I had an old 8088 that had a 10 MB hard drive, and as far as I'm concerned, once 286's were common, hard drives were pretty standard. True, not
everyone had them, but certainly by the late 80's, it was far more likely to see a PC with a hard drive than an Amiga or ST. Most games took advantage of this too. Adding a hard drive to a PC later was also generally easier and cheaper. I have an Atari SH-204 hard drive... the giant case has an MFM hard drive hooked to an MFM-to-SCSI adapter, which is in turn hooked to a SCSI-to-ACSI adapter so it can talk to the ST... was it even possible for Atari to fuck this up any harder?
According to Wikipedia, the original Sound Blaster was released in late 1987, and
this page claims that VGA was introduced in 1987 as well. The Atari ST and Amiga 1000 were released in 1985, though I'd say the Amiga scene really kicked off with the release of the Amiga 500 in 1987. Obviously, it would take years before VGA graphics and Sound Blaster effects were widely used, so the Amiga and ST definitely had a few years where they greatly outperformed the PC's.
So, your point is taken... but still, we're talking about around 3-4 years worth of games that are better (graphically and aurally) on the 68k machines... a relatively short time in my opinion.
The point was that putting together a high-quality, MS-DOS based PC is easy and cheap, while putting together a high-quality Amiga or Atari ST system is much harder and more expensive. I'd say anything that can run Duke Nukem 3D well counts as a high-quality, MS-DOS based PC... it wasn't meant as a direct comparison to any Amiga or ST game.
I got mine for $12 from a local thrift store... but it's not in the best shape, and the hard drive was dead (80MB is nothing anyways, so would have had to replace it anyways). I still haven't really gotten my 1200 set up nicely, as it just doesn't have enough base RAM for my likings. I've been wanting to get myself a nice accelerator card (maybe an '030) in order to solve the RAM problems, but the prices are just a touch higher than I'd like at the moment (I suppose I could get a cheap, RAM-only expansion, but if I'm going to fill that trapdoor slot, I might as well go all the way rather than buying a stop-gap solution that will be useless when I eventually get a real accelerator). In the mean time, I have a nice Amiga 3000 setup that serves me well, with 14MB of RAM, network card, '030, etc. Only thing it lacks is AGA graphics, and it's of course much larger than the 1200.
Honestly, 95% of PC platformers were terrible as well. Commander Keen was the first one worth playing, and Apogee was pretty much the only company that managed to do the job well (Dangerous Dave, Bio-Menace, and the original Duke Nukem are all excellent).
--Zero