A Few Thoughts on Portable PC Gaming (Premium)

In the early 1990s, the PC became inevitable as a platform thanks to several unrelated advances. The biggest, of course, was Windows. After struggling to gain traction with an inept series of initial releases, Microsoft delivered a surprisingly capable Windows 3.0 that arrived to rave reviews and triggered a massive adoption wave that continued for the entire decade.

This was a big deal for me as well, but the inevitability of my own shift to the PC was tied to two other events: A decision to go back to school to learn software development. And then the arrival of Id Software's Castle Wolfenstein 3D in 1992, which upended my understanding of what was even possible. My fate was sealed.

Castle Wolfenstein 3D was nothing less than a wake-up call. Despite a sophisticated multiprocessor architecture optimized for videogames, my beloved Amiga 500 of that time was incapable of playing this new type of game, what we now call a first-person shooter, let alone at the performance Id Software somehow summoned from the lowly x86 architecture. This game was so highly optimized, so well-made, that it ran full-speed on my wife's underpowered 286-based IBM PS/1. It seemed impossible at the time. It still does, thinking back on it.

Id racked up a series of wins in the 1990s, most notably the tent pole releases, in turn, of Doom, Doom II, Quake, and Quake II. But the market was also quickly flooded with a stable of capable rivals like Duke Nukem 3D, Rise of the Triad, Unreal, and many others. By the end of the 1990s, I was very firmly in the PC camp, not just with Windows for productivity work, but with gaming as well. As a card-carrying member of the first generation who grew up with what we now call videogame consoles—the Atari 2600, Odyssey 2, Intellivision, and ColecoVision, among others—I had, like so many others, moved on. The PC has become everything. It was essential.

I tell the story of the history of Windows from a technical perspective in my book Windows Everywhere, and the central theme is that Microsoft successfully weathered several major technology shifts over two decades by adapting this platform to address each change. This worked so well, the company got caught up in antitrust troubles on three continents, triggering a lost decade in which other companies finally usurped Microsoft's dominance via new web and then mobile platforms. Today, personal computing is more heterogeneous than it was during the heyday of Windows in the 1990s. And as those changes occurred, we found ourselves engaging in fewer tasks on the PC as we collectively started using different hardware, software, and services.

This is well understood: Far more people spend far more time using smartphones and other mobile devices than is the case with PCs today. But one might view the resurgence of console gaming at the dawn of the 21st century, starting with the Sony PlayStation 2 in 2000, timed perfectly to Microsoft's influential nadir, as the earliest hint...