The tech that gave PC's a foothold in gaming - In the Beginning...

Tech being as it is and was, there's been some very unique advancements that drove games from being console only into the PC which I favor so much that I'm dancing! With Nintendo being the big dog back in the late 80's and early 90's it was hard for anything to compete with them. They were the masters and we all were the slaves, just throwing money at them happily. So what was the advancements that changed this all?

First you had Creative Labs, back in 1989 they came out with the much loved, very first Sound Blaster card. It was advance for the time frame and had 8-bit mono and C/MS which was still a bit of a step up from consoles at that point. What Creative also did was give it all the support that people needed which made it very popular. A+ there! They kept improving it and I have to say, till the Z series,  which I have now, I loved them all. This Z series sucks plainly right now. I wont go into it.

Next was 3d graphics. The first game to use it and use it well was Doom. But if you look back, it was the advent of OpenGL that caused 3d graphics to boom. Silicon Graphics(SGI) focused on 3d computer graphics and created IRIS GL. Because it was such a proprietary item other companies were closing in on them. What they did was clean IRIS up and release it as OpenGL to the public. And to this day its still the standard that it was back in the early 90s.

The last that comes to mind is shareware  Andrew Fluegleman and Jim Knopf can be named the father of shareware but Apogee took it a bit further with games. You have a bit of a taste and then boom, pay for the rest. id Software separated Wolfenstein 3-D into 3 sections, Apogee tossed out the first part, in essence, for free, left you wanting more and gave you all the information you needed to get the rest. The next year, they(id Software) basically did the same with Doom and as they say... the rest is history.

Now consoles are scrambling to keep up with PCs and failing because of key components. CD-ROMs were a recent addition to consoles. Better graphics cards, recent and still behind addition to consoles. Games. That's a wide open debate because the feel of games going from console to PC is really odd. Its the controllers that caused it. Mouse is a lot smoother than controllers when playing which is why you will never see a open world where any platform can play.