1988

Trade war between Japan and the U.S.

The trade war between Japan and the U.S. had also effects on the computer industry. The U.S.A. wanted to have a greater market share in the microchip market. Japanese companies decreased the production and RAM chips were getting more expensive. Jack Tramiel announced not to increase the price of the ST, Commodore was not affected because they made contracts with their chip manufacturers to get RAM for guaranteed prices.

Tetris

(January) One of the all-time puzzle classics celebrated its debut on almost every homecomputer and pc: Tetris. The game with the falling bricks was developed earlier for Russian personal computers and was spreaded rapidly. It would have been of no use to release the game commercially in eastern Europe since everything was pirated anyway. Tetris was published in the west by Spectrum Holobyte which were more known for their flight simulators (F16-Falcon).

Since then, Tetris has been ported offically on unoffically on almost every computer and video game systems. Even vintage gaming systems like the Atari VCS received Tetris derivations.

Blitter for all Atari computers

The Blitter was finally available for all Atari computers. A third-party producer published a Blitter card.

RiscOS

RiscOS was the successor of the Arthur operating system for Acorns Risc PC computers. Arthur was much criticized during its short lifespan (one year).

Atari sued Nintendo

Atari sued Nintendo. Nintendo held controlled at that time the majority of the videogame market. Strict contracts with software companies were the reason that many games were only available for Nintendo systems.