From Doom to Half-Life to World of Warcraft, few platforms have been as instrumental in the evolution of gaming as the powerful PC. In the early days, it brought us grand text-based adventures and the very first examples of dungeon crawlers. By the early ’90s, we were enjoying real-time strategy titles, role-playing games, and the very first shooters. In 1999, EverQuest, while not the first game to connect players around the world, sparked the era of the MMORPG. All of this gaming history happened on the PC and Den of Geek is here to explore it.
Our History of PC Gaming series includes in-depth features, interviews, retrospectives, fun lists, and videos covering the people, games, and innovations from the earliest days of Tennis for Two and Commodore 64 to the hero shooters, MOBAs, and battle royale games we’re enjoying today.
What are the most important PC games of all-time? We have an answer for you. The innovations that allowed us to one day start dreaming about the cloud? Yep, we’re covering that too.
Below, you can find all of the entries in our History of PC Gaming series, with excerpts and links to the full articles:
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25 PC Games That Changed History
When trying to name the most important PC games of all-time, though, it’s not only about innovation and who came first. No, the most important PC games of all-time are typically the ones that inspired the community itself. These games inspired a legion of other developers to consider new concepts. They inspired outsiders to look at gaming in an entirely new way. Most importantly, they inspired those who played them to tell everyone they knew that they had to do the same.
These are the PC games that send you right back down memory lane and define the eras in which they were released (while still being enjoyable today). Most importantly, they changed the way we played on PC.
PC Gaming Innovations That Changed the Way We Play
The evolution of PC gaming features ups, down, important characters, and many, many chapters. And these chapters are not always so clearly defined. There is much debate about which pivotal moments define the history of PC gaming.
There is no universally agreed upon series of innovations that form the story of PC gaming to this day, but we’ve taken a crack at identifying the landmark occurrences which not only forever changed the way we play on our PCs but that helped shape the nature of the video game industry as we know it and as it will become in the future.
The Legacy of Baldur’s Gate
Cameron Tofer is a game developer familiar with the long, and sometimes complicated, legacy of the seminal computer RPG Baldur’s Gate. He not only co-founded Beamdog, the studio working to preserve and enhance the Baldur’s Gate series and other vital RPGs, but he worked as a programmer at BioWare when one of the most legendary studios in gaming was little more than a group of passionate Dungeons & Dragons fans.
“The team, at the time, this was their first game,” Tofer says in a recent interview with Den of Geek. “It was just a lot of pure passion and soda pop and just shag carpets and basements. It was just a passion that just went straight from around the table into making a game.”
Tofer takes us from the early days of playing Dungeons & Dragons with the Baldur’s Gate team all the way to the era of revitalizing classic experiences for a modern audience.
How EVE Online Evolved from Online Game to Real Life
It’s not easy explaining what exactly EVE Online is in a single paragraph or why it’s so important to the estimated 500,000 people who play it. On the surface, it’s a MMORPG that takes place in a galaxy populated by five empires vying for control of over 7,500 star systems. EVE, which launched in 2003, has its own governments, currency, economy, and religions, making it more complex and intricate than even the most popular MMO in the world, World of Warcraft. The game is full of political intrigue, space battles, and betrayal. But EVE Online is so much more than that.
The Legacy and Return of FMV Games
In 1983, FMV games introduced us to the future. At a time when graphics were defined by sprites and basic polygonal models, the arrival of the first FMV (Full Motion Video) games felt like a gigantic technological leap forward for the industry.
While FMV games seemed to be on track to change the landscape of the industry in a big way in the ’90s, the hype train was derailed by technological limitations related to limited storage space. FMV continued to be used for in-game cutscenes in subsequent years, but full FMV games became a passing fad.
Until now…
What Role-playing Means to Obsidian
Nobody has waited longer for The Outer Worlds than co-directors Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky. Over 20 years ago, they were key figures in the development of the original Fallout, one of the most important PC RPGs ever made. Eventually, they split and forged their own paths in the industry. As it turns out, it didn’t take much convincing to get the band back together.
The Legacy of World of Warcraft
John Staats, former Blizzard developer and the original 3D level designer for World of Warcraft, remembers people thinking he was crazy when he told them the seminal MMORPG would last for decades. It didn’t help that Staats had made this prediction before the game had even released on Nov. 23, 2004.
“The first day on the project, [Blizzard] said, ‘Well, it’s going to be like Everquest but we’re going to simplify, take out all the pain points that EverQuest players were suffering under,'” Staats says. “It was obvious to me it was going to be a huge title. When we finally announced the game, we would go to trade shows like E3, and I would go way off script and I would say, ‘WoW is probably going to have a 20-year lifespan.’ They would all give me a double take and look to see if I was joking.”
Thinking on how the game has evolved since its launch and what lies ahead, Staats now thinks even he was being a bit conservative with the numbers: “As it turns out, I was underestimating the length on this game.”
Revisiting The Matrix Online
In 2005, Monolith Productions, in conjunction with WB and Sega, released The Matrix Online, an MMORPG that told the story of what happened after Neo defeated Smith in The Matrix Revolutions. Dealing heavily with the stories of Morpheus, the Merovingian, Seraph, and other characters from the movies, the game is a pseudo-Matrix 4 that you never saw on the big screen. It’s also one of the weirdest MMOs ever released.
John Saavedra is Games Editor at Den of Geek. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @johnsjr9 and make sure to check him out on Twitch.
Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.