How the IBM PC Became the Greatest Gaming Platform of All Time

In August 1981, IBM announced a new personal computer at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. With 16K of RAM, a single floppy drive, and a starting price of $1,565, it was designed squarely for business users. The operating system — MS-DOS, which Microsoft had acquired from a small Seattle company for $50,000 just two weeks before the announcement — was a tool for accountants, not adventurers. Nobody in that hotel ballroom was thinking about games.

Fourteen years later, MS-DOS was the platform on which Doom had sold millions of copies, sparked a Congressional hearing on violence in video games, and permanently established the PC as the dominant gaming platform worldwide. The journey from austere business machine to gaming powerhouse is one of the great accidental stories in the history of technology — driven not by IBM's strategy, but by a series of developers who saw what the platform could become, and pushed it there one landmark game at a time.

A Business Machine Nobody Wanted to Game On (1981–1983)

IBM had not intended to build a gaming machine. The PC was designed for the boardroom, and everything about it reflected that priority. Its graphics — the Color Graphics Adapter offered four colours at 320×200 resolution — were underwhelming compared to what dedicated gaming computers of the era could deliver. Its sound was a single-channel beeper. What the machine had was the IBM name, which carried an almost mythological weight in American business culture. Merrill Lynch ordered 12,000 units essentially overnight. IBM's production lines couldn't keep up with demand for years.

For gamers, the IBM PC was initially irrelevant. In the early 1980s, the action was on the Apple II and the Atari 8-bit machines — the platforms that had defined home gaming since the late 1970s. Then, from 1982 onward, the Commodore 64 swept through the market with its superior sound and graphics at an affordable price, becoming the dominant gaming computer of the mid-1980s. These were machines built with games in mind. The PC's early software library was ports and afterthoughts. The machine was more powerful in raw processing terms and had more memory, but nobody had yet found a way to translate that into gaming experiences that felt better than what you could get for a fraction of the price. That was about to change.

Sierra On-Line and the Game That Proved the PC Could Be Fun (1982–1985)

In late 1982, IBM flew Ken and Roberta Williams of Sierra On-Line, along with their colleague Jeff Stephenson, to their offices in Boca Raton, Florida. IBM was the most powerful company in the world by many measures, and they arrived hat in hand, asking Sierra to make a showcase adventure game for their upcoming home computer, the PCjr. What they wanted was something genuinely new — replayable, dynamic, visually ambitious. Ken and Jeff made their pitch during a pause in the proceedings, sketching it on a napkin: the player's character would be visible on screen and movable within each room, the graphics would exploit the PCjr's 16-colour display, and real action sequences with timing and coordination would be possible. IBM signed on immediately.

The result, King's Quest (1984), very nearly killed Sierra in the process. The company was already in trouble: it had invested heavily in producing cartridges for the Commodore Vic-20, only to see Commodore launch the 64 as a surprise successor in 1982, rendering those cartridges worthless overnight. It was one of the reasons Sierra would never again prioritise home computers. Then came the PCjr disaster: it too proved a commercial failure, and Sierra found itself holding vast inventories of software for a machine nobody wanted. The company shrank from 100 employees to 20 in a matter of days. What saved them was the Tandy 1000 — a Radio Shack machine that could run King's Quest with its full graphical capabilities, sold across America, often the only computer available for hundreds of miles. Slowly, the game found its audience, and Sierra found its feet.

Its long-term significance was enormous. King's Quest: Quest for the Crown was the first game to make people seriously consider buying a PC because of a game. It demonstrated that the IBM PC platform had headroom that the 8-bit machines simply didn't have — genuine computational complexity, 16 colours, 128K of memory to build a world in. It established Sierra as the studio that would define the adventure game genre for a decade, with King's Quest, Space Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry bringing new audiences to the PC in huge numbers throughout the late 1980s.

Sid Meier and the Hunger for Complexity (1987–1991)

By the late 1980s, the landscape of home computing was shifting. The 8-bit market — Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit, Apple II — was collapsing. The Amiga and the Atari ST had arrived as their 16-bit successors, and in Europe, they were enormously successful gaming platforms. But in the United States, the picture was different: the PC had already captured the business market so thoroughly that it dominated homes too, and the Amiga and Atari ST never achieved the same foothold. The audience moving to MS-DOS machines was older, more affluent, and wanted something more demanding than what the 8-bit era had offered. As one account of the period put it, the implosion of the 8-bit market had created a hunger for more complicated, ambitious strategy and simulation games. Sid Meier, co-founder of MicroProse, was perfectly positioned to feed it.

MicroProse had built its reputation on military simulations — flight simulators, submarine games, war games — primarily for Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64. Meier himself was an accomplished C64 developer; Sid Meier's Pirates! (1987), one of his finest early games, was designed for that platform. But the US market was telling him something clear: his audience was on the PC. By 1988, when he was developing the F-19 Stealth Fighter, he had already switched to MS-DOS as his primary platform. The PC's keyboard, its processing power, and the sheer size of its installed base in American homes made it the natural destination for the kind of deep, systemic games he wanted to build. In the spring of 1989, while nominally working on a troubled spy game, he started tinkering with a simulation of a model railroad. He continued working on it through a beach holiday in August that year — on a computer he had brought with him, while his partner assumed they were on a romantic getaway.

In April 1990, Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon was released, and hit with the force the title implies. A full economic simulation spanning a century of railroad history — real-time operations, stock market manipulation, AI competitors — delivered with a generosity of design that made it accessible without being simple. Computer Gaming World named it Game of the Year. It sold precisely to the audience that had moved upmarket to DOS machines and was hungry for something worthy of the hardware.

If Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon was the proof of concept, Sid Meier's Civilization (1991) was the consecration. Guide a civilisation from 4000 BC to the space age, managing diplomacy, science, culture, war, and economics across thousands of years — it was the most ambitious game yet designed for a computer. The console market had no answer to it. The 8-bit machines couldn't run it. The Amiga version was enjoyable but slower, and had fewer colors on the screen (see later). The PC was becoming the home of the most intellectually demanding games.

VGA and the Visual Turning Point (1989–1991)

Complexity and depth were winning the argument on one front. Visually, however, the PC still had a problem. CGA graphics had been a standing joke — four colours, dithered and ugly. EGA improved things considerably, but the Amiga's custom graphics hardware — capable of smooth sprite animation, parallax scrolling, and effects that the PC's general-purpose architecture simply couldn't match in software — still made many PC games look workmanlike by comparison. In 1989, that balance began to shift.

The Video Graphics Array — VGA — arrived as a standard feature on IBM's new PS/2 line and quickly spread to compatible machines. Its key capability was a video mode — known among programmers as Mode 13h — that could display 256 colours simultaneously at 320×200 resolution, drawing from a palette of over 262,000 possible shades. This had more colours than any home computer available at any price. It also meant smooth gradients, realistic skin tones, detailed backgrounds, and atmospheric lighting effects that had simply been impossible before.

The first wave of VGA titles in 1990 made the implications immediately clear. Chris Roberts delivered space combat with cockpit graphics that looked genuinely cinematic with Wing Commander. Roberta Williams and Sierra released King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!, the most visually sumptuous adventure game ever made, its hand-painted backgrounds rendered in colours no other platform could reproduce. Ron Gilbert and LucasArts released VGA editions of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade and The Secret of Monkey Island that transformed already great games into visual showcases. Westwood Studios used VGA to stunning effect in Eye of the Beholder (1991), a first-person dungeon crawler whose richly detailed environments set a new standard for atmosphere in role-playing games.

In colour count alone — 256 versus the Amiga's 32 — VGA was now ahead. But it's worth being precise about what this meant and what it didn't. VGA cards were expensive in 1990, and not every PC owner had one; the platform transition took years to complete. And the Amiga remained genuinely superior in other ways: its custom chips delivered faster 2D sprite animation, hardware scrolling, and audio quality that the PC still couldn't match without dedicated sound cards. For a game built around fast-moving sprites or music — a platformer, a shoot-em-up, a demo scene production — the Amiga was still the more capable machine. What VGA changed was the specific battleground of detailed, painterly, static imagery: backgrounds, portraits, cutscenes. On that front, for the first time, the PC had the edge.

For many players, particularly in the United States, where the PC was already dominant, VGA tipped the balance in favor of the PC. The Amiga remained a beloved platform with extraordinary creative communities well into the 1990s — especially in Europe. But the momentum had shifted. The PC was improving relentlessly; its open architecture meant every year brought faster processors, more memory, and better graphics hardware. It was the arrival of 3D gaming — and id Software in particular — that would ultimately make the Amiga's architecture impossible to keep pace with.

id Software and the Final Checkmate (1992–1993)

In 1990, four young men rented a house on the Red River in Shreveport, Louisiana, and, fuelled by pizza and Mountain Dew, proceeded to change gaming forever. John Carmack — a programming prodigy who thought in mathematical abstractions and barely registered other human beings. John Romero — restless, profane, and creatively explosive. Together with artist Adrian Carmack and business manager Jay Wilbur, they formed the nucleus of id Software.

What Carmack had realised was that he could simulate 3D space convincingly enough to create something that had never existed: a first-person action game running in real time at a playable speed on consumer hardware. It wasn't the first time he had upended a category: id Software had already transformed 2D platforming on PC with Commander Keen (1990), proving that a DOS machine could scroll sprites with the fluidity of a Nintendo. But 3D was an order of magnitude beyond that. The technique required radical constraints — all walls at right angles, no looking up or down, everything on a single flat plane — but within those limits it was utterly convincing. When Romero saw it, he knew immediately what game to make: a 3D remake of the classic Castle Wolfenstein, with as much blood and violence as they could put on screen.

In 1992, Wolfenstein 3D was released as shareware — the first episode free, the full game for $40. It spread through offices and universities faster than any retail distribution could have managed. Then came Doom in December 1993 — darker, more atmospheric, more technically extraordinary, and utterly relentless. id Software's press release had declared they expected Doom to become "the number one cause of decreased productivity in businesses around the world." Estimates suggested that within months of its release, Doom was installed on more computers than Microsoft's own Windows 3.1.

The cultural impact was enormous. Doom triggered Congressional hearings on video game violence. It invented a genre — the first-person shooter — that remains one of gaming's dominant forms today. And it made the PC's dominance irrefutable. The platform that had started as a business machine, been made cinematic by Sierra, given intellectual depth by Sid Meier, turned visually spectacular by VGA, had now demonstrated it could also deliver the most visceral, adrenaline-soaked gaming experience ever created. The argument was over.

The Legacy

What followed was a golden age that ran through the mid-1990s and beyond: Quake, Command & Conquer, Warcraft II: Tides Of Darkness, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, Ultima VII: The Black Gate, UFO: Enemy Unknown, Dune II: The Battle For Arrakis. Some of these games, like Dune II or Monkey Island 2, could be ported to the Amiga too, but for some others, like Ultima VII, only the PC was powerful enough. The PC's architecture — open, upgradeable, keyboard-and-mouse-driven, with processing headroom that kept expanding — created an ecosystem for gaming that no closed platform could match.

MS-DOS itself was absorbed into Windows 95 in 1995 and quietly retired after fifteen years of service. But the gaming culture it had incubated — complex, ambitious, visually rich, and uncompromising — survived and defines PC gaming to this day. The spreadsheet machine that nobody thought was meant for games turned out to be the most important gaming platform of the twentieth century.

Play These Games Today

All the MS-DOS games mentioned in this article are available to download for free on GamesNostalgia, pre-configured to run on modern Windows and Mac via DOSBox. No technical setup required.

Check our new MS-DOS games hub to know more about MS-DOS and discover the Best PC Games of All Time available on GamesNostalgia.

Also, this article draws on facts reported by Jimmy Maher on his outstanding blog The Digital Antiquarian — an essential long-form history of computer gaming covering the period from the late 1970s through the 1990s. If you are into retro-gaming, a visit is strongly suggested.