Computer game generations

PC gaming is a continuous, constant evolution, with hardware gradually improving multiple times every year, which makes a direct comparison to console hardware generations difficult. This is an attempt to do it anyway. This effort went through several iterations before finding a grouping method that felt consistent and correct; key to this was ignoring the years of release of specific games, and focusing on classes of computer hardware instead, organizing them into fuzzy chronological groups more or less corresponding to Wikipedia's defined console generation periods. Also, no attempt was made to define the end of a generation, only the beginning of it.

First generation: PC pre-history (1970's)

Personal computers started existing around 1974, with 8-bit, no-display microcomputers such as the Altair 8800. Information about games on these early microcomputers is scarce, and likely of little relevance to video game history.

But around this time, games developed for even older mainframe computer systems surged in popularity, and some of them are of great historical interest, not just as early milestones, not just as seminal, genre-defining titles, but as games still worth playing. Many of these games would get ported to later personal computer systems, but they originally existed as text-only games, many programmed by university students, often in high level languages like FORTRAN and BASIC, for refrigerator-sized systems such as the PDP-10 and VAX.

Some of these games include:

• Colossal Cave Adventure
• Hunt the Wumpus
• The Oregon Trail
• Rogue
• Telengard
• Tetris
• Zork

The PLATO IV computer system, which debuted in 1972, is an important, if relatively obscure landmark, as it hosted the first known CRPGs, and featured graphics and multiplayer realtime gameplay. Unlike the above list, none of the PLATO IV games have been faithfully ported to later-generation personal computer systems. Titles that were ported at all, such as Oubliette, are fundamentally different from their original versions; a necessary compromise moving from a multi-user networked system to a personal microcomputer. Nevertheless, these games were massively influential to early RPGs and multiplayer games. They are playable in some form at Cyber1.

Some of the PLATO IV RPGs include:

• Avatar
• Camelot
• dnd (ingame The Game of Dungeons)
• Dungeon
• Moria
• Orthanc
• Oubliette
• pedit5 (ingame The Dungeon)

Second generation: 8-bit microcomputers (1977)

The second generation starts with the Apple II's release in 1977, and includes all hardware families that predate the NES. These computers usually had monochrome or color displays, video hardware with high-res text modes and lower-res graphics modes, 8-bit microprocessors, between 64KB to 256KB of RAM, 5.25" floppy drives, and no hard drives.

Some 8-bit microcomputers with significant game libraries include:

• Acorn Electron (MOS 6502)
• Apple II (MOS 6502)
• Atari 8-bit (MOS 6502)
• BBC Micro (MOS 6502)
• Commodore 64 (MOS 6510)
• FM-7 (Motorola 6809)
• IBM PC (Intel 8088)
• IBM PCJr (Intel 8088)
• MSX (Z80)
• PC-88 (Z80)
• Sharp X1 (Z80)
• TRS-80 (Z80)
• TRS-80 CoCo (Motorola 6809)
• VIC-20 (MOS 6502)
• ZX81 (Z80)
• ZX Spectrum (Z80)

Apple II family (1977)

The original Apple II could have up to 64KB of RAM. Its audio abilities could be expanded with the Mockingboard line of sound cards, which were used most famously by Ultima III and IV.

Later models included the Apple II+ and Apple IIe. The Apple IIe's RAM was easily upgraded to 128KB, which many games required. It was also compatible with the Mockingboard line of sound cards, and could support MIDI music with a Passport MIDI card and an external synthesizer.

Some games originally designed for the Apple II include:

• The Bard's Tale trilogy
• Castle Wolfenstein
• Dragon Wars (Apple IIe)
• Lode Runner
• Neuromancer
• The Oregon Trail, 1985 graphical version
• Prince of Persia (Apple IIe)
• Ultimas 1 through IV
• Ultima V (Apple IIe)
• Wasteland
• Wizardry 1 through V

Atari 8-bit family (1979)

The original Atari 8-bit models were called the Atari 800 and Atari 400, which had the same architecture, but the 800 came with more RAM, more expansion options, a better keyboard, cartridge slots, monitor support, and including sales of the later 800XL which replaced it, was the most popular of the entire line. Both initial models could be expanded to 48KB, and the 800XL came with 64KB.

Some games originally designed for the Atari 800 include:

• Alley Cat
• Archon
• Boulder Dash
• Jumpman
• M.U.L.E.
• Spy vs Spy
• Star Raiders

IBM PC family (1981)

The IBM PC, though popular with businesses, was initially the worst of these computers for gaming, thanks to its ugly 4-color CGA graphics hardware, its screechy monophonic beeper for sound, and prohibitively high cost for home computing. The first commercial configurations had up to 64KB of RAM, and could be upgraded to 256KB.

A variant, the IBM PCJr, attempted to be more home friendly, with 16-color graphics, a three-voice audio chip (perhaps comparable to the Game Boy), joystick ports, cartridge slots, TV compatibility, and half the PC's price tag. It debuted with King's Quest, the first IBM PC compatible game by Sierra, marking Sierra as the first major game developer to focus on the IBM PC. The IBM PCJr nevertheless had serious design flaws, including poor compatibility with IBM PC software, and it failed. A later PC compatible system, the Tandy 1000, was also compatible with IBM PCJr games, corrected most of the PCJr's flaws, kept the PCJr's advantages, and succeeded. A wave of inexpensive PC clones would follow, and eventually ensured all major computer games would be developed to be PC compatible.

Some IBM PC compatible games include:

• The Ancient Art of War
• Digger
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards (IBM PC, IBM PCJr, Tandy)
• King's Quest (IBM PCJr, Tandy)
• King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne (IBM PC, IBM PCJr, Tandy)
• Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel (IBM PC, IBM PCJr, Tandy)
• Space Quest 1&2 (IBM PC, IBM PCJr, Tandy)

Commodore 64 (1982)

The Commodore 64 came with an advanced for the time VIC-II video processor, the famous SID sound chip, and 64KB of internal RAM. It was much cheaper than the competition, notoriously destroyed the TI-99/4A in a brutal price war, and unlike the competition, remained more or less the same for its entire product cycle, as incremental upgrades such as the Commodore Plus/4 and Commodore 128 never took off or replaced it. The competition from Apple, Atari, and IBM were faster and offered more RAM and expandability, but the Commodore 64's custom video and audio chips were a tremendous and unique gaming asset.

Some games originally designed for the Commodore 64 include:

• Alter Ego
• California Games
• The Last Ninja 1&2
• Maniac Mansion
• Project Stealth Fighter
• Sid Meier's Pirates!
• Skate or Die
• Turrican 1&2
• Winter Games
• Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders

Third Generation: 16/32-bit microcomputers (1984)

The third generation starts with the Apple Macintosh's release in 1984, and includes all hardware families that predate the Turbografx 16.

Some 16-bit and early 32-bit microcomputers with significant game libraries include:

• Acorn Archimedes (ARM2)
• Amiga 1000 (Motorola 68K + OCS chipset)
• Atari ST (Motorola 68K)
• IBM PC AT (Intel 286)
• IBM PS/2 (Intel 386DX)
• Macintosh (Motorola 68K)
• Macintosh II (Motorola 68020)
• PC-98 (Intel x86)
• Sharp X68000 (Motorola 68K)

IBM PC AT (1984)

IBM's follow-up to the PC was the PC AT, with a 6mhz, 16-bit 286 processor. It could be equipped with an EGA card for 64-color graphics at double the resolution of the PCJr's video hardware. Hard drives became more common, allowing users to boot MS-DOS and install games to their internal disks and play without needing to swap diskettes. Up to 640KB of RAM could be addressed (16MB was possible in theory, but early DOS versions limited this to 640KB in practice). Mice became more common, and games with point & click interfaces surfaced to take advantage of this. Ad Lib, Inc. manufactured the first PC compatible "sound cards," which were not capable of true digital sound, but used FM synthesis to produce chiptune quality music and limited sound effects. The Roland MT-32, an external MIDI synthesizer, was capable of rich, orchestra-like soundtracks, and thanks to Sierra became the de facto standard for music in PC games. Most MT-32 compatible games also featured lower quality soundtracks compatible with the less expensive AdLib cards, while some others were composed with AdLib in mind to begin with.

Some games that would run on the PC AT include:

• Commander Keen: Invasion of the Vorticons
• Indianapolis 500
• Loom (original EGA version)
• NetHack
• Quest for Glory 1&2
• The Secret of Monkey Island (original EGA version)
• Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon

Amiga (1985)

The Commodore Amiga debuted in 1985 and offered very strong graphics and sound capabilities for its time, stronger than its competition for most of this period. But IBM compatibles would enter the market and eventually dominate it. The most popular model, the Amiga 500, was released in 1987 at a much lower price than the original 1985 model.

Some games originally designed for the Amiga include:

• Another World
• Battle Chess
• Cannon Fodder
• Defender of the Crown
• Lemmings
• Pinball Fantasies
• Populous
• The Settlers
• Shadow of the Beast
• Star Control

IBM PS/2 (1987)

Succeeding the PC AT, the IBM PS/2 line featured MCGA or VGA hardware supporting 256 simultaneous colors, or up to 262,144 colors with palette-cycling. 3.5" high density floppy disks were introduced, offering larger capacities than their 5.25" predecessors.

Some games designed around the PS/2 standard specs include:

• Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge
• Sid Meier's Civilization
• Stunts
• Wing Commander

Fourth Generation: Multimedia PCs (1988)

The fourth generation starts with the standardized CD-ROM data format in 1988, and includes all hardware families that predate the Panasonic 3DO. A single CD-ROM offered the data capacity of over 450 high density floppies, and more multimedia-centered advances quickly followed to take advantage of this.

Creative's Sound Blaster line quickly followed, and offered true digital PCM sound playback, giving PCs the ability to play back high quality speech and sound effects that were previously lacking compared to competitors. It also offered full support for 100% of AdLib compatible games, thanks to having an onboard Yamaha FM synthesis chip, the same one found in AdLib boards.

Although games quickly adopted Sound Blaster support, using realistic sound effects and speech that needed more data storage than before, not all games fully used the space that CD-ROMs offered. Many continued to be released on multiple floppy disks. Others were released in multiple formats, with CD-ROM versions offering full voice acting, and sometimes enhanced soundtracks and/or video. And yet others were only released on CD-ROM for convenience's sake, using only a small fraction of the capacity and being functionally identical to floppy versions.

Early adopter upgrade (1989)

In 1989, a high end IBM compatible might have had these specs:
386 DX CPU at 25Mhz
VGA graphics board
1 MB RAM
80 MB hard drive
3.5" 1.44 MB floppy disk drive
Roland MT-32 MIDI synth

A CD-ROM drive and digital sound card such as the Sound Blaster could be purchased separately and installed in such a machine.

The very first CD-ROM games were simply upgrades of older floppy-based games that used CD audio for music and speech. They did not require any sound card for digital audio; the audio would play directly from the CD-ROM drive itself, and the software would simply control which track was played back at which time. This approach had some major limitations; compression was impossible, so a game could have no more than 74 minutes of audio on a single disc. Only one audio track could be played at a time, and accessing any other data on the disc as it played was impossible, so there was no way to play voice samples over digital background music. Many CD-ROM games continued to use MIDI or FM synth for background music, as it was simple to play digital voice samples over this - the music was being processed by a completely separate piece of hardware.

Later, CD-ROM games stored speech and sometimes digital music as compressed audio files on the disc as data. These required a digital sound card to play properly, but were much more flexible than the CD audio approach. Games could have hours of audio, audio samples could be of any length and quantity, and the sound card could mix multiple digital audio sources together, such as playing sound effects over digital or FM synth music. Floppy based games would take advantage of sound cards as well, offering digital sound effects and speech at lower quality and capacity.

Some multimedia games that would run on an early adopter system were:

• Alone in the Dark
• Dune
• Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• King's Quest V
• Quest for Glory (VGA remake)
• Star Control II
• Wolfenstein 3D

Early mainstream build (1992)

Sierra was the first company to heavily promote the "multimedia" experience among PC gamers. A multimedia upgrade kit could be ordered from them, which included both a CD-ROM drive and digital sound card. These kits were expensive but popular among gamers.

By 1992, a high end IBM compatible might have these specs:
486 CPU at 33Mhz
1MB SVGA graphics board
8 MB RAM
200 MB hard drive
3.5" 1.44 MB floppy disk drive
Roland SC-55 General MIDI
CD-ROM and sound card multimedia upgrade kit

New solutions for breaking the 640KB RAM barrier were developed by Intel and Microsoft, making it possible for games to take advantage of several MB of RAM. Intel also introduced the 486 processor, their first to use a modular CPU socket, allowing future upgrades. IBM introduced the 'XGA' video standard, an extension of VGA, defining 1024x768 resolution at up to 256 simultaneous colors, or 640x480 resolution at up to 65,536 simultaneous colors. Microsoft Windows reached version 3.x, offering a multimedia hardware abstraction layer. The General MIDI standard was introduced, offered some enhancements over the old MT-32 de facto standard, and ensured games composed with one General MIDI device (the Roland SC-55 was the most popular, and modern Windows' built-in MIDI support is based on it) would sound more or less correct on any other General MIDI device. With powerful processors, flexible VGA graphics, CD-ROMs, and true PCM capable sound hardware, IBM compatibles were capable of the same or better graphics and sounds as their competitors, and dominated the home computer market.

In this time period, Commodore offered some new Amiga lines. The Amiga 3000 had a faster Motorola 68030 processor and an enhanced 'ECS' chipset, and the Amiga 4000 had a Motorola 68040 processor and advanced 'AGA' chipset. Apple introduced their "Quadra" line of computers, also using Motorola 68040 processors. Nevertheless, almost every major retail computer game was, at this point, developed primarily for IBM compatible computers.

Some multimedia games that would run on an early mainstream system were:

• Beneath a Steel Sky
• Day of the Tentacle
• Civilization II
• DOOM
• Full Throttle
• Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers
• Master of Orion
• Myst
• One Must Fall 2097
• Sam & Max Hit the Road
• System Shock
• TIE Fighter
• Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
• Ultima VII: The Black Gate
• Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness
• X-COM: UFO Defense
• X-Wing

Late mainstream build (1993)

By 1993, there were a number of game oriented PC manufacturers, such as Falcon Northwest, who initially catered especially to flight simulator enthusiasts. An early 1993 machine from them had these specs:
486 DX2 CPU at 66Mhz
2MB SVGA graphics board
8 MB RAM
200 MB hard drive
3.5" 1.44 MB floppy disk drive
CD-ROM drive
Sound Blaster 16

Some games that would run on a system like it were:

• Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
• Command & Conquer
• The Dig
• Duke Nukem 3D
• The Elder Scrolls: Chapter II - Daggerfall
• Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares

Fifth Generation: Wintel (1993)

The fifth generation starts with the release of the Intel Pentium processor in 1993, and includes all hardware families that predate the Sega Dreamcast. Intel's P5 architecture was downright powerful, for reasons that Wikipedia can explain better than I. Fluid, 3D texture-mapped graphics were finally a possibility, as were even larger, SVGA-compliant resolutions. Windows 95 offered a far superior hardware abstraction layer than Windows 3.1 before it. Games could be truly 32-bit, could be compatible with an infinitely wide variety of hardware thanks to Windows' device driver-based architecture, and did not have to manage their own memory; Windows 95 could multitask and manage up to 2GB of memory, though 8MB to 32MB was more typical. Video cards became more diverse. SVGA/XGA standards could go as high as 1600x1200 resolution with 16 million colors if the video hardware supplied enough horsepower.

A few developers continued to support DOS, and these late DOS games took advantage of the faster processors and larger amounts of RAM than were previously available.

Early adopter build (1995)

With the release of Windows 95, a high end gaming machine might have these specs:
Pentium CPU at 133Mhz
2MB 64-bit SVGA graphics card
16 MB RAM
1.2 GB hard drive
3.5" 1.44 MB floppy disk drive
4x speed CD-ROM drive
Sound Blaster 16

Some games that would run on a system like it were:

• Age of Empires
• Baldur's Gate
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert
• The Curse of Monkey Island
• Diablo
• Fallout 1 & 2
• Quake
• Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
• StarCraft

Early 3D accelerated build (1997)

3D accelerator cards such as the 3DFX Voodoo Graphics began to surface, and allowed sharper, faster, higher resolution graphics than software renders could, but the games had to be programmed specifically to support them on a card-by-card basis. Most games continued to render their graphics in software, using only standard SVGA acceleration features. Microsoft's DirectX attempted to unify this new graphics technology by providing indirect access to advanced 2D and 3D features, allowing the games to be programmed agnostic of any specific graphics cards. DirectDraw, the corresponding 2D interface, matured quickly, and became a de facto standard for 2D Windows games. But Direct3D was initially inefficient and low quality; early DirectX 3D games were more primitive than games optimized for specific cards (3DFX Voodoo was the most supported and even had its own proprietary API), and even software-rendered games looked nicer in some situations. OpenGL was introduced to Windows 95 as a competing standard, and fared better. Eventually, with DirectX 6, Direct3D had matured enough to hold its own against OpenGL and proprietary 3D APIs.

DirectX also provided interfaces for other gaming related tasks, including sound, networking, and input. Creative's EAX extensions to DirectSound allowed games to be rendered in surround sound with environmental effects, using Creative's compatible sound acceleration hardware.

Several older games, including a very small number of DOS games, received patches to enable 3D acceleration. Later games shipped with optional 3D acceleration.

A high end gaming system in 1997 might have these specs:
Pentium CPU at 200Mhz
4MB 64-bit SVGA graphics card
4MB Diamond Monster 3D card with 3DFX Voodoo chip
32 MB RAM
3.8 GB hard drive
3.5" 1.44 MB floppy disk drive
8x speed CD-ROM drive
Sound Blaster AWE 32

Some games that would run on a system like it were:

• Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings
• Half-Life
• Grim Fandango
• Planescape: Torment
• Quake II
• System Shock 2
• Thief: The Dark Project

Sixth Generation: GPUs (1999)

The sixth generation starts with the release of Nvidia's Geforce 256, which was the first graphics card marketed as a "GPU," and includes all hardware families that predate Microsoft's XBox 360. The Geforce 256 set itself apart from earlier consumer-grade 3D accelerators by integrating a transform & lighting engine, previously handled by software, into a central 256-bit chipset with its own cache memory. 3D scenes could become increasingly complex, and more and more games would forgo a software renderer entirely, requiring a 3D capable video card.

Microsoft's Direct3D 7 provided access to hardware T&L instructions, as OpenGL had done much earlier for professional-oriented software and graphics cards. Later, Direct3D 8 introduced programmable pixel shaders, vertex shaders, normal mapping, and other features. Direct3D soon 9 followed and offered enhancements over Direct3D 8 that I don't really understand.

At this point, there haven't been any serious PC hardware paradigm shifts comparable to hardware T&L or prior genre-defining ones. Hardware gets incrementally better, and games are written to take advantage of the new hardware within a few years. Computers have an "upgrade continuum" of sorts, where the differences in power in a typical setup only accumulates slightly year to year.

But it's around this time that "generation" enters the video game lexicon. The upcoming XBox 360 is marketed as a "next gen" system. Wikipedia users create the generation-oriented "History of video game consoles" page. The term "console generation" starts trending on Google, and peaks in May 2005. GameFAQs board members argue over whether the Dreamcast belongs in the same "generation" as the N64 or the PS2.

With console generations conceptually established, and with most large budget game development being console-oriented, PC games can be grouped according to when the necessary hardware became mainstream. There still is an upgrade continuum effect; you will still find a wide range of hardware upgrades in the span of a single console generation, and games released at either end of it can seem far apart. But the lines between generations sort of work.

Within this generation, after the Dreamcast but before the XBox 360, Intel's P6-based Pentium II saw an enhancement with the "SSE" instruction set and faster clock speeds, and was dubbed "Pentium III" despite having the same architecture. Later they released a new architecture dubbed "Netburst," used most famously by their Pentium 4 processor. AMD creates the AMD64 64-bit architecture which eventually beats out Intel's 64-bit instruction set with consumers, but the 64-bit mode is seldom used by consumers. Typical RAM ranged from 64MB in 1998, and may have been upgraded to 512MB or more by 2004. A video card with hardware TNL would have at least 8MB of onboard video RAM, and by 2004 may have as much as 64MB.

Some sixth-gen games include:

• Unreal Tournament
• Quake III: Arena
• Deus Ex
• Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
• Diablo II
• Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
• Thief II: The Metal Age
• Max Payne 1&2
• Anachronox
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein
• Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
• Neverwinter Nights
• Mafia
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
• Half-Life 2
• DOOM³

Seventh Generation (2005)

Intel introduced a "tick-tock" release cycle strategy; the first "tick" was a set of new Pentium 4's with smaller, 65nm transistors and higher clock speeds, including the 64-bit, AMD64-compliant, dual-core "Pentium D." The first "tock" followed and introduced the new "Core" architecture, using the same 65nm transistors. Each subsequent "tick" shrank the transistor size of the previous "tock," and each "tock" introduced a new architecture using the transistor size of the previous "tick."

The next architecture, "Core 2," with dual-core and quad-core variants, also 64-bit and AMD64-compliant. Ironically, the AMD64 instruction set is only now widely used by consumers, with Intel processors. These computers would have at least 1GB of RAM, and at least 4GB by the end of the seventh generation.

The Geforce 6800 was nVidia's mainstream GPU at the time of the XBox 360's release. Within this generation, there was also the 7 series, the "Tesla" series', and "Fermi" Geforce GTX 400 and 500 series. These cards would have 128MB to 1GB of video RAM.

Some seventh-gen games include:

• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Gears of War
• BioShock
• The Witcher
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
• Portal
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl
• Crysis
• Mass Effect
• Grand Theft Auto IV
• Dead Space
• Batman: Arkham Asylum
• Dragon Age: Origins
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Portal 2

Eighth Generation (2011)

Multiple Intel architectures have been released this generation. But each architecture is not categorically more powerful than the one before; several marketing "families" designate the general specs of any given processor, and is more meaningful with regards to power than how new the architecture is. E.g. - a quad-core i5 with the Sandy Bridge architecture is good enough for nearly any game, and is generally stronger than a dual-core i3 with the newer Kaby Lake architecture.

The marketing families most relevant to gaming are the Core i3, designating dual-core with hyperthreading, and the Core i5, designating quad-core with hyperthreading. Multithreaded games have become more common, making the quad-core i5 more useful. A step beyond that is the Core i7, which is more business-oriented, can have as many as eight cores, has extra CPU cache, and is overkill for most games.

Graphics cards come in a wide variety of price and power, but the Geforce GTX 660 is a common baseline target, a GTX 1070 is high-end, and anything more than that is only needed for enthusiast setups such as multi-monitor systems or 4K screens. These cards may have 2GB to 8GB of onboard video RAM.

Many games are optimized for 8GB of RAM, but only a handful can make use of more than that.

Some eighth-gen games include:

• Battlefield 4
• Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
• Alien: Isolation
• Far Cry 4
• Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin
• Grand Theft Auto V
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
• Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
• Fallout 4
• Rise of the Tomb Raider
• Dark Souls III
• DOOM
• Inside
• Resident Evil VII
• NieR: Automata