Casual gaming can be a bit of a dirty phase these days. It conjures up images of ad-laden freemium games where you spend more time watching a video about another game than actually playing the one you downloaded. Once upon a time though, casual gaming skipped the word ‘casual’ and focused squarely on ‘you mean I can play games on my office computer instead of look at these dull spreadsheets?!’ And that’s how so many early 90s PC owners found themselves hooked on a Microsoft Entertainment Pack.
It’s weird to think about now but, back in the early 90s, Microsoft needed to make Windows more appealing to both homes and small businesses. We take it for granted these days, but back then people weren’t sure if they actually needed a PC at home and small businesses had other plans. Who could blame them? PCs were expensive.
I distinctly remember the family PC costing a good £1,000 or so, and it took up a lot of room too. What started out as a work tool for both my parents, as well as an educational tool for me, soon turned into a place where you could find a scrappy selection of games to lose your free time to. Much of that selection stemmed from the Microsoft Entertainment Pack.
Designed by Microsoft’s Entry Business team, the Entertainment Pack project’s budget was mostly non-existent. As Bruce Ryan, Microsoft product manager at the time, explained to Business Insider: “None of the game companies had any interest in [Windows].”
That sounds absurd now, doesn’t it? Still, back then, Windows just wasn’t a legitimate gaming platform. To an extent, I can’t blame them. I remember trying to get games like Theme Park to run, and it was quite the battle. It took you out of Windows into the solely text-based DOS operating system then usually expected you to bung in a floppy disc that had a config file known as autoexec.bat to do the heavy work for you. In theory. Assuming you knew what to type into the file and ohh, it wasn’t actually easy at all. At best, you’d end up with no working sound while you played. At worst, it just wouldn’t work. It was complicated, alright?
I’d inevitably gravitate towards simpler fare like the Microsoft Entertainment Pack. It simply required fewer technical hoops to jump through and didn’t really stress the computer or human using it.
On my family’s PC, we had one Microsoft Entertainment Pack while a friend of mine had a completely different one. I’m honestly not sure who had what but somehow we ended up with all the Entertainment Packs available.
You see, the packs weren’t copy protected so customers were somewhat encouraged to distribute copies to friends, all in a bid to encourage people to use Windows for games. Instead of a conventional wage, each author of its games were given ten shares of Microsoft stock which I’m going to assume was a much better deal in the long term but may have seemed risky at the time.