Computer games are a type of video game played on a personal computer rather than a special game console. Over the years, the popularity of computer games has changed as prices and performance have fluctuated between consoles and personal computers. These days, it has largely asserted itself in its own right, with many games designed exclusively for PC games, while other types of games are better suited for consoles.

Early computer games mostly revolved around text-based adventures, as this was one area where they could immediately distinguish themselves from arcade games. Although there were early graphical computer games such as Spacewar, which was perhaps the first computer game in history, many of the most popular were simple text-based inputs. The original and perhaps most famous of these was Adventure, and later games built on its success. Eventually, graphics were added to the idea of text-based computer games, with text remaining as a command input, although simple graphics helped build the scene.

In the early 1980s, the popularity of computer games increased as the bottom fell out of the console video game market. The abundance of bad console games, combined with the lower prices of home computers, made computer games the obvious choice for many. When the Nintendo Entertainment System was released, this boom slowed somewhat, although it continued for many more years in Europe.

With the addition of the mouse as an input device to computers, graphic computer games began to make a lot more sense. Graphic adventure games, such as the popular King’s Quest series, used the mouse to allow the player to interact with a static image. At the same time, a new genre emerged, the first-person shooter. One of the first, Wolfenstein 3D, was released by id Software in 1992 and helped popularize the idea of first-person shooters.

The following year, capitalizing on the ever-increasing computing power of computers, id Software released Doom, a revolutionary first-person shooter that was one of the most popular games of the time. The industry remained relatively stable until 1996, when further innovations in graphics card technology allowed for even more sophisticated and stunning games, and Tomb Raider was an early third-person shooter to take advantage of the computing power of computers of that era.

Since the turn of the millennium, computer games have become an even bigger market than usual and have become a major use of computers in most homes. Games became even more complex as technology evolved even further, and game developers began to experiment with new methods of interaction that distinguished the computer platform from the console. Games like Warcraft and Starcraft, Command and Conquer, Black & White, and The Sims are all examples of this type of game.

The emergence of massively graphic online role-playing games was the next huge leap in computer gaming. These massive games, similar to the concept of text-based MUDs that have existed since the early days of the Internet, took full advantage of the ubiquity of high-speed Internet and powerful computers. Allowing thousands of hundreds of thousands of players to interact in the virtual world, they have become a huge market share for video games and a social phenomenon in their own right.