The Birth of Windows Gaming
The Birth of Windows Gaming
Software is a fluid that expands to fill its container
Gabe Logan Newell was born on the 3rd of November in 1962 in Colorado, USA. Along the way, he moved to California, where he attended Davis Senior High School in Davis, California. His first job was delivering newspapers, and his second job was delivering telegrams for Western Union. From there, Newell enrolled in Harvard University in 1980.
While attending Harvard, Newell decided to visit his brother who had recently joined the ranks of Microsoft, and Newell says this about his experience:
The most valuable educational experience for me was sort of the nontraditional one. I was going to university and went out to visit my brother. He just started at this new software company, which was the third largest software company on the East side of Lake Washington, and I was going out to visit him, and all of a sudden he was working all the time. So rather than hanging out with me and seeing the Space Needle, I was just hanging out with him at work. Steve Ballmer, who's currently the president, got mad that I was distracting him and said, “Well, if you're going to be spending all your time hanging out here, you need to do something useful.” Those first three months, when I was working with people like Tom Corbett and Neil Konzen and Steve Wood, were probably the most intense and valuable educational experience I've ever had. They sort of showed me how to be a professional software developer. You know, it was an incredibly vast and really significant set of lessons that I learned…
Not to bang on Harvard, but I learned more in three months with those guys at Microsoft than I did in the entire time I was at Harvard. At Harvard, I learned how to drink beer while doing a headstand in the snow. Which, you know, is a useful skill, but not nearly as useful as how to actually develop software and think about how small group and large group processes affect applications.
As a result of this experience, Gaben (this nickname originates in the naming convention for Microsoft email addresses where it would have been GabeN) dropped out of Harvard after some convincing by Bill Gates in 1983 like so many Microsoft people before him had. Over the following 13 years, Gaben worked on Windows. As far as I can tell, he was one of very few people who worked on all of the first 3 major Windows versions, and he was among the lead developers on those projects.
On the 10th of December in 1993, Doom was released by id Software following their successful releases of Commander Keen in 1990 and 1991 and of Wolfenstein 3D in 1992. The release of Doom was in a shareware model. The first episode was free with the other two episodes being in the registered version. A retail release was made that was titled The Ultimate Doom in 1995 and this contained an additional fourth episode. By 1996, Doom was the single most popular software program in the USA.
Gaben installed Doom on a laptop and demoed it to people in their offices, and he’d often say things like: “Look, look what PC games can do! This is a lot better that your NES system or your Sega system.” Yet, it was an MS-DOS title. This stuck with Gaben who had worked so hard on Windows. Despite the massive success of the recent Windows 95 release, Windows was second. Gaben had this to say about the situation:
But what was so shocking to me was that Windows was the second highest usage application in the US. The number one application was Doom, a shareware program that hadn’t been created by any of the powerhouse software companies. It was a 12 person company in the suburbs of Texas that didn’t even distribute through retail; it distributed through bulletin boards and other pre-Internet mechanisms. To me, that was a lightning bolt. Microsoft was hiring 500 people sales teams and this entire company was 12 people. Yet, it had created the most widely distributed software in the world. There was a sea change coming.
One of the very first Windows applications was the game Balance of Power which saw a release for Windows 1.0 in 1986.
In the Windows 3 era, gaming on Windows got somewhat better with improved versions of Civilization, Myst, and SimCity all making appearances. Despite these titles, most PC games and the majority of PC game sales were titles released for MS-DOS.
Gaben wasn’t alone in this concern. Alex St. John had asked various game developers how likely they’d be to port their games to Windows 95, and the responses weren’t great. Programmers felt that Windows didn’t provide the features they needed, and the game developers really wanted direct hardware access to gain the best performance possible. Additionally, there were some issues with WinG and various video adapter drivers, and WinG only provided access to the frame buffer of a video card ignoring all other features. St. John then started “the Manhattan Project” within Microsoft. The goal was to outcompete the video game consoles of the era, and effectively replace game consoles with PCs running Windows.
From Christmas of 1994 to April of 1995, St. John, Craig Eisler, and Eric Engstrom built the Windows 95 Game SDK, which was shortly later named DirectX. The name actually came from a reporter poking fun that everything in the SDK was named Direct something, or Direct “X”: DirectDraw, DirectSound, DirectPlay, Direct3D, DirectInput, DirectSound3D. The team decided that was as good a name as any. The “direct” part of the naming scheme for the various libraries stems from their bypassing normal Windows 95 operating system routines and accessing hardware through the hardware abstraction layer. DirectX was ready for the launch of Windows 95, and games were shipping using the system by Christmas of 1995.
Gaben was also on a mission to solve Windows gaming. He felt that Windows should be a gaming platform, so he called John Carmack over at id and he said that he’d port Doom to Windows for free. He got a couple of developers to work on it with him. Initially, the intent was to target Windows 3.11 via win32 and WinG and the working title was WinDoom. This changed in late 1995, and the only target from there on was Windows 95. The resulting ported game was titled Doom 95.
Microsoft was the second school (or sometimes third, thinking of companies like Martin-Marietta) for a large number of industry pioneers. Michael Abrash had recently left Microsoft for id, where he helped with Quake. Carmack and Abrash then told Gaben and Mike Harrington (one of Gaben’s friends at Microsoft) that they should leave Microsoft and start their own game company. So, Gaben and Harrington left Microsoft, and on the 24th of August in 1996, the two founded Valve LLC in Kirkland, Washington.
The thought that two guys who’d worked on operating systems and productivity software would be successful in entertainment software wasn’t immediately obvious. The two gentlemen doubted themselves and thought that they may find themselves returning to Microsoft with a bit of shame. With this in mind, they knew that they’d need more people. They cashed in their Microsoft stock options and used the money to fund Valve. This gave them a rather large amount of funding for their first efforts. They hired 26 people bringing Valve’s staff to a total of 28, and they began working. Initially, they’d planned for two titles. One of these would be a first person shooter similar to Doom or Quake, and the second would be a science fantasy role-playing title called Prospero.
Again, knowing their own limitations, Valve licensed both the Quake engine and the Quake II engine from id. They then combined these engines with their own code and began to iterate. In the end, Gaben estimates that their 3d game engine was about 75% original to Valve. As time went on, it became rather obvious to Gaben that their FPS game was going to be more important than their role-playing title. Prospero was canceled, and its team was absorbed into the Half-Life project. As the game was taking shape, Valve got in touch with Sierra to establish a publishing deal. This was done by giving Sierra a small stake in Valve’s intellectual property, and the game was set to launch in late 1997. Unfortunately, Valve felt the game wasn’t really any good… they scrapped it. Another year was spent completely rebuilding the game. Finally, it was demoed at E3 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta on the 28th through 30th of May in 1998. Tens of thousands of people were in attendance and all of the industry’s big companies were too. The largest companies present were Nintendo, Sony, and Sega. Valve was small, but Half-Life was well received and anticipation was building.
Half-Life was released on the 19th of November in 1998. Half-Life has been named the best game of all time by PC Gamer, GameSpy, and several other industry publications. This wasn’t expected. Half-Life was expected to reach lifetime sales of 180000 copies by Valve, but the game sold 2.5 million copies by July of 2001. In 1998, Valve acquired TF Software PTY which had developed the game Team Fortress as a mod for Quake. One year later, Valve released Team Fortress Classic which was Team Fortress built on the Half-Life engine called GoldSrc. In 1999, Gearbox Software developed Half-Life: Opposing Force, and in 2001 they developed Half-Life: Blue Shift and Half-Life: Decay.
Following the releases of Half-Life and Team Fortress Classic, Valve actively encouraged the modding community to make new titles on their engine, and mod the community most certainly did: Deathmatch Classic, Ricochet, Gunman Chronicles, Day of Defeat, Counter-Strike, The Ship, Alien Swarm, Garry’s Mod, and many more.
In the year 2000, Harrington left the company. He intended to take an extended vacation with his wife, Monica, who had had dreams of building a boat and traveling around the world. He and Gaben had built a successful company, made an amazing game, and for Harrington, that was enough. He and Monica built a 77 foot boat named the MV Meander and began sailing the seas. Valve moved from Kirkland to Bellevue following Harrington’s departure. For Newell, this was tough:
It was really hard, Mike was the one person who I could talk to more than anyone else about things that worried me.
Still, Gaben didn’t have it in him to retire, and there was still much to do.
Back at Microsoft, things hadn’t slowed down. While Gaben was off building Valve and Half-Life, Microsoft’s DirectX team was still working. DirectX 2.0a shipping with Windows 95 OSR2 and Windows NT 4.0 starting on the 5th of June in 1996. DirectX 3 launched on the 15th of September in 1996. DirectX 4 was planned for December of 1996. This was a smaller update that was going to allow access to special features in upcoming Cirrus Logic chips. Those chips were delayed, and as a result the team had some wasted effort. DirectX 4 never shipped. DirectX 5 continued development seeing a release on the 16th of July in 1997. DirectX 6 launched on the 7th of August in 1998 for Windows CE. This one is humorous. Microsoft’s Manhattan Project was meant to end the game consoles providing significant advantages to developing for Windows, but version 6 was on the Sega Dreamcast. This version also saw its way onto PCs on the 3rd of February in 1999 with version 6.1, and a Windows 98 exclusive version 6.1a on the 5th of May in 1999.
Very large and widely sold titles were being released for MS-DOS even following the release of Windows 95. While Doom originally released in 1993 and can therefore be forgiven for its MS-DOS homeland, this is not true for games like Command & Conquer: Red Alert or Tomb Raider in 1996, or Blood in 1997. Yet, Windows did quickly get large titles besides Half-Life. Windows 95 and DirectX were successful in getting Diablo, StarCraft, Thief, Unreal, and many more. Alex St. John and Gabe Newell were clearly very successful in their mission.
Following the business changes at Valve in 2000, Valve was working on a new game engine called “Source,” a Half-Life sequel built on that new engine, and they were growing increasingly concerned about their deal with Sierra. Giving Sierra a stake in their intellectual property would be a much larger give when considering that the company was building a new game engine and a new game in the wake of a resounding success. As result of these concerns, they renegotiated that deal removing the IP rights on Sierra’s part, and allowing Valve to distribute software digitally on their own.
Getting patches to customers more quickly was a priority for Valve. Multiplayer gaming meant that if someone lacked a certain patch that fixed critical game flaws, a user would be unable to play online until they patched. If the customer had to go to a retail store to grab an update on a disc, this could be a considerable wait and a considerable cost to both sides of the transaction. With that in mind, Valve set to work on creating a digital sales and software distribution platform. Initially, Valve approached Microsoft, Yahoo!, and RealNetworks to partner with them and help build this digital platform, but they were turned down by every company they approached.
In 2002, Valve started building this platform initially called Grid and then Gazelle, and this was eventually renamed Steam fitting with the company name. Steam was publicly announced at the Game Developers Conference on the 22nd of March in 2002, and it was made available for beta testing around the same time. Valve made their game engine and digital distribution available to developers for $995 (around $1690 in 2023).
At first, there was some pushback against Steam. Software was sold in boxes on store shelves. Period. Software was something for which the buyer had a perpetual license, and it was something that was collected in boxes on shelves in a person’s home. Having no physical item as the result of a purchase was alien. What’s more, the games initially available on Steam were ones that many Valve customers already owned. Sure, the key code could be entered to make the game show up in the Steam library, but why would one need that if he/she already had the game? Well, online multiplayer and patch delivery were the initial motivations for many.
On the evening of the 13th of October in 2004, testing was completed on Half-Life 2 after more than five years of development and $40 million (around $65 million in 2023). The game was released on Steam on the 16th of November in 2004, and received 39 game of the year awards. Like the original Half-Life before it, many people consider it one of the best games ever made. While Half-Life 2 was made available on CD and DVD, it was the first major hit for Steam. Players were able to purchase the game prior to release, download it in an encrypted form, and on launch day the game was decrypted and made playable. For fans who’d been waiting for years, this was worth forgoing the physical purchase.
Steam did some major things to the software industry. First, it made people comfortable with digital purchases. Second, it completely changed the way patches and updates were delivered. Third, it increased the amount of profit that could be made off of software while simultaneously making many games less expensive for the customer. Fourth, it cut the time from development to release. On the other hand, Steam made video games more difficult to copy, made many games impossible to play offline, and took away the physical artifacts that are enjoyable for so many. Of course, Steam also made Windows the only gaming platform in the non-console world for almost 20 years.
The combination of Steam, the creation of new hardware enabled by Windows 95’s plug and play, the PCI and AGP buses, and new driver models in Windows brought PC gaming to heights. Microsoft had hit after hit in the operating systems, applications, and gaming markets. From Microsoft itself, there were titles like the Neverhood, Age of Empires, Flight Simulator, Metal Gear Solid, Age of Mythology, Rise of Nations, and many more. The success of gaming on Windows 95 contributed directly to both hardware and software advancement. There was a feedback loop. Better graphics cards would require more refinements to the operating system software stack, faster buses, faster and more RAM, faster CPUs, and so on. In turn, as these more powerful hardware components became available new games would be written that would just barely operate within these newly expanded confines. At each turn, Microsoft was able to respond with operating systems and newer versions of DirectX. Expanding to today, we see this cycle still in play, and the advancements started with gaming have enabled new AI systems, new cryptographic systems, new cinematic capabilities, and … heavy JS frameworks.
Thanks to people like Gaben and Alex St. John, Windows 95 PCs became an extremely competitive gaming platform and MS-DOS was killed in the market. Microsoft was ascendent. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, the WinTel platform would outcompete all rivals. In covering so much of Microsoft’s history first with my article on DOS, then with the BASIC series, and now recently with my Windows series, we see that Microsoft was perfectly positioned for this time period. The company had attracted extremely talented and driven people, they’d established the right relationships with hardware and software vendors, and they’d stayed either ahead of or current with emerging markets and technologies. While some people dislike the monoculture market that WinTel was, I feel like it was needed to help make computers common in every home, bring the World Wide Web to the mainstream, and push our technologies forward. For many people prior to this time period, picking a computer platform was a very complicated affair, and the computers themselves were often difficult to use. With Windows 95 becoming the mainstream productivity software target, the Internet target (with IE), and the gaming target, this decision was made easy for almost everyone. Once a large single target existed, the risk in developing software and video games went down. The addressable market with a single software product made for this single platform target was enormous. Microsoft’s Golden Age had had dawned.