Atari ST

What it was
A 16-bit home computer system, released in 1985, with amazing sound and graphical capabilities.

Why it lost
The Atari ST was ultimately kicked into touch by IBM PCs and Apple Macs -- even the Amiga managed to get the boot in before disappearing itself.

Why it should have won
The Atari was a first-class computer on a number of levels. Firstly it was the musicians' choice. These days you're quite likely to see James Blunt with an Apple Mac perched on his smug little knee, but if he'd been crooning back in the day, he'd almost certainly have used an ST to create his ballads. Not a week went by in the late 80s where you didn't see a pop act perform on TV with an Atari knocking about in the background.

The Atari ST enjoys support from key musicians, even now. Fatboy Slim (or as he's known to his wife, Norman Cook) used an Atari ST to produce music. He did so until his 2004 album Palookaville, when he switched to Pro Tools. Russel Hobbes from the wholly cartoon rock band Gorillaz is also a fan of the ST's musical moves -- he even has an Atari ST emulator on the band's Web site.

The ST was also the first choice of the CAD engineer. Its high-resolution graphics made it ideal for design work and desktop publishing. Indeed, users had handy visual options -- they could either run their computers at 640x400-pixel resolution on a special monochrome monitor, with 640x200 pixels and up to four colours on-screen, or 320x200 pixels with 16 colours.

Notably, the Atari ST was also the first computer that offered 1MB of RAM for less than $1,000. It also fended off Microsoft, which was keen to offer Windows as the operating system of the Atari. Surely it deserved to survive for that gutsy act alone.

Our fantasy outcome
The key to getting the Atari into the mainstream would have been more games, so Captain Tech would have to use all his gaming experience to create fantastic titles to propel the Atari into the home-gaming mainstream.