History of video games/Computer games

Early Computer Games

See the chapters early games and Dr. Nim for early examples of computer games.

1970-1979

• 
  An IBM 5100 portable computer. While not used for gaming, it had a large influence on later designs.
• 
  Common computers released in 1977, the Commodore PET 2001, the Apple II, and the TRS-80 Model I.
• 
  An Ohio Scientific Challenger 2P
• 
  AMD 9080 Processor

Games

• 
  Infocom began producing text adventures in 1979.
• 
• 
  Dial a Grue

1980-1989

Notable Devices of the 1980's

CPUs

• 16 bit Intel 80286 (286) - 1982-1991
• 32 bit Intel 80386 (386) - 1985-2007
• 32 bit Intel 80486 (486) - 1989-2007

Regional Computers

In the 1980's there was a rivalry between Iraqi users of the Al Warkaa and the Sakhr 170 home gaming computers.

In Wales, Dragon computers were popular.

Gallery

• 
  ATI Hercules Graphics Card (1986)
• 
  AdLib Music Synthesizer Card (1987)
• 
  The Compaq Portable, a popular computer of the 1980's.

1990-1999

By 1990 well used dithering was being used in EGA games to create the illusion of better colors. From the early to late 1990's Color Cycling, the shifting of a palette on a still image, was used to produce resource efficient animations in computer games.

The 1990's saw the first common graphics cards, as well as the first common 3D API's for graphics cards such as Glide.

The introduction of CD-ROMs was initially seen as a way to reduce costs and piracy compared to floppy disks, though pirates quickly gained familiarity with the new format.

In 1994, the first Dreamhack was held in Malung, Sweden.

In 1996 the Marine Doom is made for US military training, a notable early use of FPS games for military training.

The Nvidia GeForce 256, considered as the world's first GPU, was released in 1999. It offered a huge improvement in 3D graphic capabilities.

• 
  The popularity of Doom was so massive that for a while first person shooters were commonly called "Doom clones"
• 
  The Quake engine spawned a number of decedent engines.

2000-2009

Valve launches Steam on September 12th, 2003.

Audio Cards remain popular till the end of the decade in many high end gaming rigs, along with brief experiments in gaming themed network and physics acceleration cards.

Events

• 
  Dreamhack 2004 LAN party
• 
  PAX 2006 computer gaming.
• 
  A Korean PC Bang in 2006.
• 
  NVIDIA SLI at E3 2006

Components

• 
  GeForce FX5900
• 
  Powercolor Radeon 9000 AGP video card.
• 
  Nvidia 7900GS video card.
• 
  Nvidia 260 GTX. This card shows a trend where static 3D renderings were printed on the card.
• 
  A Turtle Beach Catalina sound card.
• 
  A Western Digital VelociRaptor in 2008.
• 
  A Linksys WRT54GS Router, common during the early to late 2000's.
• 
  2009 LCD shutter glasses for 3D gaming.

2010-2019

Rise of Steam

We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable.

—Gabe Newell, Interview with the The Cambridge Student - 2011.

In 2011 Valve identifies game piracy as a service problem. In 2013 Steam distributed 75% of digital games on PC.

In 2015 Steam and Bethesda briefly introduced paid mods as a feature, before quickly withdrawing it in response to widespread criticism.

Ray-tracing games started in 2018 and ray-tracing cards were released to be capable of ray-tracing in supported games. The first ray-tracing graphics cards were Nvidia RTX 2060, 2070, 2080, and Titan RTX.

2010's gallery

• 
  AMD booth at E3 2011
• 
  NVIDIA GTX 1070 Founders Edition
• 
  A Blizzard Battle.net Authenticator token in 2016.

2020-2029

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a shortage of computer parts. Despite this the Folding@Home distributed computing project reaches quickly 1.5 Exaflops of capability as thousands of PC gamers donate unused cycles from their computers to tackle biomedical research in the fight against COVID-19.

The Trump Administration began enforcing a new tariff on computer components from China near the end of it's term in mid January 2021, causing GPU prices to significantly increase, sometimes by several hundred dollars.

Some manufactures experimented with PCs in handheld console formfactors. In 2022 Steam released the Steam Deck, which is a handheld console that runs PC games.

In 2022 Intel released its first graphics cards: the Arc A750 and A770. These GPUs supported RTX 3060 performance for cheaper prices in games, especially DirectX 12 ones. DirectX 9 support was improved on these GPUs in 2023.

2020's gallery

• 
  Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition