What difference does ten years making to a top of the range gaming machine? That's what we found ourselves wondering the other day, and seeing as we're old enough to remember such machines, we set out to find out.
Ten years ago we were enjoying genre-defining classics. Half-Life was putting down the foundations of quality storytelling in mostly-believable settings. The soon to be revived Medal of Honour was astounding war fans with its excellent set pieces (most recently aped by Modern Warfare 2).
Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena were impressing with their graphical finesse and adrenaline-fuelled rocket-jumping matches, and the seminal Deus Ex was merging genres, while Diablo II was hinting at what Blizzard was capable of.
Seeing off the consoles
PC Gaming may have been facing stiff competition from the consoles, but a well-specified PC could show those boxes how it was really done. Unfortunately, gaming PCs weren't exactly cheap.
True the battle between AMD and Intel was at its height, with AMD's Athlon taking on Intel's Pentium III to great affect, but you were still looking at north of £1,200 for a budget system, and around £2,000 for a fully pimped out gaming machine.
These were the dark times of slots versus sockets, as well; making for plenty of headaches for anyone trying to upgrade later on.
A key component of any such rig was a quality graphics card, and after the early days of sorting out which manufacturers had the muscle to compete, it was down to a few familiar names for the closing stretch. 3DFX had already had its heyday with the Voodoo2, and the Voodoo3 was finding it tough going against Nvidia's Riva TNT2 Ultra and its newest offering, the GeForce 256.
ATI was doing well with its first Radeon card, and even its Rage 128 Pro could still be found strutting its stuff. Back then AGP was the interface of choice, and Microsoft's DirectX 7 API was finally becoming a standard for developers to write to.
Sound and vision
TFT monitors were still some way off making it to the mainstream, which meant that desks were packed with 15 and 17-inch CRTs, although 19-inch screens were putting in a good showing for gamers as well.
Quality sound was something that came from a discrete card, and Creative Labs was already forging ahead with its SoundBlaster Live! series.
Meanwhile gaming machines packed a relatively impressive 128MB of SDRAM into their beige boxes, and offered anything up to 30GB of space if you were prepared to pay for it.
Those on a tighter budget would have to make do with 10GB or less. And away from gaming, the big beeping-whistling noise was all about free internet connections, and getting the most from those 56k modems.
Amazingly, Pentium III and Athlon gaming PCs are still around today - at least they are on the likes of eBay, Freecycle and your local tip.
You can spend anything from zilch to over £200 on a machine that once played finest games around, and originally cost ten times that - and they say nothing depreciates like cars do.
Alternatively, you can go seriously old school and piece together a bit of gaming history yourself. If you were to shop around, then you could pick up everything you need for such a machine for £177.90, although to be fair that does include a new quality case far better than was available at the time.
Even so, realistically your money is probably better spent on a netbook - it's a bit more portable, and dare we say (yes we dare) more powerful.
Hit the next page to see what made up our gaming PC of 2000.
Your comments (5) Click to add a new comment
louis058
December 15th 2009
5. How on earth could spending the same amount of money that you could have on a PC on a netbook instead mean that the netbook would be more powerful than PCs? Netbooks are slower than PCs, and that's that.
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paul
December 15th 2009
4. @madjedi the conclusion is on the first page - if you're going to go all all that trouble you might as well spend the same amount of cash on a netbook and get a more powerful machine :)
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dreamhunk
December 15th 2009
3. when it comes to pc gaming there is alot of miss information.
here I have to very imorptant links about pc gaming.
http://www.glgroup.com/News/Chinese-games-companies-have-shown-the-West-the-future-of-games-45339.html
Summary
Asian games companies (particularly in Korea and China) have led the way in creating innovative online business models. They have tackled major issues including piracy, the high cost of consoles and low disposable incomes to create a growing, profitable business.
The idea that they need to change their business models to reflect those in the West is preposterous. It is Western companies who need to change, and fast.
Analysis
At any moment of every day, 2 million Chinese are playing online games. 64% of all Chinese internet users are online gamers. And by 2012, China will represent half of the forecast $12 billion market.
The Asian companies have developed new businesses suited to their local markets. But to suggest that they would benefit from copying Western models is preposterous.
The Western market is dominated by consoles. The console market is characterised by:
* Massive investment in R&D, manufacturing and marketing by the console manufacturers: The Home Entertainment division of Microsoft has invested $21 billion over five years, with an operating loss of $5.4 billion. Sony lost $3.1 billion in the games division in the two years to March 2008, arising “from the strategic pricing of PlayStation 3 hardware at points lower than its production cost”.)
* Massive investment by publishers in new titles: The smash hit of 2009, Modern Warfare 2 from Activision, cost over $50 million to develop and a further $200 million in marketing and manufacturing. Few companies can afford in a portfolio of titles with capital requirements like that.
* Significant investment by consumers in the hardware: Even several years after launch, a PS 3 or Xbox 360 is likely to set you back around $300.
* Continued investment by consumers in software: With RRPs often above $50, gaming is a major financial decision for Western consumers.
In contrast, companies like TenCent and Shanda have built their business on free-to-play games that make their money from the sale of virtual goods. And these games can be incredibly profitable.
The virtual goods/online business model is better than the traditional console model because it:
* Addresses piracy: there are no DVDs to copy, and the virtual goods have no value without the servers and game infrastructure to use them
* Requires less upfront investment: Playfish, a British developer of games on Facebook that was recently bought by Electronic Arts , for up to $400 million, estimates that an average Facebook game costs $1 million to make, but they typically launch the game when it is only 20% complete and continually iterate – or kill it if players don’t like it
* Allows consumers to pay as much they like: Consumers can play for free, but if they wish to pay for virtual goods, they can pay as little as a few cents or as much as thousands of dollars for a product
In short, there is a major difference between Western business models and Asian ones (although there a dozens of private Western businesses exploiting this model including Zynga, Playdom, Bigpoint, Gameforge, Gameduell, Jagex, Ankama and others).
But it is the West that needs to adopt Chinese business models, not the other way round.
here is the other really good link
http://downloadablesuicide.com/2009/07/16/pc-gaming-its-problems-stem-from-mistreatment/
this is proof of how big pc gaming is
http://adrianwerner.wordpress.com/games-of-2010/
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rob_b
December 15th 2009
2. Bit OTT on the case/PSU no? Could have cut a good £50 off the price :)
Time to break out teh HL/Opposing Force/Blueshift CDs then eh?!
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madjedi
December 15th 2009
1. Nice article but is that it? It seems to end very abruptly, no benchmarks, conlusion or anything. Are we missing the last page??
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