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> ... reading Tandy magazines like 80 Micro and Rainbow [...] from the early 1980s is like visiting a sad and barren alternate world; instead of Origin, Sierra,

> ... reading Tandy magazines like 80 Micro and Rainbow [...] from the early 1980s is like visiting a sad and barren alternate world; instead of Origin, Sierra, MicroProse, and SSI, there are much cruder-looking ads from tiny companies offering bad clones of popular arcade games. This is a nice post with a lot of detail and understanding of computers from that era, but I'd just like to point out that December 1983 was still early days for computer games on personal computers. Looking at the list of games for the IBM PC from 1981-1983 [0] there were only ~75 games total, many of them were text-based ones such as Zork, and while there was for example Ultima 2 by Origin Systems, it's not as if there were a ton of games from the above listed publishers available on the PC at that time and those that existed were also pretty crude. [0] https://archive.org/details/TGODFloppyCollection?and%5B%5D=year%3A%221983%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221982%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221981%22 https://archive.org/details/TGODFloppyCollection?and%5B%5D=y...

TMWNN 4y ago
The PC isn't what I had in mind as comparison; it did not become a meaningful gaming/non-business software platform until cheap clones c. 1985 gave it a substantial home presence. I chose December 1983 because it was close to the peak of the Tandy 8-bit market. Compare the TRS-80 magazines I mentioned to Compute!'s Gazette's December 1983 issue <https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/2up?...>. It's still early in the C64's lifespan, but Atarisoft, Epyx, Sierra, SubLOGIC, Avalon Hill, Infocom, and Access already have a presence. A year later <https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/2up?...>, by which time the C64 has essentially seized the entire US 8-bit non-Apple market, Broderbund, EA, Sega, Weekly Reader, Davidson, SSI, and MicroProse are also present.

TMWNN 4y ago

The PC isn't what I had in mind as comparison; it did not become a meaningful gaming/non-business software platform until cheap clones c. 1985 gave it a substantial home presence. I chose December 1983 because it was close to the peak of the Tandy 8-bit market. Compare the TRS-80 magazines I mentioned to Compute!'s Gazette's December 1983 issue <https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/2up?...>. It's still early in the C64's lifespan, but Atarisoft, Epyx, Sierra, SubLOGIC, Avalon Hill, Infocom, and Access already have a presence. A year later <https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/2up?view=theater https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/2up?...>, by which time the C64 has essentially seized the entire US 8-bit non-Apple market, Broderbund, EA, Sega, Weekly Reader, Davidson, SSI, and MicroProse are also present.