I’m in Love with a Strict Machine

In between hand-cranking his computer and refilling the oil lamp in the monocculuminescence chamber, Cameron Goble reviews his beloved classic PC games at LongTailGamer.com.

RED HOT GAMING RIG OF THE FUTURE (center),
accompanied by Clarance (left, accounting)
and Alice (right, Capricorn).

One of my favorite gaming memories is of playing Wing Commander with my friend Jeremy. Now, I’m not fixated on Wing Commander, despite recent evidence. It’s the game that stands out from my formative gaming years, though. Jeremy and I built a cooperative camaraderie as we played. It was easier to fly a mission with two pairs of hands manning all the game’s controls, spread between the joystick and keyboard as they were. With Jeremy as my wingman, and with me as his, we reached new heights in dogfighting performance.

PC gaming always involved a sense of performance: getting the most out of the hardware you’ve got. As a DOS game, Wing Commander pushed the technical limitations of the day’s computers, and the onus was on the gamer to step up. PC gamers had to either learn to streamline their rigs or just settle for less. Jeremy had a real facility for it: he always got the joystick hand graphic to come up, which demanded extra memory, even after burning precious kilobytes on loading his mouse drivers.

The requirement of technical tweakery made the PC an unlikely participant in the dawning age of popular video gaming. It was a such a clunky, uninspired thing, the PC of yesteryear. Put it this way: GAMING AIN’T BEIGE.

Other computers of the age were much friendlier to video gamers. The Commodore series had better graphics and sound right out of the box. And systems like the NES, Sega Genesis, and Saturn were arcade-emulating juggernauts! Plug in to your TV and enjoy. Easy! Fun! Familiar!

Gaming on the PC, on the other hand, was practically an act of masochism. Forget the cost of specialized components like “monitors” and the dim, Carcosian landscape of an alien DOS prompt. You *had* to get mired down in fancy technical stuff for it to do anything remotely game-like. Example: high-end PC video that could show more than FOUR COLORS AT A TIME didn’t hit the mass market until around 1982. And even then, setting them up felt a lot like brain surgery: crack the case, perform precise work, and never touch anything inside … even if you knew what it was connected to.

“The missing circuit’s in your head, Whorfin.
Or it’s conflicting with COM3, IRQ4.”

(And can you believe we used to have to plug our joysticks into the back of the sound card? The SOUND CARD. And sound cards didn’t even COME with joysticks. You had to buy sound cards and joysticks separately. Madness, I tell you.)

I’ve worked in IT for most of my adult life, and I can honestly say that I owe my living to my love of PC video games. Without those trials, I would not have the know-how to deal with PCs that suddenly spit out cryptic error messages, emit strange smells, or simply go ‘click’ and then die. Instead, PCs to me would be incomprehensible blinky monoliths: not tools to be exploited, but intemperate, fickle saboteurs to be endured at best and avoided at need. Much as how my user base sees them, in fact.

PC gaming has it over consoles through the gift of truly marketable IT skills. It comes at a cost, though: working with the technology professionally isn’t as fun as when I was just an enthusiast. (After all, I don’t get to play games once I get a borked computer up and running.) And I resist sitting in front of the computer when I get home from work these days. My gaming hobby is less accessible to me now.

Yet, one of the things I’m grateful for as a gamer these days is that I don’t have to be a hardcore computer geek to get the most out of my games anymore. PC systems have pioneered and adopted approaches to everyone’s “no-brainer” benefit. From USB ports that enabled interchangeable game controllers, to standardized development platforms, to abstracted libraries like DirectX that liberate PC gamers from DOS driver hell into a more modest Windows driver heck — I love the results. Even on PCs, games are easy to set up and play. At last!

If I’d spent my youth knitting instead of tweaking TSRs
in DOS, I’d be the God Emperor of Etsy by now.

Maybe it’s no surprise that PC gaming takes its cues from consoles now, ports and all. You kids frankly have it easy, what with your X-Wiis and Playtendo 420s. Your “turn it on and it goes.” Your “I never have care about what driver version I have.” Your “tell me again about how you had to calibrate your joystick every time you turned on the computer, grandpa.” Yeah. I can see how consoles have it over PCs. Maybe. A little.

Still, when the siren song of a new generation of beeps and boops calls to me sweetly from inside the PC case, I’m strangely drawn to get elbow-deep in the hardware again for the tricked-out gaming rewards. Consoles purposefully mute this sweet melody; to those of us who have heard it, console aficionados game in stoic, lifeless silence. Meanwhile, the music carries me.

My stripe of PC gaming was — and still can be — about understanding the entire system to bring out the best in it. I take pride in that understanding. It satisfies me beyond simply playing the game. Jeremy and I bonded our friendship over it, after all.

That, and a mutual homicidal attitude toward giant cats in space ships. It’s good video gaming no matter how you slice it.