The History of the Apple II as a Gaming Platform

Matt Barton writes "Gamasutra is running a feature on the venerable Apple II platform, which practically defined the early home computer industry and was home to many of the greatest games and developers of all time. The authors discuss the platform's lifespan and many iterations, struggles with illegal distribution, and legendary Apple II games such as Prince of Persia, John Madden Football, and Ultima. 'How big of a problem was piracy? Although several software authors claim that they stopped developing games because of rampant piracy and the subsequent loss of revenue, piracy did expose more computer owners to more games than they otherwise would have been -- this was at a time before ubiquitous demos made it easier to "try before you buy." Another benefit of this piracy is that much of the software archived today at online repositories are the cracked versions.'"

Comments

Re:The good old days

[Captain Splendid]

in many ways they've gotten to be somewhat pedestrian compared to the excitement of playing Dig Dug or Conan on the green monitors.

It occurs to me the reason we don't excited about games the way we did when we first played Pong, or messed around with early Apples and C64s is because back then, this was all cutting-edge stuff and very non-mainstream. We were doing cool shit that almost nobody else knew about. In the days before the NES and Sega Master system, I could count people I knew who played videogames on one hand.

Nowadays, everybody and his cousin owns at least a couple piece of hardware able to play games, even if it's just a low-spec PC and a cellphone, and most games tend to basically be point releases, incremental upgrades designed to suck up your spare cash, not try anything new.