For Me)
Growing up playing games exclusively on consoles, the world of PC Gaming was a complete mystery to me for a long time. I would see boxes for these strange and unknowable products at my local Walden Software, but had no idea what strange and wondrous treasures might lay inside.
As I got older and time marched on into the early 90′s, more classes at school started having computers in them. I was fascinated by them, probably because we didn’t have one at home. In junior high and high school, I would take every computer class I could get my grubby scheduling sheet on.
Sometimes in these classes, when we were really lucky, the computers would even have games on them.
My first exposure to playing games on computers (Mac and PC) was in the form of Sim City and The Oregon Trail, along with a few other games that would fall into the “edutainment” category.
Then one day, my best friend got an old Tandy 286 and opened my eyes to the world of PC gaming. It was a little outdated even by those standards, but it was bought from a family friend of his and came with a few very memorable titles.
It was my first exposure to adventure games, as his friend had put Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel on it. There were no internet FAQ’s to look up, and we spent weeks solving that game tape. Eventually, while discussing it at school, we found a classmate that had the official hint book from Sierra and helped us get past where we were stuck.
Over the years, we played more and more games on the PC, but it still never outweighed our love of console gaming. Especially back then, they were two very different experiences.
In high school, I was more into computer hardware and learning how to build and upgrade machines than the games I was upgrading them to play; not that I didn’t play my fare share.
After high school, I found some other friends who were also into PC gaming. We started having LAN parties nearly every weekend. Things were great for a while, but then the common PC problem of needing to upgrade hit me. I was living on my own and didn’t really have the money to do so.
Slowly but surely, I started playing on the PC less and less.
A few years ago, I bought a new PC that could actually handle newer games. It was nothing super fancy, but it had a decent graphics card in it. My interest in gaming on the PC was rekindled, but I didn’t really know where to begin. What I didn’t realize was how much the experience had improved since my former PC gaming days.
Digital distribution was the key to my return.
Services like Steam and Good Old Games are now in place. Games that I liked back in the day are often available through these services for cheap, and are optimized to run on my newer machine. Newer games that I normally wouldn’t have tried have demos that are easily accessible. Small independent games are right there in the e-store with the big triple-A titles. Best of all, my library is stored online, and I can re-download my games whenever I want.
I am really happy with the direction digital distribution has taken the PC gaming experience. At this point, I wish I could download all my games forever and free up some shelf space.
Tags: edutainment, Mac, PC, pc gaming, Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel, Sim City, The Oregon Trail
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 5:00 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 17th, 2010 at 11:11 am
Cameron Goble says:Amen to that. I remember watching the shelf space dwindle to almost nothing at my local CompUSA outlet and thinking to myself, “Is this all PC gaming had to give? A few pathetic boxes and uninspired knock-offs?” There didn’t seem to be any reason to buy boxed games, even as few as they were. Screenshots and ad copy on the box weren’t enough to bring out the best in what the game in my hand might have to offer. Physical media just wasn’t up to the task of making games exciting enough to try.
CompUSA fell under in a majestic collapse itself not long after. It looked like the days were done.
Digital distro swept up the remnants of PC gaming and put them in an exalted place again. Fast acquisition of new titles, online demos, automatic patching, trailers — all of it is a multimedia experience that gives games a real chance to shine. The weird permanence of digital over hard media guarantees a game need never go out of print. And the limitless space is a blessing for indie and low budget developers to share the same kinds of front-page views that was once reserved for middle shelf, highly promoted AAA games alone.
Thanks for the thought-provoking article!
February 18th, 2010 at 8:36 am
MIchelle says:Buying my Mac was a bit of a sad day, it was a bit of a personal admission that my PC gaming days were largely over – modern PC games don’t interest me very much on the whole.
But I have noticed an interesting side effect – I’m playing retro games on my Windows partition more than I ever did before.