Apple II

Introduced in 1977, the Apple II was one of the first personal computers designed for ordinary people rather than hobbyists soldering their own boards. Steve Wozniak's elegant engineering gave it color graphics, an open expansion architecture, and, crucially, the Disk II floppy drive in 1978, which made loading and saving software fast and practical. That combination made the Apple II the platform on which American home computing, and American computer gaming, grew up.

Because it reached homes, schools, and small businesses across the United States, it built an enormous and durable installed base that developers could rely on for over a decade. Its influence on game design is hard to overstate. Richard Garriott's Ultima series and the Wizardry games essentially defined the computer role-playing genre on Apple II hardware. Sierra On-Line, founded by Ken and Roberta Williams, launched the graphic adventure with Mystery House and later King's Quest. The educational classic The Oregon Trail reached generations of schoolchildren on Apple machines, and Broderbund shipped hits like Choplifter and Lode Runner, the latter becoming one of the platform's signature titles.

The hardware had quirks that shaped its aesthetic, including a strange color system that produced fringing artifacts programmers learned to exploit, and only rudimentary sound from a single speaker. Yet its openness meant a thriving ecosystem of expansion cards and a hacker culture that treated the machine as endlessly extensible.

Commercially the Apple II line, spanning the II, II Plus, IIe, IIc, and the 16-bit IIGS, sold in the millions and kept Apple solvent long enough to gamble on the Macintosh. Its entrenchment in American education gave it a second life well past its technical prime; Apple did not finally discontinue the line until 1993.

The Apple II's legacy is foundational. It proved that software, not just hardware, was the reason to own a computer, and the studios it incubated, Sierra, Origin, Broderbund, and others, went on to shape the entire trajectory of Western game development.