I was gonna say, the same thing that happened to all the western PC platforms that weren't Microsoft or Apple. Commodore and Atari and Acorn and Sinclair and Dr

I was gonna say, the same thing that happened to all the western PC platforms that weren't Microsoft or Apple. Commodore and Atari and Acorn and Sinclair and Dragon and probably dozens of others I've never heard of. As computers became more powerful and development costs rose, small-market architectures and OSes simply became unsustainable. You had to either reach sustained global success or die. I'm sure there were some unique challenges for architectures that mainly served Japan, but I doubt they were that much worse than the ones facing the ones that mainly served, say, Britain. All of them lost the race in the end. The same thing happened again with graphical cellphones! In the flip-phone era there were a zillion different OSes with their own app libraries. For a while it looked like Blackberry was set to be the Microsoft of the upcoming smartphone era, and then Apple stole their thunder, and no one could compete except Android and Windows Phone, and then Windows Phone dropped out too, and now we're back to two basic architectures with no meaningful competitors, just like the home PC market by 1996. > By 1994 though, they had a problem: the 32-bit consoles were out, which could do 2D games just as well as the FM Towns and X68000, and the consoles could also do 3D that blew away anything those computers could handle. This line from the article caught my eye in particular, because it's similar to what happened to Commodore's Amiga, one of the last real Microsoft competitors in the West. Essentially, Doom killed it. There's a rather tragic list of Amiga games that struggled valiantly to be Doom on that platform, and some of them were pretty good but none of them could really match what Id could with a tricked-out DOS machine in 1993, and that was more or less that.