The history of PC gaming can be neatly split into two eras. Everything from 1993 onwards we can class as the Modern Age, in which the PC is established as a games platform in its own right. (We can pinpoint 1993 based on the fact that before that year the number of PC games that have survived into posterity drops off precipitously.)

Everything before 1993 could be termed the Dark Age, a period shrouded in mystery, when there was no internet nor any dedicated PC gaming magazines, and when the "IBM compatible" was seen as just another home computer format among many (and as far as the UK was concerned, one that was both technically inferior to and several times more expensive than the riotously popular Commodore Amiga and Atari ST).

Thanks to this combination of factors most modern gamers are unfamiliar with the PC's formative years, having only joined the party in the mid-1990s after sound cards and CD-ROM drives had become standard features and the likes of LucasArts, Origin, Bullfrog and Westwood had started churning out big-budget blockbusters. While these big-name studios played a role in the PC's reinvention, most of the credit for realising the PC's true potential as a games platform came from a very different scene.