From Doom to Half-Life to World of Warcraft, few platforms have been as instrumental in the evolution of gaming as the powerful PC. In the early days, it brought us grand text-based adventures and the very first examples of dungeon crawlers. By the early ’90s, we were enjoying real-time strategy titles, role-playing games, and the very first shooters. In 1999, EverQuest, while not the first game to connect players around the world, sparked the era of the MMORPG. All of this gaming history happened on the PC and Den of Geek is here to explore it.
Our History of PC Gaming series includes in-depth features, interviews, retrospectives, fun lists, and videos covering the people, games, and innovations from the earliest days of Tennis for Two and Commodore 64 to the hero shooters, MOBAs, and battle royale games we’re enjoying today.
What are the most important PC games of all-time? We have an answer for you. The innovations that allowed us to one day start dreaming about the cloud? Yep, we’re covering that too.
Below, you can find all of the entries in our History of PC Gaming series, with excerpts and links to the full articles:
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25 PC Games That Changed History
When trying to name the most important PC games of all-time, though, it’s not only about innovation and who came first. No, the most important PC games of all-time are typically the ones that inspired the community itself. These games inspired a legion of other developers to consider new concepts. They inspired outsiders to look at gaming in an entirely new way. Most importantly, they inspired those who played them to tell everyone they knew that they had to do the same.
These are the PC games that send you right back down memory lane and define the eras in which they were released (while still being enjoyable today). Most importantly, they changed the way we played on PC.
PC Gaming Innovations That Changed the Way We Play
The evolution of PC gaming features ups, down, important characters, and many, many chapters. And these chapters are not always so clearly defined. There is much debate about which pivotal moments define the history of PC gaming.
There is no universally agreed upon series of innovations that form the story of PC gaming to this day, but we’ve taken a crack at identifying the landmark occurrences which not only forever changed the way we play on our PCs but that helped shape the nature of the video game industry as we know it and as it will become in the future.
The Legacy of Baldur’s Gate
Cameron Tofer is a game developer familiar with the long, and sometimes complicated, legacy of the seminal computer RPG Baldur’s Gate. He not only co-founded Beamdog, the studio working to preserve and enhance the Baldur’s Gate series and other vital RPGs, but he worked as a programmer at BioWare when one of the most legendary studios in gaming was little more than a group of passionate Dungeons & Dragons fans.
“The team, at the time, this was their first game,” Tofer says in a recent interview with Den of Geek. “It was just a lot of pure passion and soda pop and just shag carpets and basements. It was just a passion that just went straight from around the table into making a game.”
Tofer takes us from the early days of playing Dungeons & Dragons with the Baldur’s Gate team all the way to the era of revitalizing classic experiences for a modern audience.
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John Saavedra is Games Editor at Den of Geek. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @johnsjr9 and make sure to check him out on Twitch.
Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.