And all the while the “hardcore” gamers barely even noticed this most profound democratization of computer gaming that the world had yet seen. In fact, they were playing games enough to make Windows, that alleged game-unfriendly operating environment, quite probably the most successful gaming platform of the early 1990s in terms of sheer number of person-hours spent playing. Whatever the fact was, they were still playing games. Yet they too would soon be putting in millions upon millions of hours every year playing games, albeit more often in antiseptic adult offices than in odoriferous teenage bedrooms. The people who came to play these different kinds of games couldn’t imagine describing themselves in those terms - and, indeed, would likely have been somewhat insulted if you had suggested it to them. The second, more interesting story about games on Windows deals with different kinds of games from the ones the traditional game publishers were flogging to the demographic who were happy to self-identify as gamers. It wouldn’t be until after the first decade of Windows was over that game developers would finally embrace it, helped along both by a carrot (Microsoft was finally beginning to pay serious attention to their needs) and a stick (the ever-expanding diversity of hardware on the market was making the MS-DOS bare-metal approach to programming untenable). Unfortunately, though, GDI was slow it was fine for business graphics, but unusable for most of the popular game genres.įor all these reasons, game developers, alone among makers of software, stuck obstinately with MS-DOS throughout the early 1990s, even as everything else in mainstream computing went all Windows, all the time. It was true that Windows’s library for programming graphics, known as the Graphics Device Interface, or GDI, liberated programmers from the tyranny of the hardware - from needing to program separate modules to interact properly with every video standard in the notoriously diverse MS-DOS ecosystem. Instead you were stuck all the time inside the borders of the window in which it ran this, needless to say, didn’t do much for immersion. As a programmer, you couldn’t even force a Windows game to go full-screen.
#SOLITAIRE 3D WINDOWS 10 SOFTWARE#
Games were in fact the one kind of software in which uniformity wasn’t a positive thing gamers craved diverse experiences. But it certainly hadn’t been designed with games in mind they were so far down on Microsoft’s list of priorities as to be nonexistent. The Windows API made life easier in countless ways for makers of word processors, spreadsheets, and databases, allowing them to craft attractive applications with a uniform look and feel. Yet even after Windows 3.0 hit the scene in 1990 and makers of other kinds of software stampeded to embrace it, game publishers continued to turn up their noses. Why should they? Very few people were even using the thing. We’ll dispense with the former first.ĭuring the first half of the aforementioned decade - the era of Windows 1 and 2 - the big game publishers, like most of their peers making other kinds of software, never looked twice at Microsoft’s GUI. One of them is extremely short, the other a bit longer and far more interesting. There are two stories to be told about games on Microsoft Windows during the operating environment’s first ten years on the market.
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