Starflight: How the PC and DOS Exploded Computer Gaming 1987-1994

By Jamie Lendino

No one saw it coming. At its launch in 1981, IBM's original Personal Computer was an expensive business machine-not a gaming behemoth of the kind you saw from Apple, Atari, Commodore, and Tandy. But by 1990, the PC had trampled all its competitors and become the gaming juggernaut it remains to this day. How did this happ

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steel Gear Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781957932019

Book preview

> Contents

> Introduction

1> Beginnings

2> Launch

3> Battle

4> Warp

5> Origins

6> Conquer

7> Worlds

8> Epic

9> Knee Deep

10> Forever

> Acknowledgements

> Bibliography

> About the Author

> Notes

> Introduction

Most people today play computer games on Windows PCs. Some play on Macs or Linux, but the majority are on Windows; at least, that’s where all the cutting-edge titles show up first. This wasn’t always the case, and early PCs had little to do with gaming. Back in the late 1970s, the Apple II and other 8-bit systems kickstarted the home computer revolution. But ask anyone what kind of computer they play games on now, and chances are it’s a Windows PC—or, to use the original terminology, an IBM-compatible PC.

IBM didn’t introduce its own personal computer until 1981. With a 16-bit processor, it was much more powerful than popular home computers such as the Atari 800 and the Commodore 64. But it also cost much more, and it had relatively rudimentary graphics and sound capabilities compared with the 8-bit machines, which had dedicated processors for these tasks. Most people bought one for work and played video games on it as an afterthought, if ever. Many game developers started with home computers and only later ported their best titles to the PC.

This began to change in the late 1980s. The PC platform gained faster processors, better graphics, and sound cards, spurring new kinds of games matching and even exceeding what was possible on competing systems. Suddenly, the PC was no longer a strange, vast land of overpriced business machines. By 1990, the PC had become the default game development platform—a title it still holds today. All other competitors either disappeared soon after (the long-running Apple II and Commodore 64, and the newer 16-bit Commodore Amiga and Atari ST) or stayed niche forever (the Mac).

Why did this happen? How did it happen? What caused the PC to start as one voice among a dozen and to, eventually, dominate the industry for 30 years and counting? Starflight: How the PC and DOS Exploded Computer Gaming 1987–1994 tells the story of what it was like to play games then and how the hardware evolved to make it possible. It’s both a celebration of the most sophisticated and significant DOS titles and a map to show how the PC went from one of the worst gaming platforms to the best.

How This Book Is Organized

The story of computer gaming is complex, and to take an effective stab at explaining the dominance of the PC requires some zooming in and sharpening of focus. I’ve written other books about vintage computers and gaming, but this is the first time I included the range of years I’m covering in the subtitle. Make no mistake: The years 1981 through 1986 were crucial for PC gaming, and hundreds of good titles came out. We’ll cover this in the first chapter—it’s vital to understand how the stage was set, and we’ll detail a few key early titles that became a direct part of the story of PC gaming—but early IBM PCs and compatibles weren’t ideal gaming machines, so we’ll move through the period at a fast pace.

Instead, most of this book focuses on 1987–1994, when PC gaming found itself—and everyone else found it. We’ll look in detail at the biggest and most significant MS-DOS games that illustrate the progression of the platform in tandem with hardware and OS development, as well as key innovations that changed computer gaming forever and still resonate today. Nearly all the games I cover in depth were released during this time frame. Chapters 2–9 each roughly correspond with one year. The last, much shorter Chapter 10 closes the story.

I can hear it now as some readers go through the book: Where is [my favorite game]? Why did you give this game two pages and this other one only a sentence? Making these decisions was the single toughest thing about structuring this book. I went with some of the most popular and significant, but given these criteria, there easily could have been hundreds, and I wouldn’t want to write or read that kind of encyclopedia. Besides, my editor would have murdered me. Nonetheless, after a very strenuous and considered process involving copious amounts of game-playing, coffee, guilt, and mental agita, I narrowed it down, but it’s still more than 100 key titles. By themselves, these could easily comprise a lifetime of gaming; I’ve returned to many of them time and again even outside of working on this project. I do mention many others as well, fitting them in context as the story goes on. Throughout the book, we’ll alternate between sections covering dozens of games in brief and singular titles that set the stage for the PC to take over the market.

Even more significant than narrowing down the book’s focus was deciding where to cap off the timeline. How do you cover the best PC titles of this era without also extending the timeline a few years past 1994 and covering Diablo, Civilization II, and other Windows 95 and DirectX hits of the second half of the 1990s? Or, more likely, even if I restricted the book to DOS games, it would have still left room for Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness, Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Quake, The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, Duke Nukem 3D, and Fallout, to name just a few examples. I may well visit those games and many others in another book. But for this one, I wanted to look closely for the first time at how the PC transitioned from one of many computer gaming platforms to where it ascended and then finally when it had become the best.

Conventional wisdom suggests the Intel–Microsoft bullet train and widespread business adoption made the PC’s dominance a foregone conclusion. There’s some truth to that, but with gaming, there was plenty of nuance in how this occurred. Rest assured: We’ll get to it all.

Why I Wrote This Book

I started out as a massive Atari computer fan, with the 8-bit Atari 800 and its 16-bit 520ST successor. But when the brand started fading in the U.S. toward the end of the 1980s, and I was in high school (with college looming) with a need for better productivity software, I knew I had to move on to the world of MS-DOS and IBM PCs. My first PC was a Vendex HeadStart III, a 286-12 machine with 3.5- and 5.25-inch floppy drives, 1MB RAM, a 32MB hard drive, and a 14-inch color VGA monitor. I still had my Atari computers, but the PC became my go-to system for homework, college applications, and plenty of gaming. And it became clear very quickly that with titles released in the last few years of the 1980s, the PC was already comparing well with the best the Atari ST and Amiga had to offer.

Soon, I was hooked. Over the next five to six years, I upgraded several times: first to a 386DX-33 desktop in January 1991; then to a Centrix 486DX-33 midsize and a beloved MAG MX-15F monitor in April 1992, both of which I ordered from one of the many vendors advertising in massive Computer Shopper tomes; and finally, in November 1993, to a custom-built 486DX2/66 midsize tower with VESA local bus graphics and a double-speed CD-ROM drive. (It’s amazing I graduated college, given the sheer amount of time I spent playing DOS games and shopping for computer components!) Among the upgrades I bought as soon as they became available were sound cards such as the AdLib Music Synthesizer, the first Creative Labs Sound Blaster, and the Roland MT-32—all by 1990 for the 286-12 computer—and a few years later, the Gravis Ultrasound and the Roland SCC-1 Sound Canvas. I was already interested in music recording, so I ran several of these together through a Mackie mixer to a separate amplifier and speaker system, for games that supported two cards simultaneously.

Configuring the components in your next PC was part of gaming on the platform even back then. It wasn’t like buy a Commodore 64 or sell it and upgrade to an Atari ST. With PCs then, as now, you became intimately familiar with CPUs, memory speeds, video cards, hard drives, power supplies, bus types, and prices. I used to pore over the elaborate magazine ads for Zeos 386 PCs, Gateway 2000s, Micron PCs, and other brands to see what magic combination of specs and cost would keep me happy for the next 18 to 24 months. Although this book isn’t primarily a memoir, here and there I’ll intersperse little snippets of my own personal experiences with the games when they were relevant, the same way I’ve done in my other books about computers and video games. But my main goal in this book is to tell the history and celebrate the awesomeness of DOS games—and, hopefully, in the process, convey what it was like to discover and play these titles when they were new, and in light of competing platforms.

Going Home Again

There are many advantages to the way gamers buy titles today, be it over Steam, GOG, or any number of other digital distribution services. You get to play your new game instantly, rather than going to a store hoping they have a copy in stock or ordering by mail or phone and then waiting days for the package to arrive, all of which we used to do. And as much as we complain about digital rights management (DRM) as a form of copy protection, it still beats using a code wheel, reading an obscure word buried in the manual, or keeping a floppy disk or CD-ROM loaded in the drive for the game to work. (I realize not everyone may agree with this, as opinions on DRM run hot.)

But in getting to this point, much has been lost. In some respects, playing boxed PC games with their original printed materials today mirrors playing coin-op games in an arcade as opposed to running them in an emulator. It’s not that you can’t enjoy gaming digitally, particularly if you have access to PDF copies of what originally came in the box. Emulators and archive sites are wondrous things, helping us preserve access and knowledge from generations ago, and letting us run all kinds of systems and software on a single modern computer. But our brains remember the sights and sounds of opening a new game box and smelling the fresh ink in the manual, or even the plastic the floppy disks were made of. Reading the included materials, collecting the feelies, unfolding the map or schematics, and referring to them while playing the game combined to deliver an enhanced experience all but gone today, as even consoles are shedding the last vestiges of packaged optical media.

For me, the thrill of buying new games and collecting the boxes and instruction manuals was unparalleled. I would spend time away from the computer just reading the manual, studying the map, and rereading the back of the box. I’d also read all the magazine reviews and ads. All of this was part of soaking in the experience of the game, both interactively on the computer screen and offline with printed materials: the experience of walking into a store and buying software, taking it home, and tearing off the shrink wrap. This was true multimedia in a way, as the game appealed to other senses in addition to sight and sound, although I personally never ate a floppy disk and wouldn’t recommend it.

The manuals were a key part of many of the best titles of the era. First, there was the purely mechanical issue that you often needed the manual to understand the controls and gameplay. Today, this kind of thing has almost disappeared, as most genres of games have standardized control schemes, and in-game tutorials and narration explain what you need to know to play. But some of the better-written manuals also explained the game’s deep backstory, taking you far beyond the relatively rudimentary on-screen graphics to fully immerse you in its world. Not all the manuals were this good, but the better ones were a part of and even key to the gaming experience.

I’m not alone in thinking all this either. Not only is there a thriving community of fans out there on social media and in forums, but there are specifically those who miss the big box era of DOS gaming, before publishers agreed to shrink the packaging in the early 2000s to better match those of console games and DVDs on retail store shelves. Many hobbyists collect these original big box games, displaying them nicely on bookshelves, and most importantly, playing the heck out of them. If any of this describes you, more power to you! But you don’t need to be a complete-in-box collector to play and enjoy them now.

Conventions

This book follows several conventions you may already be familiar with if you’ve read my prior books. Tense remains a difficult subject, because if you’re not careful you can jump around between present tense, such as when playing one of these games today, and past tense, when discussing back when these games were new and exciting and historically significant. To keep things simple, this book is in the past tense, except for a few references to today sprinkled throughout—for example, [x] game was a milestone in its genre, and because it has aged well, many people continue to play it today.

In my previous books about different systems, each platform either excelled right out of the gate or within a couple of years of its initial launch. PC gaming, on the other hand, took longer to mature. Although the MS-DOS platform accumulated hundreds and then thousands of titles in its first years of life, it wasn’t until the mid and late 1980s when the platform truly began to come into its own and become affordable enough to be considered a home computer as well as one for business.

Pinning down exact release dates in the 1980s and 1990s is tricky for all but the most famous of titles. The publicized launch dates, announcement dates, and advertisements could disagree with each other. Sometimes a magazine received a prerelease copy of a game, so you couldn’t go by the appearance of a review in print either. Even if the magazine was told under embargo from the publisher that such-and-such game would go on sale on a certain date, this doesn’t mean it did—especially given the two-month lead times common in monthly print publications and the potential for last-minute bug fixes. Today, these inaccurate dates get passed around from website to website and taken as gospel. For this book, I cross-checked release dates primarily in the product materials and magazines of the period and across user forums, MobyGames, PCGamingWiki, eXoDOS, GOG, and sources cited in Wikipedia. All the detailed game examinations are arranged chronologically by month and year. Beyond this, and for our purposes, it doesn’t matter in most cases if a game came out a couple of weeks before or after another game, unless it was such a massive disruption it affected the entire industry (and we’ll get to all of those). As for the dates themselves, I always went with the PC release, even if it was a port from another platform. Atari Games released Gauntlet II in arcades in 1986, for example, but the PC conversion didn’t arrive until August 1989, so I used the latter date here. Every attempt has been made to get these dates correct, but uncovering history is a nonlinear process and sometimes new information comes to light.

I treated hardware introductions in a similar fashion, but instead covered them in context rather than by their initial retail launch. For example, it wasn’t of consequence to gamers that AdLib released its first sound card in 1987 because it took a couple of years before developers could complete and release titles with AdLib support in earnest. Intel unveiled the 486 CPU in 1989, but complete 486 PC systems weren’t widely available until 1990, and prices remained out of the reach of most gamers (often near five digits!) until at least early 1991. I did my best to account for this phenomenon throughout the book, always mentioning the correct hardware introduction dates, but more importantly fitting the products into the narrative in the appropriate spots and not before they mattered to us PC gamers. Unlike for new consoles, no launch day lineups of games existed for these sorts of hardware upgrades. If anything, business, academic, and engineering users with higher budgets took advantage of them first, although this changed as time went on.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with a quick look at how we got the PC in the first place—and, at the close of the 1970s, how unconventional a product it was for the world’s most storied name in computer systems.

1> Beginnings

The full history of the IBM PC is beyond the scope of this book. But a short refresher is in order, as it helps explain how PC gaming got started—even though, and amazingly in retrospect, none of the companies involved were interested in video games.

International Business Machines, founded in 1911 in central New York as the Computing Tabulating-Recording Company, had become synonymous with computing by the 1960s thanks to cutting-edge mainframes such as the 701 and the revolutionary System/360. The market for these room-filling computers was an academic, government, and corporate affair, where only students, professors, and company employees could access the machines and had to share precious resources with each other. Computer gaming was considered frivolous. Fortunately for us, it didn’t stop everyone, as students and professors in American research labs pioneered pivotal mainframe games such as Space War (1962), The Sumerian Game (1964), Lunar Lander (1969), and The Oregon Trail (1971). The advent of BASIC programing also proved key; in 1973, DEC employee David H. Ahl published 101 BASIC Computer Games, which sold 10,000 copies, or more than the total number of computers in the world.¹

With the arrival of inexpensive CPUs in the early 1970s, several electronics entrepreneurs had begun experimenting with building smaller machines, with the dream of having a complete computer of their own. This culminated in the Altair 8800, first shown (secretly as a non-working prototype) on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. You had to assemble the 8800 yourself and add peripherals before it would even do anything. But it cost $399—not tens of thousands of dollars, as did even the smaller IBM, DEC, and Data General systems of the era. The IMSAI 8080 and other similar kit computers followed. All promised to put some of the power and all the control of a massive computer in a box that fit on your desk. The electricity in the new movement was palpable, as excited computer enthusiasts began banding together to workshop hardware add-ons and share their programs.

Lightning struck in 1977 with the arrival of the Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80, the Commodore PET 2001, and the Apple II, three fully assembled personal computers ready to use and program. The Apple II impressed with its color graphics and expandability, and VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, proved the Apple II’s case as a business tool. Others soon followed with color systems of their own, marketed for home use. Enterprising developers quickly began making games for these machines—especially for the Apple II, which Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak had designed in part to be capable enough to play his Breakout arcade game at home, and later, for the Atari 400 and 800 and newer Commodore machines. Each platform jostled to become the standard for a new era of personal computing. To give you an idea of how fast this took off, the 1978 second edition of Ahl’s retitled BASIC Computer Games became the first computer book to sell a million copies.²

The threat to IBM was immediate and existential. Big Blue knew it needed to sell a microcomputer of its own. One potential solution was dropped into the staid company’s lap. In July 1980, Atari approached IBM CEO and chairman Frank Cary and asked if he wanted Atari to design and build a PC for them—specifically, to rebrand, upgrade, and sell the cutting-edge Atari 800 personal computer as IBM’s own. Cary saw the potential and put Bill Lowe, the head of IBM’s Boca Raton Labs, in charge of the proposal. Lowe had been a fierce advocate for IBM to build a microcomputer for years. Designer Tom Hardy mocked up a beautiful, all-white prototype with a redesigned motherboard and extra memory. Hardy married the 800’s industrial design to a proper IBM keyboard and Big Blue’s color scheme, and he sketched the injection moldings and tooling required to manufacture the machine.³

Lowe presented the proposal to the IBM executive board knowing they would turn it down, which they did.⁴ The board had zero interest in video games and thought getting involved with such a company was an awful idea.⁵ Back then, IBM was allergic to anything resembling excitement or fun—probably even puppies. But because Cary was interested, the board gave Lowe one month to draw up a plan for building a genuine IBM personal computer. It was exactly what he wanted.

Birth of the IBM PC

Lowe assembled a skunkworks team of 12 under lead designer Don Estridge in Boca Raton, Florida, away from IBM’s bureaucratic headquarters, and a far cry from the hundreds usually involved in designing new products. The microcomputer market was moving too fast, so Lowe decided to design and build the machine quickly using off-the-shelf parts from third-party manufacturers.⁶ The only pure IBM hardware would be the steel case and keyboard. And the computer would be sold in retail stores instead of IBM’s dealer network.⁷

At the time, microcomputers contained 8-bit processors. The Apple II, Commodore PET, and the Atari 400 and 800 had MOS 6502s, and the TRS-80 had a Z80. All could address 64KB of memory at most—less once you accounted for the ROM. IBM went with the 16-bit Intel 8088, which could run as fast as 5MHz and address up to 1MB of memory. Moreover, anyone could produce and sell PC cards and peripherals without securing a license from IBM.⁸ This open design ensured PCs would be expandable for years to come. Buyers could configure the computer they wanted, and the proven, third-party components guaranteed reliability from day one.⁹

It also meant that with the right cards, the PC could play computer games. But no one at IBM was thinking about this yet.

For software, IBM needed a BASIC interpreter for writing programs and a disk operating system for storage. Lead negotiator Jack Sams tapped Microsoft, which had already supplied BASIC interpreters to Altair, Apple, Commodore, Radio Shack, and a small company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP), which manufactured boards for Intel’s 8086 CPU. Securing an OS proved more complex. IBM wanted Digital Research’s CP/M, but it only worked on 8-bit computers and IBM needed a 16-bit version. Plenty of ink has been spilled over a mysterious meeting between IBM and Digital Research, but no deal was reached and Sams was left casting for an alternative.¹⁰ He went back to Microsoft and asked Bill Gates to build a similar OS.¹¹

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Figure 1.1: The Intel 8088, a 16-bit processor with an 8-bit data path, became IBM’s entry point into the microcomputer market. (Credit: Konstantin Lanzet/CC BY-SA 3.0)

The way this happened is still amazing to recount even today. Gates immediately said yes, but Microsoft had no such OS and had no time to develop a new one by IBM’s deadline. It turned out SCP programmer Tim Paterson had written one already. He had ensured his OS, named QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System, worked with the same API calls as CP/M, but with improved disk and file handling.¹² One day, Paterson called Microsoft to see if it wanted to use QDOS or write software for it. Gates called Sams immediately and asked him whether he should get it or if IBM wanted it. Sams made the fateful decision: By all means, you get it.¹³ Gates bought QDOS from SCP for $75,000, renamed it MS-DOS, and licensed it to IBM in November 1980 for $700,000 plus per-copy royalties.¹⁴ The deal wasn’t exclusive: Microsoft could also license MS-DOS to other computer manufacturers.

Sams got what he wanted for his new PC. Microsoft would write the software, including the OS, because it wasn’t IBM’s area of expertise. IBM would stick with the hardware. This soon made Gates the richest man in the world. As he said later, it was only after the OS grew in volume and power that IBM executives finally realized having us control such a key aspect might be a mistake for them.¹⁵

Go for Launch

IBM unveiled the completed Personal Computer 5150 on August 12, 1981. The base $1,565 configuration included one 5.25-inch floppy drive and 16KB of RAM expandable to 256KB, an amount then unheard of in desktop computers. Moreover, the PC’s five card slots meant unlimited expansion potential. IBM billed the PC, finished in conservative off-white, as a business computer, but with a few nods toward home use thanks to its BASIC in ROM and cassette storage port. IBM’s advertising featured a Charlie Chaplin–like figure who showed how easy its new PC was to use and how because it was from IBM, it was automatically the best choice. The company’s brochures echoed the same themes and showed photos of the PC in various office environments. One brochure depicted a now-humorous setup in what appeared to be a proto-home-theater PC, with the giant case mounted in a TV cart and the television displaying educational software in front of a family in a living room.¹⁶ To this day, no one knows if anyone ever did this.

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Figure 1.2: The 1981 IBM PC brought the computer industry’s most storied name to a desktop you could buy at retail, unbox, set up, and use immediately. (Credit: Rama & Musée Bolo/CC BY-SA 2.0 France)

Two graphics cards were initially available. The Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA) displayed 80 columns and 25 lines of text and was designed to work with IBM’s ultracrisp 5151 monochrome monitor. The Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) displayed four colors at 320-by-200 resolution in two palettes: cyan, magenta, white, and black; and red, yellow, green, and black. It could also display 16 simultaneous colors in a text-only mode. It worked with numerous RGB monitors at launch, although IBM didn’t release its own (the 5153 Model 1) until February 1983. And the card had a composite output, which connected to any TV with the appropriate input like most home computers. Some programmers took advantage of this using artifacting. Most often associated with the Apple II, this technique let developers blend colors to display a wider palette at the expense of blurrier text output. For audio, a speaker in each PC produced monophonic square wave sounds all at the same volume.

DOS 1.0 included Donkey, a driving game Gates coded with Neil Konzen to show off what IBM’s CGA card and built-in BASIC could do.¹⁷ It was the first official PC game, and it came with every single PC IBM sold. It was terrible. The object was to avoid donkeys on a vertically scrolling road by pressing the space bar to change lanes. You couldn’t steer, accelerate, or brake. A few years later, when Apple was developing the Macintosh, Steve Jobs purchased an original PC to see what they were up against. According to Apple’s Andy Hertzfeld, when they discovered Donkey, they listed out the code and were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft’s co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments.¹⁸

Microsoft soon readied a better game for IBM to sell: Adventure, a repackaged version of the 1975 mainframe text game Colossal Cave Adventure written by Will Crowther and Don Woods. Adventure grew out of Crowther’s real-life cave explorations and became the world’s first example of what is now called interactive fiction. The game presented a text-based description of your surroundings and a command line, where you’d type simple two-word commands such as GO EAST or OPEN MAILBOX and then the program described what happened next with additional text and a subsequent command line. You had to explore a cave, find as much treasure as you could, and escape with your life. Microsoft had already adapted the title for the TRS-80 and the Apple II in 1979, so releasing a version for the PC was an obvious choice. IBM being IBM, it packaged the game in a nondescript gray case with no cover artwork, as if it were a filing program for accountants.

Apple, Commodore, and Atari weren’t terribly concerned despite the scary weight of the IBM name. The PC looked like no fun at all. It was more expensive, and easily ran upwards of $4,000 with 64KB of memory, a CGA card, a color monitor, and a printer (roughly equivalent to $12,000 today). It wasn’t competitive for video games, and the already-dated Microsoft Adventure and laughable Donkey sure didn’t help. But there was a key difference. Thanks to the open and flexible nature of IBM’s platform, PC hardware could eventually catch up and leap ahead.¹⁹ The other machines remained forever stuck with the computer architecture and CPUs they came with, maxed out in graphics, sound, animation, and storage speeds.

Only the Apple II, with its expansion card slots, approached the expandability of the PC. But it was still an 8-bit machine and would be forever restricted as such. The PC would never know such limitations.

Origins of PC Gaming

IBM wanted nothing to do with games, but consumers felt differently. Although no one in 1982 bought such an expensive computer to play games, it turned out some owners wanted to do more than just work. Dozens of programmers began to make small games, mostly with CGA and color support, but sometimes with ASCII text characters so PCs with MDA cards could run them.

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Figure 1.3: Paratrooper was a solid example of an early PC game that harnessed IBM’s Color Graphics Adapter and sheer processing speed.

Funtastic, an independent developer for MS-DOS machines, released Cosmic Crusader, a Galaxian clone written by Michael Abrash. It played a lot like a smoothly animated Apple II game, and Abrash made ingenious use of the PC speaker by employing lots of click patterns to signal multiple sound effects at once. He also developed Snack Attack II, a Jawbreaker-like Pac-Man clone, and a Space Invaders clone called Space Strike. VeriSoft Works released Novatron, an isometric version of the Tron coin-op’s light cycle sequence (itself a variation of Gremlin’s 1976 coin-op Blockade). Another PC developer named Orion Software distributed Greg Kuperberg’s Paratrooper, an excellent shooting game set in a war zone, and its own interpretation of Pac-Man called PC-Man. Ed Davis’s Anti-Ballistic Missile cloned Atari’s Missile Command.

Some bigger fish jumped in as well. The publisher Brøderbund ported its popular Apple Panic from the Apple II to MS-DOS machines. Epyx brought over Dunjonquest: Temple of Apshai, which became the first commercial RPG available for the PC. Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) established an early foothold with its board-game-style, turn-based wargames, a perfect genre for the PC’s adult clientele. SSI’s first wargame on this platform was The Battle of the Bulge: Tigers in the Snow, set during Germany’s major 1944 offensive in World War II. SSI also released the tactical space battle game The Warp Factor.

At the crossroads of early computer gaming and interactive fiction sat Infocom. Zork I: The Great Underground Empire featured excellent writing, a sophisticated parser, and intricate puzzles. The goal was to collect 20 treasures strewn throughout a vast labyrinth full of frightening monsters and long-forgotten riches. Like other text adventures, it presented the player with a description of the current surroundings and a command prompt. But Zork I understood full sentences. Instead of typing OPEN CASE the way you would in Colossal Cave or Microsoft Adventure, in Zork I you could type, PUT THE SWORD AND LAMP IN THE CASE. The quality of the game’s prose meant you could picture the places, monsters, and items in your head better than any graphics of the time could depict them—in other words, as if the game was written like a book you could play. The joy came from using your wits to improvise solutions to the puzzles.

Infocom broadened its lineup considerably later in the year with PC versions of Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz and Zork III: The Dungeon Master, the difficult murder mystery Deadline, the solitary space adventure Starcross,