The big System X *versus* System Y internet debates, 22 - 23 years ago...

[jalsonmi]

MikeB said:

@ jalsonmi

Mid-80's on was where the DOS based computer completely took over the market.

I just stated Commodore and Atari were big names around that period 1985-1986. Note Commodore also introduced Commodore PCs since 1984, entering the PC clone market themselves (though far behind IBM, they were one of the leading PC brands). Commodore PC-1 ,PC 10, PC-10 II, PC 20, PC-30 and PC 70 (in the end it's funny to note how they themselves contributed towards digging their own grave).

With regard to home usage, the c64 and then the Amiga were dominant home computer gaming platforms. Testament of this is the sheer amount of games released for these platform from 1982 to 1993 compared to PC releases. But computer gaming was especially popular in Europe, for the US the bulk turned towards the NES.

PCs only became popular as a gaming platform 1993 onwards. Like I said earlier, I agree with you the release of Doom had a major impact on the PC gaming market in December 1993. Many people upgrading resulted in PCs becoming far more viable for gaming.

 

Agreed--I think I just misinterpreted what you were trying to say. PC gaming was a relatively late creation, and took off with Doom and the popularization of a few genres that specifically geared towards PCs, such as RTSes and Sim games (like Sim City 2000). I thought you were saying that gaming is what popularized the adoption of PCs over non-DOS based machines, which I disagreed with (though I no longer think you were saying that)

I still say, though, that it wasn't a specific game that really caused PCs to take over the computer gaming marker, but simply the fact that they became so damn ubiquitous that of course game developers had to follow suit and make games primarily for PC over other computer types. Hell, I remember when Mac had more of a gaming library. I mean, it's on the upswing again but for a while it was pretty barren. But I digress.

And I'm certainly Aware of Atari's brandname power. However, the Atari computers were all massive failures, and thus don't really belong/deserve to be thought of aside the C64, much less the Amiga.