playable PC". He felt the PC-98 was an "ordinary" 16-bit personal computer, but it had plenty of games because it did not deny the playability. He theorized that Fujitsu did not consider the 16-bit personal computer as a game platform, and considered IBM JX handling games to be of minor importance, which made personal computers less attractive. He concluded that the actual value of personal computers must be found by not sellers but consumers. Legacy A writer of the ASCII magazine wrote that the Japanese input method and the Japanese video game industry were significantly developed in the PC-98 era. Because the PC-98 had a kanji character ROM, Japanese applications were developed for it, which influenced Japanese input methods being developed for them; the two built off of each other. Software companies that developed games for the PC-98 immediately expanded the video game business on the Famicom platform. He believed most programmers learned computer programming on the PC-98 at that time. Criticism In the late 1980s, competitors accused NEC of monopolizing the Japanese computer market. Takayoshi Shina, a founder of Sord, said, "The Japanese PC market is suffocating because of one company's dominance. There is no freedom. This is why its prices are 3-4 times as expensive as America's. To fulfil the same international price as America's, we really need the era of clone computers." A software company also complained that "although there are few excellent engineers in Japan, the more incompatible machines appear, the more development resources are divided." Contrary to the IBM PC and the Apple II, every Japanese personal computer had a short lifespan; NEC released a new model of the PC-98 every year. When the PC-9801VX01/21/41 models brought a new BASIC interpreter which supported the Enhanced Graphic Charger (EGC) chipset, most commercial software did not use it as they were written in C. Many developers did not follow it because they wanted to make their software less dependent on the specific platform. A software developer said, "Using the special one (EGC) goes against the trend. I don't want to use it if new machines come out so frequently." See also PC game PC-8800 series PC-6600 series X68000 TurboGrafx-16 Commodore 64 FM-7 FM Towns MSX IBM PC compatible References Further reading Joel West and Jason Dedrick, "Innovation and Control in Standards Architectures: The Rise and Fall of Japan's PC-98", Information Systems Research, Vol. 11, No. 2, June