The rise of the PC game market - timeline

[ElPolloDiabl]

How did the PC take over the games market in your part of the world?

I remember the strategy games and flight sims were the first ones to go PC at the end of '89. PC were still pretty low spec, but their add in cards and hard drives were quite cheap.

'94... Although the Amiga software has dried up, the add-ons/upgrades are actually affordable. The CD-Rom enters the picture.
The 486 is the system of choice for gamers. There is Simcity 2000, Civilization and Warcraft.

'96... The internet enters the picture. The PC doesn't have total domination, but it's getting there. Age of empires and Myst were the hot games.

'98... PCs are dirt cheap 2nd hand and so are peripherals and upgrades. First person shooters are dislodging driving sims from the top spot.

'01 and on... The decade of crappy sequels. That's weird huh, how many sequels turned out bad. They must have lost touch or flat out ignored the fans.

That's my experience from Sydney Australia. I'm gauging it from friends and relatives.

[Moto]

I really think the pivotal years were 1992-1993.  That's when you had ID's Wolfenstein 3d and then Doom.  I was in college and all my Comp-Sci buddies and I were just gaga over these new "3d" games.  That's what caused my attention to shift away from the Amiga and into the PC.  A few years later you had quake with the next generate of real 3D video boards and things really took off.   Anybody remember the first time they saw GLQuake running on one of those new "fancy" verite boards?  It was a thing of beauty, I say.

[Ilwrath]

Anybody remember the first time they saw GLQuake running on one of those new "fancy" verite boards? It was a thing of beauty, I say.

Yup...  That was the first time I suspected the Amiga was in trouble.  Seeing an OpenGL hardware accelerated game on a home system.  I already knew hardware OpenGL was great, but before that I'd only seen it on very expensive CAD systems that weren't competing in the same stratosphere, pricewise.

[rvo_nl]

I already had that with Doom, tbh.. and some of the early flight sims (commanche) and golf games (anyone remember 'real sound' ?).
 
But.. I also remember how expensive pc's were and how much noise they produced and the stuttering of video/games when the harddrive was accessed and how impossible to set up (DOS and such) and the lack of good 'scrolling' games like on the Amiga and the lack of Dpaint and Protracker and much, much more.
 
It was the internet that finally did it for me, but not until 2000!

[Amiga_Nut]

The whole issue was quite complicated from my perspective.

First we had the very slow take up of VGA in PC games, this meant the Amiga enjoyed superior graphics for quite a while (up to very early 90s) when the games companies in the EU where still producing EGA games as standard and VGA as a bonus.

Thing is once 256 colour VGA was adopted as default on PC games they were home free. The PC, unlike the Amiga, has just one source of power driving all their games, until much later when 3D accelerator cards became anything like a standard and affordable.

This meant that if you had purchased a copy of any game for your 386 PC, two years later you would be able to see a massive increase in speed just by running it on your new Pentium PC. Win for consumers, win for the programmers. The whole thing is automatic and just a feature of the PC style of computing of that era, which had eventually reaped an advantage once VGA was supported for games.

Now enter AGA, for reasons best known to Commodore they chose to make the 256 colour mode planer...so 8 bit planes needed to be manipulated to generate a single colour out of 256. PCs went for a much more streamlined byte per pixel, this meant one write compared to 8 or so. Instant speed advantage there. How many games automatically improved due to running on an A1200...not many. Did Lotus III get instantly improved to Lotus II levels of speed and smoothness? Nope. Did Street Fighter improve? Nope. Etc etc.

Add to this fact that newer game styles had zero help from the Blitter/Copper duo on even AGA (eg Voxels on flight sims or just plain Doom engines) and were massively helped by the PC's byte per pixel screen arrangement of VGA and the always faster CPU speeds of PCs and you have the whole thing going down hill for the poor Amiga.

There were things C= could have done better, like a special byte/pixel 320x256 mode etc and going for CPU speed upgrade of say 28mhz 68020 on the A1200 for those that wanted it.

But C= had lost its way a long time ago, as well as its bank balance. So in the end it was inevitable I think.

[motrucker]

I think it was pretty simple, actually. DOOM did it. Wolvenstien 3D started it, DOOM did it, then Quake clinched it. Granted there were other reasons mixed in there, but ID software can pretty much be called the culprit.