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              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC">volume 
                1, issue 4</font></b></font></p>
              <p><font color="#0000FF"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" color="#0000CC"> 
                </font></b></font></p>
              <p>  <p><font face="Courier New, Courier, mono"><b><font color="#339900" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Today 
                in loonygames:</font></b></font></p>

<P><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1">New!!</font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> The Archives have been cleaned up, fead links fixed, and printable versions restored! Also, don't miss the new comments <a href="../../../index.html">on the front page</a>!</font></p>
              
<P><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1"><a href="../../2.15/feat/index.html" target="">Livin' 
  With The Sims</a></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">: 
  theAntiELVIS explores the wild and wacky world that is Will Wright's <b>The Sims</b>, 
  asking the inevitable quesiton, &quot;is <b>The Sims</b> the first step toward a virtual 
  life where everyone is Swedish?&quot;</font></p>
<P><font color="#000000" face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1"><a href="../../2.15/pixel/index.html" target="">Pixel 
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  Vasquez on <b>Omikron: The Nomad Soul</b>.</font></p>
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              <p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-1"><a href="../../1.14/feat">NT 
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        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="+3" color="#0022A8"> 
          Play Where You Like!</font></p>
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          <font color="#804000"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">By 
          Jeff &quot;<a target="" href="mailto:jeff@solomania.com">nonick</a>&quot; 
          Solomon</font></b></font></p>
        <p align="RIGHT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><br>
          </font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The original 
          Nintendo was an 8-bit system that by 1986 took the consumer market by 
          storm. While there had been other gaming systems released in the American 
          market prior to the NES (including the Atari 2600 and ColecoVision systems), 
          Nintendo was the first company to pull off an aggressive marketing blitz 
          and command the attention of a critical mass of anxious consumers. </font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">With the NES, 
          home gaming took off with a vengeance. Gaming systems were repositioned 
          as electronic toys, as opposed to complicated systems for hobbyists. 
          Toy stores became the central location to procure electronic entertainment. 
          Suddenly, home video games were an exciting prospect for everyone. </font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">In 1986, Sega 
          decided to cash in on what was becoming an extremely lucrative market 
          and responded to Nintendo with the Sega Master System. Unfortunately 
          for Sega, Nintendo had already garnered the leadership position in this 

          market, and Sega's initial offering fared poorly by comparison.</font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">For three years, 
          Nintendo continued to reign supreme in the home gaming market, enjoying 
          a position of power very similar to Microsoft's command of the PC operating 
          system market today (an analogy that also stretches to legal situations 
          - Nintendo was accused of monopolizing the market, and preventing competitors' 
          programs from running on its system - sound familiar?).</font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">In 1989, the 
          market players were ready to shake things up. Sega lobbed its second 
          generation, 16-bit Genesis system into the fray, which offered significantly 
          improved graphics and sound over the previous 8-bit generation of systems. 
          Nintendo and Atari jumped on the miniaturization bandwagon and introduced 
          the portable GameBoy and Lynx systems, respectively. In a wonderful 
          bit of retrospective irony, <a href="http://www.disney.com">Disney's</a><i> 
          Honey, I Shrunk the Kids</i> was tearing up the box office as truckloads 
          of GameBoy and Lynx units were flooding toy stores.</font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Throughout 1990, 
          Nintendo remained on top, but the industry was beginning to resemble 
          the segmented form that is now the norm as various companies introduced 
          products and services that attempted to satisfy various types of gaming 
          needs. </font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Sega focused 
          on leveraging its dominance in the arcade industry by releasing home 
          versions of its most popular games for the Genesis. Video stores began 
          renting game cartridges. And <a href="http://www.nec.com">NEC</a> and 
          Nintendo, as well as other, smaller companies, had their R&D labs pumping 
          at full tilt to produce advanced 16-bit systems of their own. </font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">By 1991, the 
          market was rushing ahead with more momentum than a runaway train. Nintendo 
          released the 16-bit Super NES, and various other systems appeared as 
          it became clear that things were becoming so segmented that Nintendo 
          was no longer guaranteed exclusive success. As technology began improving 
          ever more rapidly, it became obvious that yesterday's technology leader 
          could very well become tomorrow's bargain bin dust cover doorstop doohickey.</font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">The race was 
          on to improve technology and battle for market share, and the assault 
          was coming from all fronts. At this point, a significant portion of 
          the home gaming market began to spill over to PCs, as graphics chips 
          and CPUs gained the power that was necessary to compete with the dedicated 
          electronics in console systems. While computer games were nothing new, 
          it was at this point that they were finally able to begin to compete 
          directly with the kinds of games that were designed for consoles.</font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">PC users were 
          no longer limited to playing comparably static games like<b> Zork </b>and 
          pure strategy simulators like <b>SimCity </b>and <b>Civilization</b>. 
          Better PC technology paved the way for games like <b>Wolfenstein 3D</b> 
          and<b> Doom</b> that made people realize that they could play engaging 
          games on the same system they used for homework. Sound cards and CD-ROM 
          drives - once so scarce that game designers would be laughed out of 
          the planning room if they made the assumption that a typical PC would 
          have them - were now shipping with standard systems.</font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Windows 3.1 
          was released in 1992, but attracted very little attention from game 
          developers, and for good reason. The graphics facilities in Windows 
          were designed to draw windows and system elements, but were highly inefficient 
          when it came to providing the raw speed and nimble output that games 
          require. Since Win 3.1 was still married to DOS, and offered essentially 
          nothing in the way of high performance gaming support, most companies 
          chose to continue writing games exclusively for DOS, which was becoming 
          less attractive for running spreadsheets but still offered the raw speed 
          and power that Windows lacked.</font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">Because every 
          system running Windows 3.1 was also running DOS, game developers had 
          little incentive to develop games exclusively for Windows. Why should 
          they, when performance would be degraded, programming difficulty increased, 
          and the overall gaming experience compromised? Microsoft, of course, 
          wanted to steer everyone over to Windows, and attempted to improve Windows 
          3.1's anemic graphics facilities with the WinG programming library, 
          which made graphics routines more efficient for programmers, but ultimately 
          attracted little notice.</font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">All of this 
          began to change in 1995, when Microsoft made good on its promise to 
          produce a more game-friendly version of Windows with the über-hyped 
          Windows 95. Although the initial version of Windows 95 didn't include 
          the extensive gaming support that Microsoft was hoping (many of the 
          features were dropped so that the product would be able to ship in 1995), 
          Microsoft released some of the goods - the initial iteration of the 
          DirectX series of drivers and APIs for Windows 95 - shortly thereafter.</font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif">DirectX was 
          designed to present developers with a consistent, streamlined API (application 
          programming interface) and driver set for Windows that would allow them 
          to write games that were not hindered by Windows' poor graphics performance. 
          Game programmers would no longer be forced to use the same set of tools 
          for games that were originally designed to draw buttons and dialogue 
          boxes. In addition, DirectX provided sound and input device drivers 
          that allowed Windows to take advantage of gaming hardware that had previously 
          gone underappreciated.</font></p>
        <p align="LEFT"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"> </font></p>
        <p>&nbsp;</p>
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    <td><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2"><b>Credits:</b> 
      Illustration &copy; 1998 Mike Sanzone. Play Where You Like! is &copy; 1998 
      Jeff Solomon. All other content is &copy; 1998 <a target="_self" href="http://www.loonyboi.com">loonyboi 
      productions</a>. Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited, so don't 
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