It has come to my attention during the past several years that the console has become the new PC. I think it kind of snuck up on me, as it probably did to a lot of gamers out there. I think it started with Halo , although there may have been signs in Metal Gear Solid and maybe even Mario Kart . However, all of a sudden, instead of just anticipating Half-Life 2 , gamers started getting all worked up about Halo 2 as well.

What happened to the PC’s status as the elite machine of gaming? To understand the rise of the console, we first need to examine what made PC gaming so great back in the nineties, during what I like to call the PC renaissance.

There have been great games made ever since Pong came out back in the proverbial day. However, the nineties (I think particularly the early- and mid-nineties) marked a period of intense innovation in gaming that paralleled the rapidly expanding capabilities of computer hardware. These advances weren’t comprised of just prettier graphics or faster game-play, they were generally more oriented towards broader or more in-depth gaming experiences, a result of a willingness to try out new game concepts.

The idea of what constitutes a video game expanded to fill the landscape of potential offered by modern PCs. Most significantly, the PC renaissance was a genre defining period — many styles of games we take for granted nowadays were imagined during this period.

Real-time strategy games were primarily defined between 1992 and 1998, starting with the mouse enabled Dune II , continuing with the Warcraft and Command and Conquer series and finally in Starcraft , setting the standard for the multitude of RTS games that have been published since. Even three-dimensional graphics have had little effect on game-play developed and proved in the nineties (except maybe in the brilliant Homeworld ). The only real innovation in the genre has been the incorporation of role playing elements and character development.

Speaking of role playing, RPGs certainly experienced at least one important spurt of development during the PC renaissance of the nineties. While the genre was pretty well defined much earlier in the forms of both pencil and paper games and the excellent Ultima and Dragon Quest games, SSI’s Gold Box games in the late eighties and its Eye of the Beholder series in the early nineties really took advantage of the interface and memory capabilities of newer machines. These games expanded game-play and in the case of the later Gold Box releases, implemented user-customizable elements. The excellent RPGs of the later nineties, beginning with the Baldur’s Gate series in 1998, owe most of the elements of their game-play and story-telling to these earlier video games.

Three-dimensional environments in many ways dominated the PC renaissance of the nineties, most notably in the definitive first-person shooters of the decade. Throughout the nineties, the PC was the platform for innovation in the FPS realm, from genre-defining classics like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom to games with depth and story like Dark Forces and Half-Life and multi-player bastions such as Quake and Half-Life’s mods. While excellent FPS games were eventually released on the later consoles of the nineties, they were never innovative, and when compared to the PC games released at the same time were technologically inferior.

Gosh, the list goes on and on, with countless flight and space combat simulations like the Wing Commander series and the X-Wing and TIE Fighter games. Tactical shooters have been ported to consoles, but the genre started out on the PC (unless you think Metal Gear was a tactical shooter.)

Well, that’s about enough waxing for one column. My main point is that this renaissance seems to have ended, and the console has risen to become the new PC.

There is very little successful genre-busting going on anywhere in game development, since most developers seem to be content to build on foundations laid during the nineties. Furthermore, I think hardware development on the PC end has staggered to the point where, to a certain extent, next-gen consoles are the systems which really push the technological bounds of video games. More advanced game-pad controllers have given consoles a level of interactivity only previously achievable by some combination of a keyboard and a joystick or mouse.

Sure there are a few gems out there for the PC, but in terms of major commercial successes, I think the games that push bounds and still pull in dough can now be found on your TV more readily than your monitor. The best games that come out for PC will invariably be successfully ported to your next-gen. Thriving multiplayer console communities mean there’s almost no point in being a PC gamer anymore — the console has become much more than a glorified home arcade; it has become a PC.

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