Think they're over-reacting? Look at Warcraft. That was originally going to be a Warhammer game. Their legal team fell asleep on the job, didn't sign a properly binding agreement and Blizzard decided that they'd just remove the GW branding, give the game a slightly different name and keep all the royalties. To rub salt into the wound, they then released Starcraft which again was more than slightly familiar to GW fans.

They didn't seem to think that kind of things were an issue when they ripped off Aliens to make Space Hulk.

Well here, computer-minded teens started to request PCs before Doom. Before the influx of high-end VGA games, we regularly went to an Amiga/Atari-owner's house to play games. From then, more often than not, we tended to meet at my place to play the PC (Wolf3D level/graphics editing was a big favourite).

1991/1992 depending on the respective families finances. 1992 was a big year actually, thanks to the cheaper though short-lived Cyrix DLC processor, as well as 'Alone in the dark' which motivated most of us to get a sound blaster.

Of course, for the one whose family really couldn't afford it, it was 1995.

VGA obviously, comparing the Amiga graphics to CGA would be downright insulting.

No. I dreamed of an Amiga at the time, as my Apple 2 was starting to be horribly outdated.

Have a look at the games i mentioned and you'll see that they're from 1991/1992. I maintain that this is when the high-end PC games overtook the Atari/Amiga for quality, and that it predated Doom (1993) by a couple years. This is the time when the PC turned into a powerful (though also expensive and arcane) gaming platform. It certainly wasn't the case before.

I definitely can sympathize with that. Playing games during the MS-DOS years required one to get familiar with the arcane science of getting enough conventional memory/UMS/XMS and loading a mouse/sound driver at the same time... AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS hacking was an unfortunate but necessary hobby. Still, despite the failings of the OS, the end product - the game - was worth it to us.

Well, if the PC and Amiga versions of Civilization look the same to you, i guess at the time you found that Atari ST graphics looked as good as Amiga's. Our group didn't. Plus, lack of loading time thanks to that little thing called hard drive was quite marvelous for us at the time, but yeah, i'll grant you that it was available. Inferior but available.

As for WC, note that i mentioned Wing Commander 2. Sure, seen today, it's just a glorified arcade sim/shooter with cheesy storyline and videos, but back in time, it was mind-blowing. My mistake if it was available on Amiga/Atari and looked just as good. Finally, i wasn't shooting for a complete list, just taking a few examples. If you want to nitpick, go ahead and tell me you were playing Ultima 7 or Ultima Underworld on your Amiga in 1992 too.

I'm sure it's unfathomable for some people, but there's a reason why the amiga owners in our group all wanted (and ended up owning) a PC.

A few years before that, my Amiga/Atari buddies were already salivating when i could play Wing Commander II, Falcon 3.0 or Civilization.

I'll grant you that Doom put the final nail in the coffin, but the PC had already taken the edge for high-end quality games when it came out.

Those data points are a drop in the ocean considering the size of the galaxy we're taking them from. Factor in the size of the universe with a few hundreds of billion galaxies, and add to that the age of the universe vs the time-window in which the data points have been collected.

Our data points are as good as we can get right now and provide us with interesting insights, particularly on planetary systems formation, but they're utterly insignificant in the context of ET life, intelligent or not.