Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games ✚

Jill

Video: Evolution of PC Games

David Pescovitz at 8:06 am Wed, Jul 18, 2012

— FEATURED —

Book Review

Lexicon: smart, sharp technothriller from Max "Jennifer Government" Barry

Book Review

The 'Geisters: spooky, scary novel

Science

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

— FOLLOW US —

Boing Boing is on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our RSS feed or daily email.

 

— POLICIES —

Except where indicated, Boing Boing is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution

 

— FONTS —

Tweet
Kindle

On the heels of Reverse Enginears' "A Brief History of Video Games" comes this new one, "The Evolution of PC Games." Again, another nice complement to our Rob's epic "Game Deaths."

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

  • http://obsidian.kokolis.net Chloramphenicol

    I recognize way too many of those games, and the CGA ones really bring back some childhood memories.

    • http://twitter.com/fossilfuels Funk Daddy

      yep, I remember lusting over the one page ads for games in my stepdad’s Byte magazines even though the text games ruled over those selections.

  • http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers

    No Another World or Syndicate? Only the Deus Ex menu?

    Otherwise, great.

    • http://twitter.com/fossilfuels Funk Daddy

      Syndicate was awesome, I also remember it fondly because I didn’t have to reconfig memory to run it the way I often had to for m other favourites.

  • Fang Xianfu

    I could watch videos like this for hours (and I probably have)! It’s like watching the history of drawing, or writing, taking you from the first scratches in the dirt up to the best and most amazing things the modern world can do – but this format really brings home just how fast that evolution has been for video games. Awesome.

  • http://twitter.com/Epers Eddie Perkins

    That was pretty cool. Recognized quite a few. It did seem a bit odd that there was no World of Warcraft (unless I missed it) considering how huge that game was and kinda still is. There was plenty of other Blizzard games so, I dunno. 

  • http://www.kmoser.com kmoser

    This is more of a hodge-podge than a chronology. It keeps jumping back to the same games it showed previously.

  • Purplecat

    You can see, almost to the second,  the point at which things started sliding into the brown swamp littered with guns that makes up so much of today’s gaming landscape.

  • Warren Grant

    There were a lot of images – far too many of which I recognized – but I don’t think I saw a single MMORPG in there, and forgive me that is what gaming has been to me at least for the past 10 years or more. I know I am not alone given all of the MMOs out there, someone else is playing a lot of them :P
    Still, a fun romp…

  • Chris Impicciche

    I waited that whole time and I never heard “build more farms” as a sample

  • Scott Barrie

    I think it would have been funny to throw Dwarf Fortress in near the end.

  • Ty Myrick

    Good to see Monkey Island and a few others, but too many console hits and not enough intrinsically PC games. Unless I missed them, I didn’t see WOW, Myst, or The Oregon Trail. And when you go all the way back to DOS, nothing evokes those old green screen monitors like Sopwith Camel.