I remember having similar trouble imagining why a PC would need a sound card.

After all, the PC speaker could already play every note: C, D, E and so on... What could a sound card possibly add?

Then I got a copy of Sierra's demo cassette that had sounds from games like King's Quest IV and Space Quest 3. It blew my mind. I listened to it a hundred times. (The whole cassette is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLC91456D0EB82E02A )

Of course the Amiga had 4-channel sample playback several years before my Sierra cassette revelation, but I didn't know anyone with an Amiga at that time.

I had a similar experience calling into Sierra's 800 number and listening to their hold music, which was music from their games played on a Roland MT-32. I had an 8 bit Sound Blaster at the time, which sounded pretty good, but this just absolutely blew my mind.

Today it's kind of impossible to explain to a young person that at one time, there were sound cards, and they were analogous to video cards today in that the music in a game would sound much better depending on how much you spent. In a world with MP3s, MIDI just doesn't compute.

Yeah, it's interesting how we pretty much hit the ceiling on digital audio quality more than a decade ago. If I'd built my computers instead of buying premade, I could still be using the audio card I bought in 2000 and not have any problems with it. That's so alien to the general hardware experience.

Similarly I used to think that resolutions above 320 x 256 are just unnecessarily hi-fi. After that it becomes very difficult to see individual pixels, so how can you really appreciate the artwork of the game anymore?

There's a cool video on YouTube of the Monkey Island theme playing on different systems with varying sound cards, from the farty PC speaker, across a decade's worth of sound cards playing the MIDI differently, all the way up to the modern WAV audio mix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a324ykKV-7Y

Its crazy how much tech leapfrogged back then. In 84/85 you still have the Apple II's in play, C64/128 were still being used, the PC jr just came out, and then the Mac and later the Amiga launched (at 1/3rd the price of the Mac, no less!)

Then DOS/Windows/Intel ate everyone's lunch, yet when did Windows have parity with Amiga and Mac? 3.0 nearly 5 years later? I guess this shows first to market isn't everything. Being able to tap into all that DOS business software turned out to be a big deal, even if the Wintel product was technically behind. The Windows 3.0 product with a 386 was just hard to beat and Amiga couldn't keep up. Especially since Commodore had to wait on Motorola chips that Apple didn't want before it could even order them.

Regardless, 82-90 was an insanely innovating period, the march from the C64 to Windows 3.0 was a fun ride. It must have been very exciting, and somewhat scary, to be in the industry then.

The annoying thing about Defender of the Crown, is that as beautiful as the Amiga version was, the game was actually better balanced on the C64.