The history of computer games – from text to DirectX

The three-channel sound chip was created by a former synthesiser developer, leading games designers to start incorporating music themes into games.

The ZX Spectrum was slightly more limited, with 15 colours (seven in two tones and black) and an effective resolution of 256x192.

Its single-channel speaker could cover only 10 octaves but at half the price of the Commodore, it sold in the millions and was also widely cloned in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Birth of legends
The increasing amount of computing power available in the 1980s made new types of games possible.

In 1980 Flash Attack became the first game to allow two players to link their computers via a serial port and play against each other using home-made cabling.

Flash Attack has been cited as the first strategy game but for most, the original examples of this were Utopia and Stonkers.

Utopia was certainly the first simulation game, where the player managed resources to build up an empire, but there was no player-directed combat. Stonkers, on the other hand, had player-controlled combat but lacked the intricate management side of Utopia.

Despite these advances, it became clear that PCs were reaching a limit of what they could do on their own as users demanded better graphics and sound.

Visual awareness
Graphics cards for bigger computers had been around since the 1960s but it wasn’t until 1981 with the first IBM PC that they became common in home computers. However the card was limited to one colour, with four-colour (or 16 text colours) CGA as an expensive upgrade.

After IBM launched the IBM AT in 1984 and standardised around the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA), which offered 16 colours for graphics, it was at last on a level pegging with the competition.

But the IBM AT also had a simple design that was easily cloned by other manufacturers and this led to much wider ownership of computers as prices fell. It also made widescale games distribution for the platform more economically viable.

After a brief standards war, IBM settled on the video graphics array (VGA) standard in 1987, allowing much more colourful games with 256 colours, and by the end of the decade the new extended Graphics Array (XGA) protocol was giving 65,536 colours at a resolution of 1,024x768.

This gave designers a lot more leeway in how to use colour and sharp graphics. Strangely it was the simple games that used this most effectively. Tetris, invented in 1985, was quickly turned into a brightly coloured game with simple rules that proved highly addictive.

The improvements in graphics made a big difference to the computer games market, allowing text-based adventure games to move into graphics.

One of the most popular of these was Leisure Suit Larry, a scrolling puzzle adventure game in which the hero tried to find a girlfriend. It became one of the most pirated games of the decade and went through many follow-up versions.