Re: Why doesn't the Apple II have a gaming community like C64, Atari, DOS, etc

["N.N. Thayer" <nnthayer@hotmail.com>]

I think it's because the Apple II only had a very brief time to shine
as a gaming platform.  You can see it in the earliest issues of
Computer Gaming World; from about '79 to '82 it was, by virtue of its
graphics and accessibility for programming, THE computer to write
games for (Chris Crawford actually said as much).  All of its
contemporaries either didn't exist yet, didn't have as much of a
development community, or were too deficient in graphics to bother
with serious gaming.

It was only a brief de facto standard, and a rather exclusive one at
that - around the turn of the 80's, hardly anyone had a microcomputer,
and only a subset of that small group was gaming.  It wasn't until the
low-priced C64 came out and flooded homes in the millions that
computer gaming became something truly accessible to the masses, so
it's not at all surprising that the C64's gaming community is the most
vibrant today, and of course the Atari name is synonymous with gaming
in its own right.

By the mid-80's, as far as gaming was concerned, the Apple II was just
a "me-too" platform, and one that was still considerably more
expensive than the C64 or Atari.  It wasn't what you were usually
going to find in homes.  People tend to remember it more for the MECC
titles they played at school than anything else.