The MegaCorp has been the foundation of the home PC 80s. But until now, he has never felt like a real player in PC games.
Bill Gates demonstrates the Xbox hardware.
(Image Picture: Getty Images)
The history of Microsoft in PC Gaming is long decades, but strangely divorced from hobby has helped to foster. It created Windows, the PC game rock, but the company had not shown interest in sampling the platform until the last few years: for its first 20 years of existence, at least, the games were at best an afterthought.
Microsoft’s early history is mostly a story of missed opportunities and a reluctance to treat the game with the seriousness it deserved. Under the Microsoft corporate focus Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer successive (a vocal opponent of the original Xbox), was the PC ecosystem, not just the operating system, but the software you use to surf the Internet or play videos or music, play video or music, or work. The company was familiar late to realize the importance of the Internet, something identified gates and ground in the mid-90s and has probably done exactly the same mistake with the games for two decades.
Ask someone to name Microsoft’s flagship PC game from the 80s and 90s, and you will likely get one of two answers: Microsoft Flight Simulator and Age of Empires. The former started life as a game Apple II, called flight simulator, programmed by Bruce Artwick and released in 1979, Microsoft has simply bought and re-released as Microsoft Flight Simulator. The age of empires came much later in 1997 and reflects that in this step Microsoft has seen its role as a publisher and developer of games back-rend instruments rather than a key player in the industry (would later the ensemble of game developers).
