Home
History
Q3A
Hall of Fame
Configs
Tips
Gaming History
My first experience playing video games was when I was about six years old. The games were Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt, from the classic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I didn't own an NES though, my best friend did. So I was at his house playing video games very often. Eventually, my parents did buy me my very own Nintendo system. Ironically, they bought me one just a couple weeks before the release of the Super NES and the Sega Genesis. So while all my friends got to play Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog all day long, I was left with all the old games on my outdated system.
By 1994, I still had my NES. Meanwhile, all my friends were getting the hottest and latest games for Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Gameboy, and their other systems. However, I had one friend that had a personal computer. After getting the chance to experiment with computers, I found that I liked them much better than console gaming systems because you could do so much more with PCs than just play games. You could create pictures, type essays, and chat with people online over the internet. I also thought the games for the PCs were far better than the games for consoles. We would play Doom, Doom 2, and Heretic all the time and never get bored of them. There was also tons of violence, blood, and gore in computer games that you couldn't find on the "family friendly" console systems back in those days. We also played around with a program called DoomCAD, which allowed us to edit maps for our favorite computer games.
I finally convinced my folks to get a computer in 1994. My friend and I would connect to each other's modems on our PCs and play our games together at the same time from each other's house. Then Windows 95 was released, as well as a plethora of new games that my friend and I could play together like: Mechwarrior 2, Mechwarrior 2 Ghost Bear, Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries, Descent, Descent 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Hexen, Hexen 2, and Quake. A few years later, Microsoft launched their next operating system Windows 98. Some new games came out as well like Star Craft, Star Craft Brood War, Quake 2, and Half-Life, as well as Half-Life's world famous modification: Counter-Strike. But there was one game that came out before the millennium that took really caught my attention. On December 1999, id Software's ground breaking online masterpiece Quake 3 Arena was released. Q3A was truely a unique computer game, because it was built specifically for playing online with other people. All the other games I have mentioned, with the exception of Counter-Strike, were intended for single player (meaning playing against the computer). However, Q3A came with a powerful game engine, beautiful network coding, and flexible player options to tinker with. After the millennium, Microsoft released Windows XP for the PC. The current games of today run on this operating system like Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, Doom 3, Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil, Half-Life 2, and Counter-Strike: Source.
From what I have seen in the past, and from what I see today, I have to judge that the biggest contributor to the evolution of games up to today is the internet. Before the mid 1990s, the only improvement I saw in games and console systems were the graphics. But beginning after the mid 1990s, the better games seemed to be games that had multiplayer capabilities (able to play over the internet with other people). With the internet being involved in games today, gamers have gone from playing games together under one roof, to playing games together on opposite coasts. Also, PCs are not the only systems that have internet access anymore. Now console systems are including internet access, and the arrival of the XBox 360, Playstation 3, and Nintendo Revolution in the near future will certainly have a big impact on the online gaming community. I think that online gaming has a bright and prosperous future. Everything will be interlinked through the internet, and gaming companies will continue to make bigger, better, faster, and smarter games for the internet. Computers are also getting smaller, faster, and more capable to handle the high intensity games that are out there. Looks like online gaming is here to stay, and grow.