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- Pic: Martin Goldberg
Way back in the late 70s and early 80s the war between consoles and PCs began. In 1972 the Magnavox Odyssey appeared, closely followed by Atari’s Pong in 1975. Then the Magnavox Odyssey 100 came with his sister, the Magnavox Odyssey 200, only months behind.
In 1976 Atari released Super Pong and Wonder Wizard 7702 snuck onto the scenes and, and, and… You get the picture. Consoles were being released at a rate of knots and it felt as if there was a new model boasting new capabilities every few months.
The console wars, also known as the System Wars, basically covered this stretch of time from the mid-70s to the mid-80s when consoles were battling it out for supremacy and fans were bitter rivals. It was almost ridiculous considering how many variants of the same machines were available.
Amusingly these battles for supremacy resulted in a pyrrhic victory, the three companies were all virtually bankrupted as a result of their frenetic competition. Atari, Mattel and Coleco sank back into the dust that their scuffling had created.
And my point is?
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- Pic: Axel Tregoning
Well what machine quietly trundled through all of this turmoil? What technology consistently developed and changed, and offered fans of gaming the chance to play happily without too much trouble? Why, the PC, of course!
Today we have the Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo triumvirate getting along fairly well (barring an occasional jab here and there) and console fans are once again sneering at the PC lovers in scorn. “Say farewell to your money-hungry machines,” they cry.
“PCs are too complicated! With a console you just stick the game in and it goes,” they scoff.
And yet PC fans have seen all this happen before. We saw console fans waving their little plastic controllers around, and claiming to have the best gaming solutions in the world, and we just carried on building and modding our machines with love.
You see, I have a theory. I believe that PCs will come of age once again. That consoles will ultimately hit another slide and tumble downwards in a spiral of competitive angst and graphical mediocrity. And PC gamers will just smile, and nod, and quietly carry on gaming.
I may be wrong. I am no soothsayer or trend analyst. But I can’t help feeling that PCs will remain the heroes of the gaming world.
They may be more complicated (sigh) to run, they may be more financially demanding, and a little tempestuous, but when they work, they REALLY work.
The sensation of playing an FPS on a mouse and keyboard cannot be beaten. You get so sucked into the brilliance of the game. The mood captures you and you are swept away. The mouse is wonderfully intuitive, perfectly mimicking the tilt of your head and the aim of your gun. The keyboard is comfortable and so varied. You can set your own keys, you can create your own combinations, and you can unleash every letter and numeral upon hordes of unsuspecting baddies.
So don’t give up on your ROG and your RAM, your GPU and your CPU, for the time will come when PCs will stand at the front of the pack once again.