"The best companies and the best programmers were making computer games. But the Nintendo player didn’t care about the sophisticated leaps we were making on computers — the frame rate of the images or incredible sound. They just wanted fun. It was like we were making gas guzzlers and the Japanese were making subcompacts."
- An unnamed Electronic Arts game designer
The Digital Antiquarian blog has published a fascinating new history of how Nintendo took on personal computers in the U.S. -- and won -- in the 1980s, with its Nintendo Entertainment System console.
The post takes in how the NES ushered out the age of the Commodore 64 in the U.S. -- with incendiary quotes from the popular 8-bit computer's fans, naturally -- and how companies like Activision and Elctronic Arts responded to Nintendo's massive and unexpected success.
It's a great read that views the very familiar and well-documented history of the NES from a new vantage -- that of how it affected the computer industry, which seemed likely to be the lone survivor of the U.S. video game crash of 1983.
You can read it at The Digital Antiquarian.