Microsoft's on-again off-again affair with PC gaming is finally the real deal

pcgamer.com:

Microsoft's history in PC gaming is decades long, but strangely divorced from the hobby it helped foster. It created Windows, the bedrock of PC gaming, but the company hadn't shown interest in championing the platform until the last few years: For its first 20 years of existence, at least, games were at best an afterthought.

Microsoft's early history is mostly a tale of missed opportunities and an unwillingness to treat games with the seriousness they deserved. Under Bill Gates and later Steve Ballmer (a vocal opponent of the original Xbox), Microsoft's business focus was the PC ecosystem: Not just the OS your machine ran on, but the software you use to browse the internet, or play video or music, or work. The company was famously late to realising the importance of the internet, something Gates identified and rectified in the mid-'90s, and arguably made exactly the same mistake with games for two decades.

Ask someone to name Microsoft's flagship PC game from the '80s and '90s and you'll probably get one of two answers: Microsoft Flight Simulator, or Age of Empires. The former began life as an Apple II game, called Flight Simulator, programmed by one Bruce Artwick and released in 1979: Microsoft simply bought the rights and re-released it as Microsoft Flight Simulator. Age of Empires came much later in 1997, and reflects that at this stage Microsoft saw its role as a games publisher and developer of backend tools rather than a key player in the industry (it would later acquire the game's developer Ensemble).

Everything was about Windows… and games were something the kids played

Microsoft's first big gaming move was DirectX in the mid-'90s, which it gave a huge push at the 1996 Computer Games Developer Conference (later