Enter my first PC. A generic clone PC running a 386DX-40. It was a monster (to me at the time), that could do anything from running Windows 3.1 to connecting to the Internet to Wolfenstein 3D. Wolfenstein was a game-changer, it revolutionized PC gaming in so many ways. Graphics, gameplay design, even the ability to modify the game and share your own levels with others. It ushered in the age of the First Person Shooter, a genre which has dominated the gaming landscape ever since. Battlefield, Call of Duty, the list goes on, they all owe their existence to Wolfenstein. And I played it, I played it a lot… but I never finished it, ’cause as I mentioned in the beginning, I suck at video games. But that doesn’t stop me from trying.
Wolfenstein lead me into other games in the FPS genre, Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Duke Nukem 3d, Quake, Blood, Unreal, etc. These games while having differing themes were all fairly similar, you follow the paths through the levels shooting the bad guys until you reach the boss at the end of the level and defeat him to progress to the next level. They all tend to include your basic compliment of weapons, a pistol, shotgun, rifle/machine gun, rocket launcher and sometimes an alpha-class weapon (generally slow firing, extremely powerful and with very limited ammunition, think along the lines of a tactical nuke). While they do try to spice it up sometimes to fit the theme of the game (Heretic/Hexen’s magic spells) the effects are basically the same.
Around 1993-94 (when I got my first PC) I began dialing in to local BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems) which allowed you to access news groups, share files and even play games. The best of these (to me) was something called Legend Of the Red Dragon (LORD). It was a text based door-game similar to the old text adventures on the Ti and C64. The thing that set LORD apart from those old games like Zork was that it was a multi-player game. Each player gets X# of turns a day and how you chose to use those turns could earn you varying amounts of experience. The first person to level up high enough and kill the red dragon wins. After somebody killed the dragon the game would be reset and restarted. Once I graduated from BBS’s to the Internet I was introduced to something called a MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon). MUDs were basically like LORD taken to the next level, a persistent, multi-player, text-based game. The direct interaction with other players enhanced the gaming experience and made it into something entirely new.
Continued in Gaming Episode III: Han Shot First…