On the Road— to NOW! - The Essential Guide to Game Audio - page 25

Commodore Amiga (1985)
The Amiga was a computer ahead of its time that unfortunately
never caught on outside of a small dedicated market segment. It
featured signii cantly better display at 4096 colors, could produce
8-bit stereo audio, and also run many applications at the same time.

IBM PC (1981)
Although the development of the PC, originally by IBM, started earlier
than many of these machines, its ef ects are still being felt today in the
gaming world. The practice of PC 'cloning' by other overseas makers,
combined with the emergence of Microsoft as a provider of operating
systems, propelled the PC to preeminence in the business world. At that
time the platform was initially rarely used for gaming because it had low
graphics performance and no sound, and this continued throughout
most of the 1980s.

However, the emergence of third-party producers of hardware such
as enhanced video and sound cards began to level the playing i eld
in comparison with dedicated consoles. By the late 1990s, due to this
high performing hardware, PC games were squeezing out arcades and
competing neck-and-neck for market share with consoles.

The Playstation consoles. Clockwise from top:
Playstation One; Playstation 2 (thin version);
Playstation 2 (original version); Playstation
3; Playstation 4, the newest console
(2013-present).

Sony Playstation
In 1995 Sony got in the game with the 32-bit PlayStation, at a price
of $299. The 24-channel sound chip in the Playstation provided
CD-quality stereo sound plus built-in support for digital ef ects such
as reverb and delay. The added storage, speed and memory really
gave composers and designers some room to work. The Playstation
allocated greater memory for audio storage, allowing for more realistic
sounding samples. Sony released the Playstation 2 in 2000, and then
the Playstation 3 in 2006. The Playstation 3, for example, featured the
ability to handle hundreds of sounds simultaneously on the CPU, along
with a maximum of 12 continuous audio streams. Output was available
via HDMI with eight channels of audio, surround sound and Stereo/
Dolby Digital/DTS. The latest entry, the Playstation 4, has once again
upped the ante, featuring an 8 core processor and a dedicated sound
processing chip with the ability to decompress hundreds of MP3 audio
streams at one time.

Voyeur , a mystery adventure game released
in 1993 by Philips Interactive, featured one of
the i rst orchestral soundtracks.

Released in 1993 for the short-lived Philips Interactive system, the
mystery/adventure game Voyeur was one of the i rst to feature high
quality full motion video, but also has the distinction of being one of
the i rst game titles to use a full orchestral score, composed by Garry