The amount of change
that has occurred in PC games over the past 10 years or so is surprising to say
the least. Gamers shake their heads at what gaming was like in the early 1990s
or the 1980s. There exists a certain amount of nostalgia for the old days of
games like WarCraft II or SIM City. But the multi-billion dollar industry that
exists today owes a debt of gratitude to the innovators that brought about the
game-changing ideas that underpin the virtual worlds that players worldwide now
inhabit.
Gaming Milestones that Had a Big ImpactIntegrated GPUs: The powerful video cards that fuel gaming PCs are themselves the end
result of years of graphics evolution and competition, striving to pack ever
more 3-D realism onto the screen. Recent moves to push that processing power
into integrated graphics chips have really made stride in recent years, though,
allowing
gaming laptops to rival their desktop
counterparts as platforms for graphics-intensive games. The next step will be
to bring that power to tablet PCs. Whether gaming tablets will be a viable
alternative to laptops and desktops remains to be seen.
LAN technology: The PC-gaming industry, as it stands today, would not be what it is had
not millions of gamers struggled with network settings and run Ethernet cables
to set up multiplayer LAN parties in their basements. It allowed a level of
multiplayer gaming that was not yet possible online, and it single-handedly
paved the way for games like
WarCraft III,
StarCraft and Unreal Tournament to create viable online gaming communities.
Those games, in turn, laid the groundwork for World of WarCraft, EverQuest and
a whole myriad of first-person-shooters to join gamers from across the globe.
MMORPGs:
World of WarCraft, the most widely played multiplayer online game on the
planet, is the pinnacle of massively multiplayer games. It really allowed
massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) to go mainstream. Games
like EverQuest may have opened the door. But it can’t be overemphasized just
how much World of WarCraft brought MMORPGs to market in a way that others struggle
to imitate. It didn’t just transform PC gaming; it changed platform and
handheld gaming forever, too.
Voice-chat:
The explosion of online gaming seemed almost inevitably to make voice-chat
programs take off at once. The proliferation of fast-broadband connections
allowed for voice and video chat to be a reality while simultaneously playing a
game, freeing gamers from juggling game controls and typing their messages.
While game consoles, like Xbox, have better integrated chat for a large
percentage of their players, PC gamers owe a lot to voice-chat technology.
This is nowhere near
a comprehensive list of innovations, but gamers can be happy at being the
beneficiaries of the technological largess that has brought the industry to a
level that could not have been conceived two decades ago. Now really is one of
the best times in history to be a gamer.
