PC gaming largely eluded me back when I was but a wee lad. As I hit double figures, the Amstrad CPC 464 was my gaming computer, later replaced by the Commodore Amiga 500. Why no PC? Well, they were expensive. Very expensive. When average wages were around £12-15k, an Epson EGA 286 would set you back about £1,600 in 1988. Even the budget Amstrad PCs (and Amstrad pretty much had the budget PC market to itself back then) were about £600 (PC1512 single drive with CGA) or £900 (PC1640 single drive with EGA). Those prices include VAT at 15%, compared £200 for your green screen CPC, £399 for the Atari STFM (including 22 games) and £449 for the Amiga 500 - all prices from June 1988 Computer Shopper magazine. The point being that, in the UK at least, PC's were a very very pricey computing option. By 1990 however, 8086 machines with VGA colour could be hand for just under a grand, and 286 machines were heading down to that all important £1,000 barrier. It would take another year for them to dip below that but things were improving, culminating in the PC's advancement to general consumer electronics status by the middle of the decade.
To cut a long story short (too late!), PC gaming remained the domain of the relatively wealthy (or credit worthy) well into the 1990's, so my exposure to PC games came from reading magazines. As such, Jamie Lendino's latest book is a worthy reminder not only of the games that defined the PC as it transitioned from business machine to consumer kit, but also of the advancement of technology that literally changed the game when it came to computer entertainment. Indeed, you could fill many books with tales of how the titans of the 16-bit market (well, as far as the US wasn't concerned) were felled by the more flexible, adaptable and prevalent technology of the PC (it also helped that there were countless manufacturers using standard tech, not single companies with all of the business acumen of a comatose Freddie Laker - one for you older readers there...) Whilst Starlight is not exactly one of those books, it does chart the changes and the games that clearly demonstrated that the PC was the future.
Once again, we are taken on a chronological journey of the author's gaming history, this time from 1987 to 1994. Two things become immediately apparent. One, the US PC market seems to have been much more accessible than the UK one. Two, how the hell did the author get any academic work done??? I would say there is more to like than computer and videogames but that would at best be a half truth... ;-)
In all seriousness though (why start now?), what you get here are nearly 350 pages dedicated to the software that defined DOS PC gaming. Add to that count a very detailed bibliography and a notes section that could take up hours of further reading (and yes, I have tried), and this is, much like the author's earlier books (and those by Richard Moss), pretty much the definitive title on its particular subject.
The format pretty much covers one year per chapter, each chapter detailing significant software releases as well as hardware developments that improved the PC's gaming potential. From the initial beginnings with the 8086/8088 processors and 4-colour CGA graphics, to the powerhouse Pentiums and 256 colour SVGA (with Ad-Libs and Soundblasters along the way), it is the very modularity of the PC that proved its main strength. That and the improvements in technology. As the author notes, once the 386 processor arrived, it heralded pretty much the end of other formats. Motorola 68020/68030 chips would remain very pricy (Apple), or hit "consumer" level price points far too late (Atari Falcon/Amiga1200 in 1992), whereas the Acorn ARM3 chip would be too late and expensive - launched in 1989 and initially appearing in the A540 for £3,000 in 1990 (which would have bought you a monster 386SX 25MHz with a huge (300MB) hard drive) and later the A5000 in late 1991 for £1,500 - the PC was always going to be better value, certainly in the UK against UK available formats.
As with the author's previous books, there is no colour imagery except for the covers, but that doesn't detract from the screenshots within. Hell, the early chapters would be CGA-agogo and no-one wants that, surely? Despite the lack of colour, images are clean and crisp, and every game given a detailed entry gets a picture too.
And what games are mentioned. You get the familiar favourites: Wing Commander, Sierra's adventures, LucasArts and the like, but it's the more esoteric (and poorly selling) titles that, for me, provided the most intriguing. I genuinely can't remember Dragon Strike as I would have loved playing that title as a kid, but here it is, given the love and attention in deserves. Yes, many of the titles mentioned in this book were available on the Amiga and ST (on the former of which I played Falcon, 688 Attack Sub and The Secret of Monkey Island), but as the PC overtook the capabilities of those machines, it became the computer format to play games on. Anyone who played Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis on the Amiga will remember the almost mandatory hard disk requirement due to the number of floppy discs the game came on - but such devices were add-ons (and not particularly cheap ones) and I, like many others, swapped like a mo-fo...
Starflight is yet another wonderful book by Mr Lendino and continues his gaming journey that began with Adventure. Where will he go next? Windows gaming? The formative years of 3D gaming? I know not, but what I can say is that whatever his next book might be, I'll be waiting to pick up a copy.
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