Top Nine Revolutionary Milestones in Computer Game Design

Those who grew up with Commodore 64 Game Systems often stare in amazement at the intense graphics and player options available to today’s young gamers. The leap from 2-D side scrolling games to 3-D multi-player universes didn’t happen overnight. Developing today’s advanced games took years of creating new computer video cards, systems, programs, and concepts.

For those of you who didn’t grow up along with the gaming revolution, here is a primer on the top 10 most revolutionary milestones in computer game design. Read it and learn. Your geeky elders will respect you for it.

The First War Games

The history of computer games reaches back to 1947, when two pioneering scientists made the Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device. This crude game “system” allowed the player to fire missiles at targets. Today’s players, however, would hardly recognize it as a computer game.

Tennis for Two

Tennis for Two, which was made in 1958, was an analog game that used an oscilloscope that allowed players to compete with each other in a simple version of tennis. Thanks to the oscilloscope, it looked more like a device on a submarine than a computer game.

Granular Video Cards

The Commodore 64 was one of the first computer systems to include a dedicated video card. This system, however, didn’t have a granular card. The introduction of granular video cards dramatically improved the visual aspects of games. Even when granular video cards were introduced, they still didn’t have anything close to the power that consumers expect today. In fact, the VGA had a 640X480 resolution, which doesn’t cut it by today’s standards when processing intense graphics. Still, the granular video cards were an important step forward.

The AGP Port

This was one of the most revolutionary milestones in computer gaming history. AGP finally gave graphics cards their own dedicated ports. This meant higher bandwidths and faster processing.

Multiple Slots for Video Cards

There was a momentary lull in the world of home gaming systems when many consumers found that they could rely on their PCs to play more intense games. This led to the development of computers that included slots for multiple video cards. Now computers could process more information at faster speeds.

Online Gaming

Basic online games have existed for nearly as long as the internet (check out the movie WarGames), but the technology didn’t really let players interact with effective avatars until games like World of Warcraft and Everquest offered an exciting way for individual players to meet each other online and play intense games even when they were separated by hundreds or thousands of miles.

DOOM

DOOM revolutionized the way that people played computer games in the early 1990s by popularizing the first-person shooter genre. This game was also important because it used intense 3-D graphics and allowed multiple players to participate through networked computers.

Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike took multi-player games to a whole new level. This game’s developers used advanced graphics to create one of the most realistic game worlds ever created in the 1990s. CS quickly became a huge hit, and players went so far as to form professional leagues, something that video game players would have thought impossible in the 80s and early 90s.

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games

Most serious gamers recognize Neverwinter Nights as the first MMORPG. It was introduced by AOL in 1991, but there were plenty of advances on the horizon. Today, MMORPGs are one of the most popular and lucrative types of computer games because they allow players to interact with other people from all over the world and explore fictional lands that offer amazing detail.