Computer games - The Computing Universe: A Journey through a Revolution - page 186

kilobytes of memory available on the BBC Micro, Braben and Bell had to write
it in the low-level microprocessor assembly language. The success of the game
with its revolutionary three-dimensional graphics meant that it was ported to
all popular computers as well as to Nintendo's NES console.
During the 1990s, the increasing power of microprocessors and the falling
price of computer memory made three-dimensional graphics much easier to
implement. The 1993 game Doom from id Software was one of the first to take
advantage of this technology advance ( B.9.10 ). The game not only introduced
more realistic three-dimensional graphics but set the ground rules for FPS
video games. In the game, the player is a space marine who has to fight his way
through hordes of invading demons from hell. Doom's graphic violence and its
satanic imagery generated considerable controversy. The game was played by
more than ten million people within two years of its release.
In 1996, a company called 3dfx Interactive introduced Voodoo Graphics,
an affordable three-dimensional graphics accelerator card for personal computers.
Graphics accelerator cards have a specialized processor that performs three-
dimensional rendering, which otherwise would take up large amounts of com-
puting power, thus freeing up the main CPU for other tasks. A modern graphical
processing unit (GPU), a computer chip that performs rapid mathematical calcu-
lations for drawing images, now plays the same role of accelerating the graph-
ical rendering process. This increase in graphical processing capability allowed
Roy Trubshaw's original concept for text-based MUDs to be transformed to
graphical multiplayer games. With the increasing availability of the Internet,
these graphical MUDs evolved into a genre known as massively multiplayer online
role-playing games (MMORPGs). The first game in the Warcraft ( Fig. 9.12 ) series,
Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, was released in 1994. A decade later World of
Warcraft was published, and by 2009 World of Warcraft had more than ten mil-
lion subscribers. RuneScape, a free MMORPG, was developed by Andrew and
Paul Gower in Cambridge, England, and was released in 2001. As of November
2010, RuneScape was credited by Guinness World Records as having more than
175 million registered users.
Minecraft is a recent example of a game that has “gone viral” - become a
huge success - with no publisher backing and without any commercial adver-
tising ( Fig. 9.13 ). The original PC version of the game was developed by Swedish
programmer Markus “Notch” Persson ( B.9.11 ). Minecraft released an “alph”
version in 2009 and the full release in November 2011. In less than one month,
more than one million copies of the game had been sold. By March 2012,

Fig. 9.12. A visual representation of the
World of Warcraft.

B.9.10. John D. Carmack (left) and John Romero are two of the founders of id
Software, a Texas-based video game development company. Carmack and Romero
were responsible for introducing new realism into PC games with their three-
dimensional graphics technology. Their breakthrough game was Wolfenstein 3D
in 1992, followed by Doom in 1993 and Quake in 1996. Doom defined the FPS
genre and was the first PC game to be ported to Linux.