The History of Arcade and PC platforms and their features and limitations

The History of Arcade and PC platforms

 
Hey everyone.

This post (as you can tell) will be about the history of Arcade and PC platforms. In the previous post I wrote about the history of games consoles, with some arcade games being in there too, like Pong and Donkey Kong.

Before I continue, I will briefly talk a bit about arcade machines and PC platforms themselves, before I start on the history.

I bet a lot of you have been to an arcade before, and you all should then know that arcades are a lot more fun if you are with friends. It doesn't just become a session of playing arcade games with friends, but it also becomes a social gathering.

In the 70's and 80's, they were extremely popular and were at their peak then. There wouldn't be a day when there wouldn't be groups of kids playing together in there. But from the 80's onwards, their popularity has decreased. And even though their popularity has deceased a lot, every year there are competitions between pro's to determine who is the best arcade gamer. Watch "The King Of Kong" if you are interested in learning a bit more about that. It's interesting to see how much arcades mean to some people. For some people seeing an arcade machine is like travelling back to there teens.

So, what are some of their features? Here are 3:

1. An arcade machine is a stand-alone unit. It may be big and (to some people) chunky, but who wants an arcade where people just sit and slouch, instead of going from machine to machine with your friends and competing with each other? Sometimes you'll get into competition with strangers and make friends. If you want to slouch, watch some TV. (This is me not being concise. I'm sorry :) )
2. They are coin/token operated. This means that you either pay for tokens, or you use your own money. Some arcades have arcade machine that will even print tickets depending on your score. This means you can win prizes with enough tickets. That also means that it makes a social/competitive meeting more fun with the chance of prizes you can get from the counter.
3. Arcade halls are available to the public, which means anyone and everyone has access to arcade games, whereas not everyone had access to computers or home consoles in the 70's and 80's.
   
   
   

PC's are completely different from arcade machines and home consoles all together. Their range of specs can vary immensely. On top of that, they are more powerful (depending on what type of PC you have. The range of games available for PC is a lot more than by console and arcade platforms.

There are 2 big (and a few more not so big) reasons as to why a PC is different from consoles and arcade platforms. I will only list a few though, starting with the 2 big ones. Here they are:

1. PC's are more powerful than arcade machines and consoles. This is because PC's can be upgraded and customized to the users needs, whereas you cannot upgrade or customize a console or an arcade machine (apart from the visual that is). In turn this means that the specs on a PC are only limited by how much the user is willing to spend. This also means that PC's are more flexible than the other platforms. What I'm trying to get at is that a PC's hardware can be more powerful than that of a console or an arcade machine.
2. PC's can be used for work and social life. There isn't much of a limit for that. You can play games, talk to friends and do fun things over the PC. You can also connect more with people. A PC can be used for researching things, writing documents or even presentations and the best thing about it is that you can switch between you social and work stuff quickly and efficiently, without any worries of extra electricity bills or even worrying about hassling from one room to another.
3. PC's can multitask. I don't just mean that you can have multiple windows open at a single time and use them simultaneously. What I really mean is that you can listen to music while playing games without blocking out audio from the game, and you can pause your game, open a new window (without completely exiting the game), do something for a while and then get back to playing from where you left off. Consoles can't do that. If you were to play music on your console while playing a game, the game will be played muted while you listen to music, because the consoles processor can't cope with all the work.
   
   
   

So lets get on with some history. It will be mostly about computers though, as I have already covered some arcade history in a previous post.

1971: Gaming on a PC became possible with the invention of the microprocessor, and this can be seen as the beginning of the PC gaming era.

1975: The microprocessor was released so that people would be able to buy it off the shelf. Buyers could also add the relevant peripherals and memory to the CPU, which allowed it to be turned into a general purpose computer.

The first microprocessor to hit the market was the Altair 8800, which was sold as a kit.

After this, many pre-assembled computers started to appear on the market, meaning that computers weren't a “hobbyist-only” thing. Before pre-assembled units started to appear, people had to buy each computer component separately and then build it together, hence the “hobbyist-only”, because one had to have enough knowledge regarding computers in order to build one, but this was eliminated with the coming of pre-assembled computers, meaning that anyone could buy a computer at a store.

Soon after that, when platforms were stable enough, people started to write basic games for these platforms. The Commodore PET and the Shack's TRS-80 were the first to run these types of basic games. However, like with what happened during the Atari Crash in the 80's, games were not protected against copying and piracy, meaning not all games back then were original.

Keep in mind that the programming language for games in those days was very basic compared to modern programming languages like C++, C# and Java. After a game was programmed and fully developed, it would often be copied onto a floppy disc and then traded, or sold, along with home printed instructions. And so began the home PC games market. However, it should be noted that at the beginning, computers were very expensive (so not everyone could afford one) and they were only able to display poor/rudimentary graphics or just text, meaning that games were either text-based games or were simple games with very low graphics.

The home PC market saw a larger growth with the introduction of the Commodore 64, the Apple 2 and the Amiga, because these computers were able to run games that are closer to those that one can experience in an arcade and on console. But, as said earlier, these games were still very simple and basic, in both their graphics and their gameplay.

Even so, computers were seen in many different ways depending on their price tags. If someone had a PC that was bought cheaply, then it was considered a toy (if it breaks, just buy a new one), and if it was an expensive PC, then it was considered to be a luxury.

1982: However some things changed in 1982, especially for IBM, with the release of its Microcomputer. Because it had an open standard, it could be adapted by all, and this is why it differed from other computers in its day, but it was a bad computer for gaming, as it had had very weak colour graphics, which caused some difficulties for newer games on the market, and the Microcomputer had no speakers, other than one that could only beep.

Late 1980's: Better sound and graphics cards were being made, improving gaming in the 80's.

CD's, interactive movies, 3D and the early Macintosh

Compared to other computers of its time, the macintosh (later referred to as the Mac) had a superior hardware architecture, but was ill cut for gaming in its time due to it having a larger price tag than other computers and a black and white screen, compared to the coloured screens other computers of its time had available to them. Even to this day, the Mac has little games that can be played on it, but it makes up for this with its media capabilities.

1990's: Gaming changed with the introduction of the CD-ROM (or just the CD). CD's could hold more data than the latest floppy disc. The CD was a vastly improved storage medium for games and could hold 650 times more data than a floppy disc (floppy discs could hold about 1MB of data).

The CD revolutionised gaming and the games market at the time, because it killed casual piracy (there was a lot of piracy back then) as it was, at the time, un-writeable. This created a then universal solution to piracy and common game storage.

On top of the fact that it killed piracy back then, photo-realistic games started to rise because CD's were able to contain that kind of data. But CD's didn't just enable developers to make games with better graphics, it was even able to contain higher quality sounds, immensely improving gaming experience and opening slowly opening a path for more complex and higher quality games. CD's could even hold small movies as a stand-alone and even games could have small movies within them, with The 7^th Guest being the most famous and popular of the these early games on CD.

However, interactive-movie games like The 7^th Guest, though popular at the time, were short-lived, because the production costs were a lot higher than normal games in those days, as on top of the costs for the production of the game came the costs of the production of the movie footage. There were games though that used short movie cutscenes, mostly acting as short messages between missions, that outlived interactive-movie games. The best example, and my favourite, is the game series Command & Conquer.

Many developers in the 90's had tried to create 3D games, but because true 3D environments put a massive strain onto the processor, many games, like Doom, had “cheated” 3D. This was also due to the fact that developers were getting ahead of technology at the time, but luckily, in the mid-late 90's, there were some advancements to GPU's, known then as a 3D accelerator, that allowed them to take off more of the work that the CPU was doing to render graphics, and by freeing up the CPU from that load, games were able to have more content in them, or have more 3D graphics. This basically means that 3D games of good quality finally became a reality, and there wasn't much of a need to “cheat” 3D anymore.

At that time, the most famous First Person Shooters were Half-Life and Quake. Even to this day, Half-Life (created by Valve) is extremely popular, and people still play the first game regardless of graphic comparisons with more modern games.

Network Games and the Internet

Success in the PC market increased with advancements in networking, especially for the PC games market. Network play was a feature that quickly caused a hype in games, and today, there are people who only buy games for their network features (online story gameplay, online competitive gameplay, etc.). However, early games were only able to support 2 players on a network, and networking 2 players together required one to physically set up a 2-way modem, meaning you to either be in the same room as the other player, or in the room next door, because both computers (and at that time, consoles slowly came into networking) had to be connected to the 2-way modem with Ethernet cables. There were however some games that were able to work over LAN (Local Area Network), but at the time these were very rare, as networking technology wasn't very advanced then.

With time, when networking technology was advanced enough, games developers had to worry less about creating their own networks with the introduction of the internet. The internet made things a lot easier for games companies, by offering a common world-wide standard.

The next big step with network/online gaming, were Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (now most commonly known as MMORPG's). MMORPG's allowed players to interact with each other in a virtual. These games started off as games which were text-only, but later became games with 2D/3D environments. MMORPG's were a huge success, and they later evolved into games like Asheron's Call and World of Warcraft (WoW).

Limitations

In the present, there has been a shift within the popularity and sales of arcade, PC and console platforms. In the 70's and 80's, arcades dominated the market (as in arcades were the most popular platforms at the time), with consoles taking over the market between the 80's and early 2000's. However, the PC games market is currently dominating (just slightly).

But even though gaming platforms are very popular, and most people own at least one type of platform, there are various limitations to them.

• Arcade limitations: There are various limitations encountered with arcade machines, and some of these factors have stunted their dominance, popularity and development within the games market. These include that they were big and “chunky”, and that they could only have one game (which was pre-installed) per machine. It was hard to move arcade machines around due to their size and their weight, compared to the other two platform types. The graphics quality wasn't as good as with consoles in the late 80's. Compared to console and PC games, arcade games were mostly 2D and simple in gameplay and graphics (even though to this day, they are still popular to some degree). Probably one of the biggest limitations with arcade games was the production costs (not the production costs of the game itself, but the costs of producing/manufacturing the machines themselves).
• Console limitations: Consoles, even to this day, have some limitations. These include that each console can't be upgraded (modified) like a PC, games run at a set (unchangeable) resolution, and some consoles have a poor hardware architecture (like the Xbox 360. Please see the Hardware Technologies blog for more detail). Another limitation is the amount of consoles available, especially during the 80's (which caused the infamous Atari crash), with their exclusive games. In the late 70's and during the 80's, there were too many different consoles available for purchase and each console had its own brand of exclusive games, which limited the sales and popularity of console, but was mostly solved from the 80's onwards, to the point where there are only 4 major home console out (ca. 2009 onwards). There is another limited, that is more towards to games themselves. Console games have to be tailored to the console specs, which means that developers have to be careful about what assets, and how many assets, they can have in their game. This includes their poly budget and data quality.
• Computer limitations: The most obvious, and major, limitation for computers is their hardware and their build. A computer user is mostly limited by how much they are willing to spend on the hardware and casing (if building a computer themselves) or on a pre-assembled computer. So money is really the biggest limit for computers. So yeah, the price tags are the largest limitation. You can get some cheap computers that are about the same price as a console, and then there are the moderately expensive computers and are about £6000 (I say moderate because there are graphics cards that cost just as much as the previous example). There is also the matter of external components (like monitors, speakers, etc.), which is another limitation. A high-end graphics card will hardly do you any good if you have an old, or a rubbish, monitor, just as much as a high-end sound card will do when you have bad speakers.

So, no matter what platform it is, every platform has some form of limitations.

Not only did we learn about storage development and the evolution of networking, but we also learned some things about arcade machines and computers themselves. And so, this concludes this post. Thank you for sticking by this far and I hope that this post was helpful for you.