I got into PC gaming shortly after my introduction to computers in my early teens back in the early 90′s. During that time, MS-DOS was the OS of choice and all games required some level of tinkering before they would function. Anyone from that era should have fond memories of EMM386 and counter-parts used to get a game to run.
Through all that mess, I still actively bought, installed, tinkered and played many PC games. At the same time, in the console market, the Nintendo Entertainment System reigned supreme. My father did buy an NES console for my brother and me and we dutifully played through Super Mario Brothers and were amazed that 8-bit graphics.
At this point in time, the PC’s with their SVGA graphics capability severely outpaced the best pixels that a console could throw up on the TV. Additionally, the variety of games available for the PC in a multitude of genres kept me happily ignoring the console for quite some time.
During this time, my brother managed to get his hands on a Sega Genesis, Super NES, Nintendo 64 and XBOX. As you can imagine this trek took us from the early 90′s to early 2000. Throughout this time, consoles were considered by me and many others to be an interesting distraction with no comparison to the PC when gaming was in question.
This premise held true until the release of the Sony Playstation 2 and Microsoft XBOX which finally made PC gamers stop for a moment and take notice. My first exposure to the XBOX came when I decided to borrow my brother’s console to play Jade Empire. I was very quickly blown away by how brilliant the game looked on my 50″ Samsung DLP HDTV. I went to play a few other games and was equally impressed by how far the consoles had come.
During this time, I continued to play PC games but with less frequency and had found that the variety of games and genres were shrinking. Also, I found that I was buying games with less frequency and in the time between purchases some component in my PC had been obsoleted and thus playing that new game not required it’s purchase but also a new PC component.