An interesting question from Europeans: why, when it comes to the 8-bit era, are North Americans entirely focused on the NES?

I think this largely depends on who you talk to.

Anyone who is 40-years-old or older keenly remembers the C64. We remember Ultima, The Bard’s Tale, California Games—all which were popular. Millions of C64s were sold here. It was the best-selling computer of the 80s.

But concurrent to the C64 was the Apple II. And games that were big there were Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, and Prince of Persia. The Wolfenstein franchise also started on the Apple II, and that ended up being a huge deal for the next era of computer games.

However, what eclipses all this is that the IBM PC architecture moved the industry toward 16-bit. And as we all know, by the late 80s, that ended up becoming the standard. So while the NES was at its peak, PC gaming moved onto games like King’s Quest, Maniac Mansion, SimCity, and Wing Commander—which was simply a different breed of game compared to what was on the NES.

Plus, Nintendo successfully marketed itself as the Disney of video games. Meanwhile, if you were into PC gaming, you were seen as a nerd at best. At worst, PC gaming became a lightning rod for congressional hearings and satanic panic.

What changed the mono-focus on Nintendo? SEGA realized that there’s nothing kids hate more than being compared to a baby. So they marketed the Genesis as the edgy platform with attitude, the place where “mature” games go. And this became all the more apparent when Mortal Kombat arrived on both systems.

PC gaming only arrived in the zeitgeist when the cultural gatekeepers could no longer ignore it. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t huge. Shareware was often traded on the school playground, and that ended up being the most well-distributed software on the planet.

When he worked at Microsoft, Gabe Newell discovered that Doom had better distribution than Windows. Which is why he worked on porting Doom to Windows 95. And this eventually became the impetus for Xbox.