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TVTranscript
00:01Its beginnings were humble.
00:04State-of-the-art gaming when I was young was a Ziploc bag with a Xerox cover sheet
00:09and a hand-copied disk stuck in the Ziploc bag.
00:12The whole concept of a home PC was really just emerging.
00:16But it eventually becomes one of the biggest gaming platforms of all time.
00:21PCs, it's in the neighborhood of like 100 million homes in the US,
00:25and about 60 million of those are playing games, which is just a phenomenal number.
00:30There are a few snags along the way.
00:32Of course, they got it badly wrong because most of the games are just fracky.
00:37Nobody's ever going to want to play games on something so obvious like a business machine.
00:41DOS was not fun. DOS was not fun for most people.
00:44But like any good story, it beat the odds and came out on top.
00:50They literally, within a very small number of years, became the ubiquitous platform for gaming.
00:55This is the rise of PC gaming.
01:17This kid just got a video game for Christmas. This kid just got a Commodore home computer.
01:24It's the early 1980s, and a relatively new product is making its way into people's homes.
01:30Thanks to companies like...
01:31Atari.
01:32Commodore.
01:33IBM.
01:34And Apple.
01:36Well, the gaming company systems at the time were Commodore 64.
01:40In the UK, the Sinclair Spectrum was massive, although it didn't really take off over here.
01:44Apple IIe was obviously a place where a lot of current game developers got their start playing games and starting
01:49on that platform.
01:53The Apple and the Commodore were machines that were, on the one hand, very capable, and on the other hand,
01:59very simple.
02:02In my case, I worked on the Apple more than the Commodore, personally.
02:04But there was a time when I knew every single solitary byte of memory on the machine.
02:11And in the ROMs, what every single solitary part of the ROM did.
02:14And in RAM and special hardware addresses, I knew exactly what those did as well.
02:19I think some of the Apple IIe stuff has really spawned ideas that are still there today.
02:23I mean, you can have Bard's Tale for the role-playing games.
02:29The next step, probably, was the Atari 800 series of home computers.
02:35Our first games were all released on the Ataris, and we thought that was a great game machine,
02:39but Commodore basically outsold it pretty quickly in the mid-'80s and became the preeminent game machine for a while.
02:46Oh, a final argument for the Commodore 64 or FIC-20.
02:49Someday, both kids will be looking for a job.
02:55For, you know, creative individuals, it was something that could be easily mastered
02:59and, therefore, could allow a great deal of creative expression.
03:03The early days of computer gaming are anything but spectacular.
03:08Well, there weren't big computer stores with masses of marketing dollars behind the products in the first place.
03:15And so they would be tucked away as computers in general would just sort of starting out.
03:19The whole concept of the home PC was really just emerging.
03:24A lot of the games were in envelopes or...
03:27A Ziploc bag with a Xerox cover sheet and a hand-copy disc stuck in the Ziploc bag.
03:32And usually these games were just hung on pegboard, you know, so to speak, at the local computer shop.
03:37And a lot of that stuff was just done by mail. A lot of the business was run by mail
03:42where fans who were a very small community of people would be able to just send their ten bucks to
03:49Richard Garriott and he would probably personally stick the game in the envelope and mail it off.
03:55When I was young, that's how I actually first got into the business was self-publishing.
03:59Spending what I thought was a huge amount of money, you know, $200 on Ziploc bags and Xerox cover sheets
04:04and published my first game by hanging it on the pegboard at the computer store.
04:08But that was truly state-of-the-art. I mean, it looked every bit as good as the other few
04:11game companies that were out there making games at that time.
04:15Well, the development cycle of games in the early period was very short. Basically, it was, you know, one guy
04:20working a year or so and getting out a game.
04:23In those days, all you needed in order to have distribution was some kind of a Xeroxed or a mimeographed
04:29manual, sometimes offset if you were really upscale.
04:32But that doesn't stop early developers from making their mark.
04:37There were actually some pretty famous games that went out that way.
04:41The original Castle Wolfenstein by Silas Warner, that went out in those days in a Ziploc bag.
04:48Richard Garriott's first game, Calabeth, that California Pacific put out, had a very plain-looking cover.
04:55It looked, you know, almost like the early D&D books, you know, some kind of art that you'd be
05:00ashamed to put on a school project today.
05:03In 1982, Richard Garriott is among the first to push the industry forward.
05:08During the era of Ziploc bags, very quickly, the Ultimas that I was making became bigger in the sense that
05:15they were bigger games.
05:16They took more time and more effort to make than most of the other games at that time, which were
05:21plain-off arcade game knockoffs.
05:23I was actually the first person to say, you know, I don't really want this in a Ziploc bag.
05:28I want my game in a box. And not only do I want it in a box, but I want
05:32things like a cloth map of the world, and I want instruction manuals to describe the rich history of the
05:37world.
05:38And I think all these materials kind of lend to the reality of this virtual world that I want people
05:43to go explore.
05:45And Sierra was the only company that would guarantee me the materials they wanted my game to be in.
05:50That's why Ultima 2 was published by Sierra, and Ultima 2, I believe, was the first boxed PC game.
05:58Meanwhile, as computer games began getting bigger, and Apple, Commodore, and Atari are duking it out, IBM releases a new
06:05PC that will change everything.
06:19In 1984, the IBM PC AT is released. It is IBM's most powerful system yet.
06:25It is a step up from the previous IBM PCs that have already established themselves as business machines.
06:31But it's behind the curve when it comes to gaming.
06:34The game industry itself is hardly impressed by Big Blue's new entry.
06:40Well, the IBM PC was a business machine.
06:43It was there to be a typewriter or a word processor.
06:46It was there to be a computer and not an entertainment device.
06:49And so it was probably very tough in the first place to say,
06:53yes, I'm going to use my several thousand dollar piece of equipment to play Pong.
06:58When the PC first came out, me and the other developers, of course,
07:02you know, picked up the machine and sat down and played with it.
07:05And we thought, oh, man, this machine is slow. It's a big box. It's, I don't like the keyboard.
07:12I was actually very skeptical that it would exceed the marketplace.
07:15And it came into a marketplace that already was thick with competitors.
07:19We produced the Ultima just before the PCs launched on the Apple, on the Commodore, on like the Atari ST,
07:25five or six different platforms. And the last of those six was the IBM PC.
07:30But this big bulky machine soon proves them wrong.
07:33People had become comfortable with computers through the Apple II and the C64 and the Atari 800.
07:39But now they wanted something that was meatier, something that was more powerful,
07:43something that could do their work in time-shifting frame, but could also give them some really challenging games.
07:53Thanks to its upgradeability and its reputation as a legitimate business machine,
07:58the IBM PC and its scores of compatible clones muscles its way into the gaming industry.
08:04And when Starflight came around and showed you can actually make games for it all,
08:08there still was a lot of resistance and reluctance.
08:10But, you know, it was inevitable, I think, because people got them into their homes
08:15and spent thousands of dollars justifying it as a business machine,
08:18and then suddenly it had, you know, these powerful gaming capabilities.
08:23When software giant Sierra lends their support, things are never the same.
08:29When Sierra made their commitment, they began to push the technology of the IBM.
08:34They were the first ones to do an animated adventure game on the IBM that required EGA Color.
08:41So the EGA Color with the King's Quest I was a really big step up.
08:46As more and more people are buying PCs, more and more game publishers jump on board.
08:56When Bing Gordon of Electronic Arts said,
08:59This mother is a bad gem.
09:01You know, what we're seeing is that the buyers aren't buying as many games.
09:04We aren't seeing the penetration we're hoping for.
09:06So we're putting our ace on the IBM PC.
09:10And when Electronic Arts made that decision to go primarily PC with every release,
09:16basically that was the nail in the coffin for the other machines.
09:19Meanwhile, as PC gaming rises, so does console gaming.
09:23But it soon becomes apparent that the two forms of entertainment appeal to very different types of gamers.
09:29As far as the games themselves, I think that the PC games pander to a slightly older audience in general.
09:35So there is an assumption that a console gamer is perhaps a younger audience, perhaps teens.
09:40And that PC gamer is a little bit older and so therefore demands and expects a certain different type of
09:46game.
09:50And the IBM compatible PC continues to evolve.
09:53One of the first steps is the introduction of sound cards in 1984.
09:57With the Sound Blaster card setting the standard in 1989.
10:00But it really was the Sound Blaster was the first really competent sound creation that was also created at a
10:07reasonably modest price point.
10:09Very quickly all the development community jumped on board saying,
10:12Hey, finally at last, our games which have been improving rapidly in areas like graphics and gameplay,
10:18but had really been lagging far behind in audio.
10:22Know that the time has finally come.
10:26It was a much needed step forward that since all the developers jumped on board,
10:31therefore all the consumers jumped on board.
10:34By the early 1990s, the IBM PC is booming as a game machine.
10:38Everything from role playing games,
10:45to flight sims,
10:49and adventure games is available.
10:56Now in the early 90s we had the speed of machine, the high resolution of graphics,
11:02and in general the technology to be able to tell these graphical stories the way, you know, King's Quest.
11:10Even the Ultima games.
11:11Stand back!
11:12Battling!
11:13I shall apply my plan to destroy Britannia.
11:17And Wind Commander were able to do very well.
11:23With Doom, one of the biggest keys there, aside from the fact that it was a huge step forward as
11:28far as the graphic capabilities that we'd seen on a PC.
11:30We could see these colors, we can hear these sounds.
11:33We could have a very impactful experience playing in it because it was frankly terrifying.
11:39On top of that, there was the multiplayer.
11:41The fact that you could actually link up a couple of machines in an office and play.
11:50The Secret of Monkey Island was just absolutely a fabulous experience because it was just hilarious.
12:06Alone in the Dark, which was one of the first real 3D adventures.
12:10Even though it was polygon looking and as blocky as could be, there were elements of that game that were
12:16just spooky.
12:21Of course, it's the one that really pushed 3D adventure gaming.
12:25But PC gaming is not without its flaws.
12:28One of the biggest headaches for PC gamers is DOS, the operating system that IBM PCs have been using since
12:34they first appeared in 1981.
12:36Oh, well, we all hated DOS.
12:38DOS was not fun.
12:40DOS was not fun for most people.
12:42Unless you have some kind of 3 higher level degrees in programming, knowing exactly what those commands are to get
12:48things to work is just a nightmare for everybody involved.
12:52It's incredibly laborious.
12:54You put in the disk and you have to type, you know, A colon, I don't even remember, I think
13:01I've blacked out purposely,
13:03but you had a whole string that you had to type in that was almost Unix-like in its obscurity
13:09just to get the game running or loading into your system.
13:13It was a great pain.
13:15But the solution to all these problems is just around the corner.
13:33As the PC continues to build momentum through 1995, the need for a uniform standard in PC software and hardware
13:39becomes apparent.
13:41The solution is Windows 95.
13:43Thanks to this new operating system and DirectX,
13:48the PC industry has a standard that helps ensure PCs will run smoothly and reliably.
13:53The coming of more standardized 32-bit platforms and particularly Windows was a really great thing for computer games.
14:03It's great to be able to stick in that CD and expect it to work and not have driver issues.
14:11That's good for everybody because nobody wants to fuss around with their operating system when they're actually trying to have
14:16entertainment time.
14:18And so all of a sudden everybody's running Windows all the time, there's no more DOS.
14:26We were instantly free of all of the QEMM exceptions, of all of the configuring your autoexec.bat and your
14:34config.sys.
14:35You could just install Windows 95 on any machine that would run it, put SIF2 on and away you'd go.
14:42It would perform great.
14:43It wouldn't crash and that was just fantastic.
14:47Around the same time that Windows 95 is getting on its feet, another innovation debuts, the CD-ROM drive.
14:54All of a sudden you needed a medium that could include the increases in the graphics cards and the sound
15:00technology.
15:01All of a sudden you need to be able to pack that software so tightly that they would no longer
15:05fit on one, two or even six floppy disks.
15:08And so a new storage medium was definitely needed.
15:11And with the CD-ROM's introduction is an entire line of games featuring full motion video or FMV.
15:19One of the biggest sellers is a game called Myst.
15:22The way that I saw it happen most often was that someone wanted to buy one of these new CD
15:27-ROM drives or a new computer with a CD-ROM drive.
15:30And they were fairly expensive when they first came out. So you wanted to be able to rationalize it somehow.
15:35And Myst was one of the best ways of showing what a CD-ROM drive could do.
15:42Myst was sold because it showed what you could do with a CD-ROM game.
15:47It was a new technology that showed graphics that had just never been seen before and those incredible vistas that
15:53were created in the Myst world.
15:56You needed the CD-ROM storage medium to be able to fit all that kind of content that was being
16:00created.
16:02I think that Myst absolutely helped drive CD-ROM cells.
16:07Competitors soon follow.
16:10Rebel Assault was our very direct attempt to capitalize on that.
16:15You know, we were looking at the technology and figured we've got to use the Star Wars stuff to make
16:19that work.
16:21The Seventh Guest, I think, was another one that was in the early days.
16:25But FMV becomes more of a curse than a blessing.
16:28My, isn't this a cheery place?
16:31What happened there was, I think, a lot of marketing people thought,
16:33Hey, Hollywood, this is what it's all about.
16:36Creating movies on your screen and being in that is what it's all about.
16:39And, of course, they got it badly wrong because most of the games just frankly...
16:44Lord, it smells awful too.
16:48Performances were wooden.
16:50You don't ever have to be afraid of anything.
16:54And the technology as a gameplay mechanic really wasn't there to make them fun games.
17:00While CD-ROM drives established themselves on PCs,
17:04another piece of hardware will become standard for gamers.
17:07The 3D Accelerator.
17:11The Accelerator meant that the games look better and, frankly,
17:14most people respond immediately to whatever the visual stimulus is.
17:17If the game looks good, then people are going to stop and look at it.
17:20The 3D Accelerator made a monumental leap to allow these games to suddenly start looking more real,
17:28and therefore attract a much broader audience.
17:313D Accelerators have made a huge difference in the whole, all the way across gaming.
17:373D hardware was the first big breakthrough to really radically speed up and radically increase the resolution of the possibilities
17:47of doing 3D imagery.
17:50There were probably a couple of killer apps that really got the 3D craze up and running.
17:54One would be the original Tomb Raider.
17:59Which you could compare the software version with the 3D Accelerator version, and this was night and day.
18:17And then there was also action games like Quake.
18:20The texture detail was all of a sudden amazing.
18:23All of a sudden the characters looked better and felt like they had that extra dimension,
18:27and actually made a real impact on how the games felt to the gamer.
18:31And the number of PC gamers keeps on growing.
18:34So I'm going to give you kind of ballpark figures.
18:37It's in the neighborhood of like 100 million homes in the US having PCs,
18:42and about 60 million of those are playing games, which is just a phenomenal number.
18:47It's probably about 20 million that are playing the big budget real games that you see at retail, you know.
18:52There are hardcore PC gamers who are buying our magazine every month,
18:56and there's half a million of those people.
18:59But there's also PC gamers who are perhaps playing hearts and spades in the Yahoo room,
19:04or doing trivia games through Pogo, or any of those community sites.
19:09Technically, they're PC gamers. They're using their PC to play games.
19:13There are millions and millions of those. Tens of millions.
19:17As technology advances, the PC continues to grow.
19:21It's still the most impressive platform that even with the consoles, you know,
19:26maybe the first year consoles come out, they look better than the PC,
19:29but it's the tortoise and the hare.
19:31And consoles absolutely have various advantages,
19:34but it is a very different experience to play something on the PC.
19:39The relationship that you have with your PC and your mouse and your keyboard is your controlling.
19:45You sit three feet away from that monitor, and it's a different mindset and different immersion level
19:50than it is if you're kicking it on the couch with a console controller.
19:55Massively multiplayer games bring together thousands of gamers.
19:59New 3D accelerators from companies like NVIDIA are pushing the graphical envelope.
20:03And games like Deus Ex 2 are blending all genres to create new experiences.
20:09The future is looking more realistic every day.
20:12For the PC in the future, I think there's going to be more connectivity.
20:17There's going to be higher resolution graphics.
20:21The PC keeps getting better and better. It keeps getting faster, more memory.
20:25And for the foreseeable future, certainly the next, you know, five to ten years,
20:29that's just not going to change.
20:30The PC is going to be with us for quite a while.
20:35We're approaching the LZ. It's going to be hot. Touchdown! Hit it, Marines!
20:45I would love to see a PC future where massively multiplayer online games were successful as a business,
20:52where that instead of asking people what their sign was in a bar,
20:56they would ask what game they were playing, what guild they were a member of.
21:00It's just very exciting. The more connectivity, the more memory, the more graphic speed and power,
21:07the better the experience we can deliver, and that's great.
21:11OK, 14%.
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