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

[Linards Ticmanis <ticmanis@gmx.de>]

On 03/12/2012 10:32 PM, Sean Fahey wrote:

> The IBM PC clone market exploded in popularity and ate their lunch. The C64 gaming market held on for a little while, just out of sheer mass but the PC became the defacto gaming platform for home computers late in the 80's and through the 90's.

Over here in Europe, PC gaming didn't really take off until maybe
1992-93. The big thing in the late 80s and early 90s (not counting
consoles) was the Commodore Amiga, especially the Amiga 500 which was
hugely popular; with the Atari ST well behind, but still in front of
PCs. PC clones in the 1987-89 time frame were still squarely targeted at
the business and home office market and were often still XT clones with
CGA and/or Hercules graphics - a half-decent EGA-equipped AT class PC
was obscenely expensive compared to an Amiga or an Atari ST, and VGA was
almost unheard of because it was so expensive. Even a good XT class PC
could still cost 2000 marks in Germany at that time without monitor, a
month's salary even for most professionals, while an Amiga 500 (arguably
better suited as a gaming platform) could be bought at below 1000 marks.
Commodore Germany was quit healthy and was the main sponsor of Germany's
most expensive soccer team Bayern Munich, not that long before the
parent company collapsed and took the subsidiary down along with them.
Only after that, and the arrival of Windows 3.1 which was usable enough
to justify a PC purchase for the not so technically inclined, did PC
gaming really take off.

And of course the Apple II came way too early and was far too expensive
for most people, at - i believe - around 6000 marks or so in 1980,
considerably more than what many people payed for their cars; and it was
probably hobbled by the mediocre PAL support. It was really an early
adopters' expensive novelty, and its market share was tiny after 1980;
the IIgs wasn't even mentioned in most German computer magazines when it
came out. I think the VIC-20 was the first real computer to sell
reasonable numbers over here, and of course the C64 was then the next
big thing. Unlike the Japanese, British and the French and even East
Germany to some extent, West Germany for some reason never really came
up with any domestic home computer models, and anything made in USA was
just too expensive for the average German, under the currency exchange
rates of the time. Commodore assembled most stuff intended for sale in
Germany at their local factory rather than shipping it over from
America, which helped them lower prices to a point where the stuff was
actually affordable.

-- 
Linards Ticmanis