The 99'ers have debated the crash for years, of course, since TI was in the thick of it, being the target of Jack Tramiel's pricing wars. Texas Instruments never really did things right. They hamstrung their designed system by using a 16-bit processor that wasn't selling and put it in an 8-bit framework. They actively discouraged 3rd party developers and did little to turn out their own titles beyond arcade clones. (Notable exception being Tunnels of Doom.) They located their hub of software development in Lubbock, Texas, far away from the tech center cities which made getting people difficult, since they were unwilling to relocate. The most success they had, really, was when they brought in a marketing guy (I don't recall his name) who started selling the units at a loss, but making up for it by developing the community. And if the TI-99/8 had ever seen release, who knows?
Interestingly, Chris Crawford saw the crash era (1983-1986) as a far more innovative period of game design and development. The reason was that the investors saw that Atari with their cranked out "shoot-em-up" console games had ultimately failed, and they were disinterested in investing in them again. So a lot of more innovative game development started happening on the PC's of the time, and there was more focus on other areas besides manual dexterity. When you think about it, a lot of the best CRPG's came out of that era, and continued into the early 90's, as Nintendo dominated the market on shoot-em-up and arcade style games.
The 99'ers have debated the crash for years, of course, since TI was in the thick of it, being the target of Jack Tramiel's pricing wars. Texas Instruments never really did things right. They hamstrung their designed system by using a 16-bit processor that wasn't selling and put it in an 8-bit framework. They actively discouraged 3rd party developers and did little to turn out their own titles beyond arcade clones. (Notable exception being Tunnels of Doom.) They located their hub of software development in Lubbock, Texas, far away from the tech center cities which made getting people difficult, since they were unwilling to relocate. The most success they had, really, was when they brought in a marketing guy (I don't recall his name) who started selling the units at a loss, but making up for it by developing the community. And if the TI-99/8 had ever seen release, who knows?
Interestingly, Chris Crawford saw the crash era (1983-1986) as a far more innovative period of game design and development. The reason was that the investors saw that Atari with their cranked out "shoot-em-up" console games had ultimately failed, and they were disinterested in investing in them again. So a lot of more innovative game development started happening on the PC's of the time, and there was more focus on other areas besides manual dexterity. When you think about it, a lot of the best CRPG's came out of that era, and continued into the early 90's, as Nintendo dominated the market on shoot-em-up and arcade style games.