Game Central's 15th Anniversary

K. Fields
2021-05-25T13:31:58-04:00
General, Video Games

Today marks the 15th anniversary of my Game Central web site. I launched it on May 25, 2006. Over the last 15 years, I have added a lot of content. Updates have slowed a bit in recent years, I must admit. However, I always post something new on the anniversary date. For the past four weeks, I have been playing Dragon Age: Origins. I will give that game a dedicated post in the future. It features a lot of content and won't be a quick one to finish. Thus far, it has been extremely satisfying. It may end up as my favorite computer game played this year.

Anniversaries are good times to reflect on the past. 2021 is not only Game Central's 15th anniversary. It also happens to be the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer. Released on August 12, 1981, the IBM PC was a transformative piece of technology. It elevated a fledgling industry and took personal computing to another level. Although targeted at businesses, it also found success in home computing. In fact, the IBM PC "5150" was my family's first computer. Years before PCs reached ubiquity in the "Wintel" era, early IBM PC users were chugging along with 4.77 MHz 8088 CPUs running DOS. There wasn't much of a commercial PC game market at first, at least not compared to what was available for Apple and Atari computers. It grew rapidly, however, and became a dominant platform.

I wanted to pay homage to those great early years of IBM PC gaming. Back then, I subscribed to a lot of computer magazines. I read Byte and PC World and had a multi-year run of PC Magazine starting at issue #1. Unfortunately, my collection of those magazines was lost in the 2011 flood. My magazines that survived were issues of Softalk for the IBM Personal Computer and Softline. I recently read through all of those issues, which dated 1982 to 1984. Softline was a gaming magazine but even Softalk featured game ads. I decided to scan ads for any PC games I used to own or at least had played. In addition to software, I even found ads for the TG Products Joystick. That was the joystick I used on my IBM PC in the 1980s.

All of these gaming advertisement scans can be found on the new Magazine Ads page. It is a nice little time capsule preserving an earlier era of computer gaming.