Electronic Gaming Monthly · Issue 56, March 1994 · DOOM / Star Wars: X-Wing
EGM's 1994 feature on the PC gaming explosion — anchored by DOOM's unprecedented shareware success and the growing power of consumer PC hardware — documented a pivotal moment when PC gaming began to seriously challenge consoles for the attention of the hardcore gaming audience.
Electronic Gaming Monthly was primarily a console publication in 1994, but the PC gaming explosion triggered by DOOM and the concurrent rise of CD-ROM could not be ignored. EGM's coverage of the PC gaming surge was unusual for the magazine and reflected a genuine shift in the gaming landscape: suddenly, PC games like DOOM, Star Wars: X-Wing, and Myst were generating cultural conversation that rivaled anything on SNES or Genesis. The magazine's coverage gave console-focused readers a framework for understanding what was happening on a platform many of them owned but didn't game on seriously. The issue also documented the CD-ROM revolution that would soon transform console gaming as well, providing context for the arriving 32-bit platforms that would make optical media central to the next generation of gaming hardware.
Documenting the moment PC gaming emerged as a genuine competitor to console gaming and providing EGM's console-focused readership with a framework for understanding the platform's growing importance.
The CD-ROM's arrival in mainstream consumer computing in 1993 and 1994 was a technological shift whose implications extended beyond storage capacity. Games could now include full-motion video, recorded speech, orchestrated music, and vastly more content than any floppy disk collection could accommodate. Myst — a game whose pre-rendered environments required the storage density only CD-ROM could provide — sold over six million copies between 1993 and 2000, demonstrating that the format's expanded capacity could reach audiences that neither console gaming nor traditional PC gaming had previously captured.
EGM's coverage of this transition was valuable for console players trying to understand why their platform-aligned gaming press was suddenly discussing PC games extensively. The answer was that CD-ROM technology was about to arrive on consoles — the Sega CD was already in the market, the 3DO was built around optical media, and both PlayStation and Saturn would use CDs as their primary format. Understanding what CD-ROM meant for PC gaming was preparation for understanding what it would mean for the next console generation.
The FMV game genre that flourished briefly in the mid-1990s — Night Trap, Rebel Assault, the Seventh Guest — was a CD-ROM phenomenon built on the format's ability to store video data. EGM covered these games with appropriate skepticism, recognizing that video storage was being used as a substitute for gameplay rather than as an enhancement to it, but the coverage also acknowledged that the technology enabling these experiments was the same technology that would power genuinely transformative games when developers learned how to use it effectively.
EGM's 1994 PC gaming coverage arrived at a moment when the lines between PC and console gaming were beginning to blur in interesting ways. DOOM's deathmatching required networking infrastructure — modems, BBS systems, eventually the internet — that consoles could not yet provide, but the game's success demonstrated an appetite for multiplayer competition that console manufacturers were watching carefully. The online gaming features that would become central to Xbox Live and PlayStation Network in the following decade were visible in embryo in DOOM's networked deathmatching.
The Pentium processor's arrival in 1993 also created PC hardware that surpassed the graphical capabilities of existing consoles. For the first time since the early 1980s, the most powerful gaming hardware was on a general-purpose computer rather than a dedicated console. This shift was temporary — the PlayStation and Saturn would partially close the gap — but it signaled a changing relationship between the platforms that EGM's console-focused readership needed to understand. The magazine's willingness to cover PC gaming seriously in 1994 reflected an editorial maturity about the gaming landscape that serves its archive well as a historical record of the period.