PC Gaming Through the Ages

A few weeks ago, we posted an article that took a look at GOG.com (Good Old Games), a service that sells, as the name suggests, old titles. Some are older than others, so it’s fun to look through their collection to see how graphics have improved over time. Depending on how old you are and how long you’ve been using a computer, you may have jumped into things more recently when SVGA or better was available, and if so, you’ve missed a lot.

If you’re an old-school PC gamer, and I mean old-school, then you may have even played games that lacked color, also known as monochrome. I played few that way, because I quickly made the move to CGA when I was able. CGA was painful in many regards, because the game developers had two color palettes to work with, and both were headache-including. But hey, at least it was color.

Then the shift was made to EGA, which was pretty-well on par with 8-bit consoles (16 colors), then VGA (256 colors), then SVGA (65,536 colors) and beyond. The sky’s the limit nowadays, but it’s great to take a look at the history of PC gaming to see just how far we’ve come. We could very well still be using EGA or VGA… and we wouldn’t even know of anything better. Imagine that! Tech Radar has a nice article discussing these color limitations and a lot more, which I’ve linked below. I recommend reading, especially if you’ve never had the privilege (is it a privilege?!) of experiencing this history.

What separated this era of gaming from the likes of Crysis (if you ignore roughly 15 quantum leaps in various areas of technology) was that tricks such as these were essential. Elite used wireframe 3D graphics on most platforms because that was as much as they could hope to handle. Most games assumed the player would understand that principle, although some built it into the fiction of the game.