PC Gaming has existed since the 1950′s with one of the very first games being a game called OXO which was an adaptation of tic-tac-toe. About 10 years after the release of OXO another pioneer game was created by three MIT students, Martin Graetz, Alan Kotok and Steve Russell, the game they created was called Spacewar!

The first generation of games were very often text based adventures or interactive adventures, in which a player communicated with the computer with a keyboard. By the 1980′s personal computers had become powerful enough to run games like Adventure, but by this time, graphics had started to become an important factor in games.

With the increased adoption of the computer mouse and high resolution bitmap displays, the industry was pushed into including high-quality graphical interfaces in new releases. The introduction of the first sounds cards allowed IBM PC compatible computers to produce complex sounds where previously they had been limited to simple beeps and tones. The company behind the first sound card, AdLib had to file for bankruptcy in 1992 after the rise of the Creative Labs Sound Blaster card which featured much higher sound quality compared to AdLib’s sound cards.

The 1993 release of id Software’s game Doom on the PC represented a breakthrough in 3D graphics. This was allowed possible by the superior power of the processors used in PC’s compared to the processors of the leading Sega and Nintendo console systems of the time which kept their CPU clock rate at 3-7mhz compared to Intels 486 which had a CPU clock rate of 16-100 MHz.

Many early PC games included extras with the main game, such as the preil-sensitive sunglasses that were shipped with Infocom’s game, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Over time these extras in games became a lot less common but the same oversized boxes that used to hold the extra “freebies” were continued to be used. Nowadays these extras are almost always found only in Special Edition versions of the games that sell for a higher price than the normal edition, an example of this is the “Battlechests” from Blizzard.

With faster graphics accelerators and improving CPU technology, the gaming industry has had rapid increase in the amount of detail in a game and increasing levels of realism. PC Gaming currently revolves heavily around improvements in 3D Graphics. Though unlike the generally accepted push for improved graphical performance in games, the use of physics engines in computer games has being a matter of debate since the announcement of them and the 2005 release of the nVidia PhysX PPU.