A personal computer game is a form of interactive multimedia used for entertainment played on a personal computer. Presently, the term more accurately encompasses games that run on general purpose computers, including certain earlier home computers models, which are capable of operating other applications besides computer games.

Like console games, personal computer games primarily require a processing devices contained in a computer case, a display device in the form of a computer display, and input devices in the form of a keyboard and mouse by default to function. However, at present, such hardware may be obtained as a set, along with additional audio devices, graphic accelerators, and network devices. The modularity of a personal computer also allows for significantly easier hardware upgrades.

Personal computer game are usually distributed using standard storage units for personal computers, such as compact discs and most recently, DVDs. Floppy disks have also been widely used in the past, and certain games are also distributed via the Internet.

History

The history of computer games has not received much attention from researchers. Although one might expect a consensus on such a 'young' research area, many details are more than cloudy. Which game, for example, was the first?

The usual answer is Spacewar. In the 1960s computers were a luxury for the few. The machines were enormous and usually exclusive to research institutions or the military. In 1961, MIT students Martin "Shag" Graetz and Alan Kotok, with MIT employee Stephen "Slug" Russell, used a computer for statistical calculations for employees at the university. However, he and his friends had another interest; they were devoted fans of Edvard E. Smith's science-fiction saga Skylark. With this saga fresh in memory they constructed Spacewar.

The first generation of games lacked the polish and AI seen in modern video games. They were often text games where the player communicates with the computer by typing the direction in which to move. Others were a hybrid of text and static graphics, as seen in the SSI Gold Box games like the original Pool of Radiance, or in the original Bard's Tale. One major genre of the 70s and 80s was the text adventure, or interactive fiction. The first text-adventure, Adventure (Crowther and Woods 1976) was created 15 years after Spacewar, for the PDP-11; during the late 70s scaled-down text adventures would be created by Scott Adams and others, for personal computers of the day. In the 80s, personal computers became powerful enough to run even full versions of Adventure and some of its imitators. By the late 1980s, text adventures had been mostly supplanted by graphical adventures modeled after Sierra's King's Quest.

Along with the arrival of the mouse, textual interaction was gradually replaced by graphical interfaces. In the 1980s, strategy games gained popularity in the wake of successes such as Sid Meier's Pirates! (MicroProse, 1987) and SimCity (Maxis, 1987).

Some of the more graphically intensive computer games were based on the IBM PS/2 Model 30 - with a 20 megabyte hard drive and 256 color MCGA graphics. Many currently popular, highly graphical mouse-based games originated on the Commodore Amiga computer platform since it had the most advanced colour graphic and animation capabilities of its time of introduction in 1985.

With advances in technology other game types were developed as computers became powerful enough to control and render more moving objects. These included flight simulators (Comanche, Microsoft Flight Simulator series), Microsoft Game's Mechwarrior series, and strategy games (Command & Conquer, StarCraft, Warcraft). Around the same time, 16-bit systems had little capability to create 3D texture maps. However, systems did have enough power to use simple flat-shaded polygon environments, often a selling point in flight simulators and racing games of the time.

In the early 1990s third-party developers created shareware demos of games, usually allowing people to play the first section of the game for free and requiring payment to play the rest. Apogee Software was one company that distributed shareware demos on disks and later through the Internet. These have since been replaced by free downloadable demos of games, or demos that come with gaming magazines.

The FPS genre was created with the release of Wolfenstein 3D (id Software, 1992) and remains one of the highest-selling genres today.

While leading Sega and Nintendo console systems kept their CPU speed at 3-7 MHz, the 486 PC processor ran at a much faster 66 MHz allowing it to perform many more calculations. 1993's 3D PC-based first-person shooter Doom was a breakthrough in graphics and design while consoles still had 2D side-scrollers like Nintendo's Mario series. As technology grew more sophisticated, dedicated games consoles caught up with the advances made by personal computers, paving the way for third-party developers to share game franchises like MDK between the different platforms,

Many early PC games included extras such as the peril-sensitive sunglasses that shipped with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. By the mid-90s these extras had been dropped for a long time but many games were still sold in the traditional over-sized boxes that used to hold the extra "feelies".

The added competition from console games and the early 2000s explosion in computer game development was the trigger to redesign this packaging and by 2001 PC games were almost exclusively sold in smaller DVD-sized game boxes.