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The Apple II, Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80 all reached buyers in 1977, each sold as a working product rather than a kit. Games spread through user groups, magazines and cassette tapes almost immediately.
A second platform for games came into being alongside consoles, with entirely different economics: no licensing, no manufacturing approval, and a machine the buyer could program. That openness produced genres consoles could not support for years, including simulation, strategy and adventure, and it created the independent developer as a category.
Commodore paired custom graphics and sound chips with aggressive pricing and sold its computer through department stores and toy shops, building one of the largest single markets for inexpensive games.
Volume changed the economics of making games. With a very large installed base of identical machines at a low price, a small team could sell enough copies to live on, and publishers could afford to take chances on unusual designs. It also proved computers could be sold as ordinary consumer goods.
The Commodore Amiga and Atari ST both reached buyers in 1985 with 16-bit processors, dedicated graphics and sound hardware and windowed operating systems, and they became Europe's leading game machines for the rest of the decade.
These machines put capabilities previously found in expensive workstations into ordinary homes: sampled audio, animation, video overlay and multitasking. For games they raised expectations of what a computer should look and sound like, and they trained a European generation of programmers, artists and musicians.
