When Video Games Came to the PC

As a kid, I loved playing Atari’s video games. All those memories came back as I was reading Stephen Levy’s book, Hackers, when he talked about the existential threat to companies like Atari when the (then) new home computers came to the market. Perhaps it was inevitable because one of the most popular use for home computers was, well, playing games.

Sure, the graphics on home computers back then may have been non-existent (or sucked), but the primitive games were addictive nonetheless. A few pioneers thought they could even make money writing and selling computer games, and this gave rise to a small industry. That in turn soon attracted a certain class of programmers who considered it a challenge to render better graphics on the available hardware. Their success led to better graphics in computer games, which in turn attracted more buyers, which then created the need to write yet more games. The circle had begun.

Since writing computer games was very effort intensive, it attracted technical geeks who were wizards at squeezing the maximum possible (graphics rendering) juice from the PC hardware, but weren’t the right guys to imagine new games. So, as graphics on the PC got better, it inevitably led to a scenario where the best video games were getting ported to the PC format. Even video game classics like Pac-Man.

And that’s when companies that owned the insanely popular video games began to wake up, writes Levy:

“Some companies were insisting that the copyrights they owned on coin-operated games made unauthorized home computer translations illegal.”

Atari, for example, sent a “This Game is Over” notice to the small companies who were porting the games for PC. And yet, at the same time, Atari executives were thrilled to find a perfect PC clone of Pac-Man. Huh? What explained the seemingly contradictory stance? Levy explains:

“On one hand, (Atari) wanted (smaller companies) to stop marketing the game. On the other hand, it wanted to buy (the translated-to-PC) game.”

In other words, Atari (and other video game makers) weren’t against the translation of their games onto PC’s; it was just they wanted to ensure that it was them who made money from it, not others.

As a person who’s played Pac-Man on both the Atari and the PC, I felt the Atari experience was far better than the PC version. Joysticks trumped the mouse/keyboard interface by far. But I get why Atari would have wanted to be sure that they didn’t lose out when the world moved to the PC.