By Kieron Gillen on April 24th, 2008 at 6:59 pm.
[Doing some invoicing, I find a reference to the following. It was commissioned as part of a larger retro feature for PC Gamer which never quite came together, but stands alone well enough to lob it up here with a few tweaks. Because there's more to "PC" than IBM's descendants...]
I didn’t have a PC when I was a teenager, in the early nineties. If you’re reading this today, and are a Brit, in all probability you didn’t either. You wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Any PC whatsoever was over a grand, without even considering fifteen year’s inflation.
You’d have owned an Amiga. You’d have loved it.
The Amiga was the last in a line. The PC, as it is today, is very much an American import. While it similarly originated in the old-colonies, the Amiga was actually in a distinctly British lineage – that of the true home computer (best personified by the Spectrum). It wasn’t a console. It wasn’t really like the PC. It rested somewhere between, taking from both of the worlds. With the Amiga (or Spectrum) you could try anything – not always as well as the more specialist formats, but a good enough approximation. That lead to an audience willing to take from both lineages, so leading to the joy of rampant hybridisation. In modern terms, if the Amiga would be any one game it would be Deus Ex. Point being, trying at both leads to a space neglected by the extremes.
Why was the Amiga different? Let’s take Amiga Power, the greatest videogames magazine ever crafted. No arguments accepted. If you disagree you either i) haven’t read it, ii) are the enemy. Scan across an archive of its covers and you’ll see many things you wouldn’t be surprised to see on a cover of PC Gamer – like, say, Syndicate, Frontier, flight sim Dawn Patrol, all manner of first-person shooters, adventures and so on. You’ll also see a selection of games you’d expect to see slapped on the front of a console mag – Mortal Kombat, Cool Spot, James Pond: Robocod. And then there’s a handful of games you’d have never even heard of. Take Zeewolf, a Virus-meets-Desert-Strike game of perfect physics. Until its recent PS3-remake, you could take the (brilliant) Super Stardust, an update of old-arcade classic Asteroids with the most beautiful pre-rendered rocks the world had ever seen. Hell, take at least two covers for pinball games.
Pinball games! On the cover of a games magazine!
Brilliant pinball games.
All were equal in our eyes. We bought them, snapped them open, sucked out all the marrow and were enlivened by the experiences. When I look back at the Amiga, what most impresses me is how omnivorous we were, understanding that games were games. The Amiga had an audience who implicitly understood that games were boundless, and that our shelves had hard-core wargames sitting side-by-side with the finest kid’s platformers and no-one blinked. You have to understand the difference. While if you have a PC, you can play literally everything that’s ever been made – but most don’t. This fuck-it-let’s-game attitude was absolutely mainstream Amiga gaming in the UK. Amiga Power wasn’t a tiny niche, but the best-selling Amiga games magazine for the majority of its existence. Its attitudes were the predominant ones, and we reveled in it. And the games reveled in it. It’s interesting to see how many future trends first germinated on the Amiga – take, for example, the Bitmap Brothers adding a harder-edge art-design sense to the classic arcade game in everything from Xenon II onwards. Just as noteworthy are all the routes unexplored. While not quite as insane as the auteur days of the Spectrum, the sheer warped thrust of the mainly British designers found fertile soil here.
In some ways you wonder if the British games industry is still trying to get over the Amiga. Many of its best developers have floundered in the years since, their quirkiness either driving them bust, alienating them from an increasing rulesbound mainstream, or ending with them being consumed by a larger publisher. Poor old DMA eaten alive and turned into the beating, anonymous fiscal heart of Rockstar, pumping the bloody GTA corpuscles about the corporate body. Lionhead’s (i.e. Bullfrog Mrk 2) sense of playfulness increasingly estranging it from the world…
It’s easy to be a little downbeat about all the things we’ve lost, but it’s important to cherish what we have now: if you’d showed Oblivion to my younger self, playing Legends of Valour with its postage-stamp-sized view window, my pulse would have rocketed to the point where my heart’d have flown out my nostrils. So while I wish there was a bit more of the anything-goes ethos around today – and I’ll fully admit that part of my motivation in writing RPS is to encourage that sentiment – I don’t get too nostalgic. It’s about what I took from there. My love for games was born in the arcades and on the Spectrum, but in terms of where I spent my adolescence – metaphorically and literally – the Amiga was it. The Amiga was where I grew up and made me the gamer I am today. The attitude I take with me every time I sit down to play is the one resulting from being sealed in a Stafford bedroom with my favourite peripheral (a younger brother, essential for 2-player games), Wizkid, Populous, Putty, Monkey Island and countless others, and being left to ferment for five years. The Amiga distilled me. I’m proof.
I didn’t have a PC when I was a kid. I had an Amiga. I loved it.
24/04/2008 at 19:03 Beefeater says:
Oh my…I remember spending hours on that pinball game. The ‘graveyard’ pic brings it all back…sniff.Were there 4 different boards? Can’t remember that much detail.
Also: lemmings. Say no more. Except, maybe Speedball II and “Ice-cream! Ice-cream!”.
24/04/2008 at 19:09 Henrik J says:
I miss the Amiga :(
24/04/2008 at 19:10 born2expire says:
it came from the desert and defender of the crown were so good, in fact, most cinemaware titles where great.
24/04/2008 at 19:15 Del Boy says:
Right, Shadow Of The Beast was great and I’ll fight any man who says it wasn’t.*
*Not that anyone has…..but you all will now.
24/04/2008 at 19:19 Taxman says:
Ah the memories of the Amiga, I loved Pinball Dreams god those games were good, DICE of Battlefield fame was responsible for those (there is an Xbox Live pinball game that reminds me of pinball dreams but I don’t think it was made by them).
All the other classics too like Cannon Fodder, Mega Lo Maniac, Flood (I cheated to see the ending & what an awful ending to the game Bullfrog gave it).
Those were the days such a pity the Amiga platform ran itself into the ground it was way ahead of it’s time. Ars Technica have been running some Amiga history articles for those with an interest, well worth a read.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/amiga-history-part-6.ars
24/04/2008 at 19:20 Nick says:
I always wanted an Amiga. I had an Amstrad CPC x86. Green screen.
You could plug it into the TV for colour though – how advanced was that! Eh?
Head Over Heels was a classic on any system, I happened to have it for the Amstrad.
24/04/2008 at 19:24 fluffy bunny says:
“So while I wish there was a bit more of the anything-goes ethos around today”
This is why I love Russian/Eastern European games. I mean, take 1C. If you look at their release list, they’ve got RPGs, arcade racers, turn-based strategy games, first person shooters, truck driving simulations, space games, flight sims, horror games,…
24/04/2008 at 19:24 Schadenfreude says:
I still have my Amiga 1200 and an absolute box load of naughtily copied games. Alas, the left-button on the mouse is broken. :(
I think I’m gonna dig it out and try and play through Darkmere; that game just oozed atmosphere.
24/04/2008 at 19:28 rand526 says:
stunt car racer, carrier command, hunter, frontier, new zealand story, turrican, deluxe paint 2, beneath a steel sky, tracker software, anything with a red sector intro…. amazing amazing amazing amazing.
my youth was defined by saturdays xcopying discs from grown men in community centres.
weeps
24/04/2008 at 19:35 Five says:
Best selling apart from that German magazine right? :p
Amiga Power was not only the first games magazine I ever bought, it was responsible for defining my sense of humour… reading that magazine at such an impressionable age, and playing Amiga games with my cousins, cemented my love for gaming that will never die.
These days I don’t have a lot of time to play games. But I understand just how important they are. Every few years I fish out my old issues of Amiga Power, and when I compare it to todays games journalism I usually feel sad that things haven’t become better.
But Amiga Power still lives on, on this site as well as other places. When I first read an article on RPS the writing reminded me of AP before I even realised who the author was, and I knew I was home again.
Oh and about Amiga games: the other day I used an emulator to play K240, which is still a wonderful game, but it took more patience to play than I have left any more.
24/04/2008 at 20:04 thefluffyfist says:
I sold my Atari ST for an Amiga. Best sale I ever made. I remember buying the 512k expansion so I could play Dungeon Master!
Stunt Car Racer, Carrier Command, Paradroid 90 (Graftgold where are you now?), the intro music to R-Type, Turrican 2, all the Bitmap Brothers games, SWOS, Cannon Fodder, Hired Guns (seriously underrated game)…..
Happy, happy memories….
24/04/2008 at 20:06 Mike says:
Zool. Superfrog. Dizzy. Never forget.
24/04/2008 at 20:08 SwiftTheRedFox says:
Anybody else notice something different on the keyboard? It’s kinda weird and I won’t say just to let others be surprised on their own. Any explanation on that?
24/04/2008 at 20:08 Janto says:
Man, we had an Acorn, and I still believe it was a superior OS… exact same case, though.
24/04/2008 at 20:14 PetitPiteux says:
ok, i guess i will be the enemy here (but then again, with me being french, i guess it was to be expected, UE or not):
Atari over Amiga, any day.
(I mean amigas were not even capable of booting without a os floppy around, tss…)
24/04/2008 at 20:27 CrashT says:
Amiga? Bah… Atari ST all the way.
24/04/2008 at 20:35 Nick says:
We should feel lucky, being a gaming kid in the eighties and early nineties in the UK was clearly a golden age.
Thinking back, it really fucking was, wasn’t it?
24/04/2008 at 20:41 Pidesco says:
Gods, Pinball Fantasies, Secret of Monkey Island, SWIV (so, so awesome), Kick Off 2, Sensible Soccer, Mega Lo Mania, Zool were all games I first played on my next door buddy’s Amiga 500.
I had a PC, myself. Where I first played Rick Dangerous 2, Xenon 2 (best graphics of all time. Seriously), Prince of Persia, those Accolade racing games (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-y8dvsLYJM), Leisure Suit Larry, Sim City, and Civilization.
The days when every game was awesome.
24/04/2008 at 20:46 Cargo Cult says:
ATARI ST FOR EVAR!!!1
…
8MHz instead of 7.09MHz, thus was much better at running those fledgling 3D games like flight simulators, Elite, Infestation, Tower of Babel, Midwinter, blah blah blah…
24/04/2008 at 20:48 alphaxion says:
I had a speccy (my mum still plays scrabble on it from time to time, the game cheats! Also, I still have my original paperboy tape kicking around.. it’s sitting next to the most embarassing tape that I still own, a sega power tips tape with cathy dennis songs on it!), one mate had an amiga with another owning an ST.. then my secondary school had acorns. I still remember playing lander on the acorn, damn thing was a pain at times.
I think it’s cause we all would play on each others systems that I just don’t get the rabid fanboyism that exists in todays gaming culture.
I have to admit, of all the things I miss the most, it’s the immense diversity of british produced and released games – with the internet we should be able to create a second golden age of the bedroom programmers and have the games released in the UK first.
The british gaming scene today just reminds me of the bland, identikit high streets we now have.
Let’s get the british sense of humour back in home grown games!
24/04/2008 at 20:56 Max says:
Putty. Wow. Now there was a game. God I loved that, and Lemmings of course.
AND OH DAYUM; ZOOL. That was king.
This article = made of win.
24/04/2008 at 20:59 Ginger Yellow says:
“If you’re reading this today, and are a Brit, in all probability you didn’t either. You wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Any PC whatsoever was over a grand, without even considering fifteen year’s inflation.
You’d have owned an Amiga. ”
Or an Atari ST/STE. Jeff Minter forever!
24/04/2008 at 21:03 InVinoVeritas says:
@ SwiftTheRedFox: That is weird! I want an explanation as well. What’s with the keyboard hijinks, Amiga…
24/04/2008 at 21:03 Kieron Gillen says:
To the germans: Yeah, brit-centric on it. Should have made that clearer.
To the ST owners: I stressed early nineties rather than late eighties – in the former, you could have gone both ways, but if you were buying an ST by the early nineties, you were MAD.
KG
24/04/2008 at 21:11 Pidesco says:
In Portugal, no one had STs. Everybody went from Spectrums 48k/128k to Amigas, except for a few richer blokes who got PCs.
I don’t even know what an Atari ST looks like.
24/04/2008 at 21:14 Janek says:
I assume the krazy keyboard is because it’s a German Amiga. Germans who had Amigas: Confim?
I’m fairly sure my earliest memory is sitting on my dad’s lap “helping” play the original Silent Service. That may have been on the C64, I’m a little fuzzy on precise dates. But certainly we upgraded when I was very young.
24/04/2008 at 21:21 alphaxion says:
swifttheredfox: that’ll be because the image was swiped from pugo.org instead of the other images from google image search ;)
24/04/2008 at 21:26 Dinger says:
Amiga 1000 here, with the 256 MB toaster up front, and a 2 gig (!) Ramdisk sidecar on the bus port on the side.
7.14 MHz sure, your ST would clock at 8. But with the bus running at 14.28, and the off cycles going to the blitter shifting stuff around, sound and video doing its stuff, the only time the ST looked similar was in those crappy ports that ran identically on the Amiga and the ST (yes, I did test them side-by-side. I was paid to).
It took five years after retiring the Amiga (so 12 after I got it) for me to get a PC with similar audio , and nearly a decade for me to get a PC that could print a document without freezing, and even then, the noticeable stutter made me miss the ol’ Amiga. Really, the only truly fine OS ever made was AmigaOS CLI+Workbench. For the time, flawless, unambiguous and unintrusive. As God commands.
It wasn’t a compromise of PC and console. It was better than both, and stayed better than both for a damn long time.
24/04/2008 at 21:30 Butler` says:
I wonder if, at 20, I’m one of the younger Amiga connoisseurs :p
I have very fond memories of flipping through large boxes of discs and picking out my favorite games. The old Workbench logo certainly brings back a few memories, too.
24/04/2008 at 21:41 mrrobsa says:
I had a BBC Acorn when I was three (’88) and moved onto a Commodore 64 a couple of years later. Where do I fit into things? I was too young to form memories! Well, apart from playing an old school platformer called ‘Magic Mushrooms’. I was a slave to that game for a period, I seem to recall.
24/04/2008 at 21:44 Wolfman says:
I still have myA500 which gets wheeled out every christmas so that my brother and I can spend hours playing Sensible Soccer and Speedball 2.
Oh and the Amiga was the home of the best scrolling shooters. Xenon 2 and Project X! Awsome. So many good games!
Skychase. Chaos Engine. Cannon Fodder. Skidmarks. Knights of the Sky. Vrooom. UFO: Enemy Unknown. Pinball Illusions. IK+. Zany Golf. F117A. Gods. Magic Pockets. Armourgeddon. Megalomania. Turrican 2. Robocod. Superfrog. Fury of the Furries. Monkey Island.
Damn it I get all misty eyed thinking about the grand old days.
-wolfman
24/04/2008 at 21:52 alphaxion says:
how many remember the strange trend of releasing snooker/pool simulators?
24/04/2008 at 21:55 muteh says:
none of the atari people I knew got involved in the whole atari/amiga fight. what was the point? we already knew we were better than them…
24/04/2008 at 21:59 Stelios says:
Nice article! My poor A1200 is gathering dust on my desk next to my PC but I do load up every so often WinUAE for some Project X, Stardust or the god of all side-scrolling platform shooter games, Turrican 2! Never loved a game as much since. Bloody hell, I think I am becoming a cranky old bastard.
P.s. I have also left my heart in AmigaOS. Never found another OS that I enjoyed as much; grudgingly using XP nowadays but…
P.p.s. anyone else remember how insane some of those French games were? Loved North & South.
alphaxion: I do; never bothered with them though, heh.
24/04/2008 at 22:01 thefluffyfist says:
@alphaxion – Archer Maclean’s (of IK+ fame) snooker and pool games!
I was utter rubbish at playing them. I remember the balls taunting the player. Very bizarre.
24/04/2008 at 22:01 Arnulf says:
It’s a german keyboard.
Z and Y are swapped. The enter key is totally disfigured, and of course all them umlauts have to be squeezed in.
But, gods! Look at the size of the space bar! No dumb windows keys hemming it in! Heaven!
My parents had an A1000. I swiped it because I was a CS student back then and needed it for, erm, studies.
Yep. Studies.
My first game I bought for it was Marble Madness. I supported EA!
Obliterator had the best intro sequence ever. Back then. Cadaver, now that was a hellish difficult game. But I liked it.
24/04/2008 at 22:03 c-Row says:
Yeah, the Archer MacLean series of snooker simulations for example. I remember one of the games in which the balls made funny faces at you if you didn’t move the cursor for some time.
Now I am not only sad and depressed as I already was before reading your article – now I am nostalgic as well. Thank you very much. :(
24/04/2008 at 22:07 Optimaximal says:
<3 Chris Hülsbeck!
24/04/2008 at 22:10 Cargo Cult says:
Oh, the joys of resurrecting twenty year old flame-wars… ;-)
24/04/2008 at 22:13 Robin says:
I had a PC from the late 80s onward, the first one being quite literally a US import (and an IBM).
PC owners were bent double with envious rage at the Amiga until about 1992.
24/04/2008 at 22:16 fluffy bunny says:
“none of the atari people I knew got involved in the whole atari/amiga fight. what was the point? we already knew we were better than them…”
Maybe you were better than us, I don’t know about that, but at least we had better computers than you… :-p
24/04/2008 at 22:40 Slang says:
If you miss the good ol Amiga shooters like Turrican then I’d HIGHLY recommend this brilliant spiritual sequel/remake:
http://www.hurrican-game.de/
At first sight it looks like a PC indie game…but believe me, at its heart it’s a hardcore Amigastyle shooter.
24/04/2008 at 22:41 Pod says:
AMI-GA! AMI-GA! AMI-GA! AMI-GA! AMI-GA! AMI-GA! AMI-GA!
If anyone fancies a peek at all the mags from back in the day, check this page:
http://amr.abime.net/
I posted a link to it on an RPS thread the other day, and it’s even more relevant in this one!
As a side note: Caveat: Gillen likes Amiga Power so much because he wrote for the damn thing! (Not that I’m disagreeing with it’s mantle of best-mag-ever, but still…)
24/04/2008 at 22:49 Radiant says:
*ahem Zzap 64*
Atari ST people on full alert!
ST vs Amiga, C64 vs CPC464, Xbox vs PS, Dogs vs Cats.
I still remember the pain of ‘the Amiga divide’ you either had the extra memory and an Amiga 512 or you didn’t and couldn’t play Skid Marks.
But to this day I will take down anyone trying to play me at Kick Off 2 or Sensi.
24/04/2008 at 22:50 Radiant says:
btw you know the Maniacs of Sounds are still around?
http://www.xs4all.nl/~mon/
24/04/2008 at 22:56 theleif says:
Even though you have mentioned a lot of great games, you have forgotten the greatest. But I’m a nice guy and will try to find a place in my heart to forgive you. It might take time, but if time heal wounds, even this grievous stab at my heart will eventually mend. And i will correct your error and state the One True Game:
Gravity Force
Please treat the following text as the small print in a mobile carrier contract and hence ignore it.
If you played duel or race against a friend, that is. As a single player game it’s only OK.
24/04/2008 at 23:05 Kieron Gillen says:
Pod: In AP’s Beatles, I was only ever the guy who turned up circa Abbey Road to play the Tambourine.
TheLeif: Hell, yeah. Frankly, if we started talking Amiga Games, I’d have been here all day.
KG
24/04/2008 at 23:10 groovychainsaw says:
Heh -i win, i liked the amiga so much i bought a cd32. Still got it as well, 2 pads and about 50 games ;-)
24/04/2008 at 23:26 James G says:
YES! Oh, I’m sorry, I seem to have come over all tingly.
Seriously though, I did actually love my Amiga. I mean, I really enjoy the gaming I achive on the PC, and I might occasionally pat my rig with the detatched fondness of a father who has just seen his child achive a dream, yet has never quite allowed himself to form any deep emotional attatchment to. But the Amiga, I actually had an affection for the hardware itself, the same way in which some people form an attatchment to their cars (Not to their children. I may have been very fond of the Amiga, but I am still grounded in reality.)
I had an A600, the often forgotten halfway house between the A500+ and the A1200. I got it on my eight birthday, and was absolutely estatic, so much so that I couldn’t actually use it for about fifteen minutes as I was running about the house laughing. It came with Lemmings, and Deulux Paint 3, I also got Magicland Dizzy at the same time. I remember sitting gobsmacked by the graphics in ‘The Chapel’ where fancy colour gradients were a nice step up from the Spectrum.
I was primarily an Amiga Power reader, although not a loyal one. I had a huge collection of magazines and coverdisks, many of them picked up at carboot sales, along with the inevitable collection of floppy disks on which the hand-written lables betrayed their slightly less than legal origins.
I also remember being heavily in to the Shareware anf Freeware scenes, primarily due to a company called ‘Pathfinder PD’ which would offer an exciting treasure-trove at less than a pound per disk. With only short descriptions it was often a stab in the dark, but I found some true gems, many of them bearing the name ‘Jeff Minter’.
But Kieron is right, the Amiga embodied the attitude towards games that I love. A gamer who can have a quick game of Peggle, followed up by a bout of Crysis; can play an evening of Dwarf Fortress before a retreat to Psychonauts. I’m not saying all genres should appeal to all people, but rather that we shouldn’t feel the need to draw up barriers, and should revel in the contrasts, rather than avoid them.
To Echo Kieron: I didn’t have a PC when I was a kid. I had an Amiga. I loved it.
(And now I shall actually read all the comments as I got a bit over excited.)
24/04/2008 at 23:42 Tom Armitage says:
Bah; I had just my Dad’s 10mhz 286, and later a 386, until we hit 1995 and we got (gasp) a P100. Until that point, it was DOS all the way, always behind the times.
Back then, I was the lone bastion of PC gaming – championing X-Wing and 1942:Pacific Air War and stuff (whilst lusting after a machine fast enough to run Ultima Underworld) – to my friends.
I had PC, and all I could think about at times was wanting an Amiga.
How times change.
24/04/2008 at 23:42 theleif says:
I remember the day i got my Amiga 500. Stayed up until 6 in the morning, playing Carrier Command (probably my first all-nighter), and faked sick to skip school the day after.
24/04/2008 at 23:43 Okami says:
I had a C64 and then an Amiga. I could write about that time, but I won’t. I’m slightly drunk right now and I would get all emotional if I’d startet remembering those days.
So I’ll just join in the chant: I didn’t have a PC when I was a kid. I had an Amiga. I loved it.
24/04/2008 at 23:45 Jon says:
My older brother had an Amiga, man I loved that. I remember Zool, and the tears that were shed when you couldn’t find the code ring. I remember that “Peasoup” is a cheat for the racing game he had which made the level foggy. And I remember the legend that was I.K.T. I loved that game, in fact I still do.
25/04/2008 at 00:02 Kast says:
I learned my alphabet on an Amiga, not to mention became hooked on games using one. Soccer Boy all the way!
I was so miserable and furious when my Dad copied over the latest Amiga Power cover disc – I hadn’t finished playing all the demos on it yet!
25/04/2008 at 00:07 Max says:
Peasoup… Wasn’t that a password for… Christ what was it called…
Can’t remember. Damnit. Pretty sure that “Dux” was a password too, that allowed you to play a small shooting game similar to space invaders where you shoot at ducks (pretty weird for a racing game).
I remember it had Toyota cars in it, little red dome-shaped things that gave you a turbo boost on the last level and green ones that gave you extra time… Would love for someone to remember the name.
Oh my! Someone just mentioned Soccer Kid! The memories!
25/04/2008 at 00:19 Lorc says:
Peasoup? That was the password for the fog level of Lotus challenge 2. Red and green thingies? Definitely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_(computer_games)
25/04/2008 at 00:38 Schadenfreude says:
Best cheat code ever was for New Zealand Story: “motherfuckingkiwibastard”. Though funnily enough I can’t remember what it actually did? Infinite lives? Anyone?
25/04/2008 at 00:38 Monkfish says:
One of the Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge games – there was a level that was based in thick fog :)
25/04/2008 at 01:00 Down Rodeo says:
I’m 18 and have quite probably missed all this. Sounds like you guys have good memories though!
(I should mention that I was game-starved as a child. My first console was a PS1, bought from someone who had bought a PS2. I mean, I’d played a bit at friends’ houses and so on, but fairly deprived.)
25/04/2008 at 01:01 Kieron Gillen says:
Down: I got into game systems fairly late, especially for a guy who became a journalist. I was 11 before I had a Spectrum, which would have been 86.
Spent a lot of time staring longingly in arcades.
KG
25/04/2008 at 01:24 Ginger Yellow says:
“To the ST owners: I stressed early nineties rather than late eighties – in the former, you could have gone both ways, but if you were buying an ST by the early nineties, you were MAD.”
Or you were into MIDI. Or, like me, you had relatives who developed ST software. That said, I was well aware the ST was an inferior games machine (even the mighty 1040STE). But at least we didn’t have to put a floppy in the drive just to boot the damn thing.
25/04/2008 at 01:25 Kieron Gillen says:
Oh God – yeah, sorry : Music stuff is the clear exception.
KG
25/04/2008 at 02:43 sinister agent says:
Oh, the amiga. Truly, it was a legendary device, and a guiding light. I date my youth based largely around which amiga games I had just bought at the time. And of course, AP was equally, if not more legendary, if such a thing can be quantifiable.
Both dead, long dead.
Sniff!
25/04/2008 at 03:23 Biscuitry says:
Come back to us, Amiga. We miss you.
25/04/2008 at 05:49 Talorc says:
I was always disappointed I ‘missed’ the Amiga. I jumped straight from the C64 to PC in the early nineties. (Started with a 386 I think)
Reading the brit magazines that covered BOTH the C64 and Amiga always made me jealous inside for a long time :-)
I tried to get into emulation a little while back, but the needing the kickstart ROM is a bit of a hassle.
25/04/2008 at 06:28 Al says:
I just lost the post I was writing. Balls. I miss my 1200.
25/04/2008 at 07:14 romanista says:
@radiant,
beat me at sensi? yiu have an xbox360? then lets battle!
25/04/2008 at 07:14 Bobsy says:
We had an A500+, which was a weird position to be in. It had extra RAM and there was just something about it that meant you weren’t cool enough to fit in with the rest of the A500 crowd. Neither was it powerful enough to compete with the mighty A1200 or A4000 (AGA!). But we had Lemmings, we had Frontier, we had SWOS (even with its bugs). Oh and New Zealand Story (must! play! again! But it needs an emulator or something? Gah)
We had a crappy little telly instead of a monitor. It’s weird now.
25/04/2008 at 07:15 Butler` says:
Batman: The Movie (?), Noddy, Speedball, New Zealand Story, Zool, Shadow of the Beast (that was hard as nails), Shufflepuck Cafe (!!), Lemmings.
I can picture at least 5 more in my mind’s eye but don’t have a clue what they were called. Good times!
25/04/2008 at 07:50 Iain says:
I kind of bypassed the Amiga and went straight from a Speccy to my first PC (a Pentium 75, which I bought from my brother in my final year at university, way back in ’96), but most of my friends had Amigas, so I still had my fill of Robocop, Speedball 2, Lemmings and the like.
It was a good machine, but unfortunately we could never afford one when they were fashionable, and I was too busy playing Elite on my Speccy to really make my parents’ lives enough of a misery to force them into buying one for me.
I have two abiding memories of the Amiga era: firstly, the hilarity we had mocking one of my friends when he accidentally formatted his Workbench disk, and secondly, the hilarity we had mocking one of the unhip kids who had the misfortune to buy an ST instead of an Amiga (this would have been circa ’91). Ah, those were the days…
25/04/2008 at 07:51 Jochen Scheisse says:
Just at that time when the C64 my friend and I had abused for all that it was worth (Maniac Mansion, Giana Sisters, Pirates and Sim City stick to the memory) started losing its appeal, my friend got an Amiga. Brilliant timing. At the same time I tried the PC when I visited an uncle of mine. I became convinced that Larry 1 was the pinnacle of gaming archievement on that machine, and because I didn’t really speak English good enough for text parser adventures at that time, I did not follow the PC scene further, also because the Amiga scene was so fucking cool. There were the demo guys, and I made my first steps to produce electronic music on that machine. When you say Mod, I definitely don’t think of an obscure teenager movement. I think of THIS. And there were so many good games: The first Settlers for example, and a million manager games because seemingly every self respecting German nerd produced a manager game before the graphics acceleration era. Mostly soccer manager, but there were also pizzeria managers and the post modern end to all that was a public toilet manager, I think. But also so much better shooters, like R Type, or The Chaos Engine which could be multiplayered. God, those were great times. The next thing I remember is my parents purchasing a PC and me prying my first 3 1/2 demo disk from my first power play to try the demo of this obscure game called UFO: Enemy Unknown. Epic win.
25/04/2008 at 07:59 Horatius says:
I just finished a branding project at my design school. I chose Amiga. Trying to explain the Amiga culture and aesthetic to a bunch of Mac and console users is like trying to raise the dead. I walked away rather frustrated. Psygnosis, open design, the cracking and demo scene… they just didn’t get it.
25/04/2008 at 08:11 AbyssUK says:
I never had an Amiga… had a cpc464 for ages always wanted an amiga… but we bought a MegaPC instead! yeah! amstrad 386 with a megadrive built in!
25/04/2008 at 08:31 Phil says:
My favourite thing about the Amiga: The strange coded message from cracking crews in German, Holland, the Czech Republic and beyond, scrolling across my TV before the games loaded always suggested to my childhood self romantic international rebels, slowing chipping away the corrupt edifice of a ownership and control through a glorious popular revolt.
The message boards of Pirate Bay, not so much.
25/04/2008 at 08:40 Irish Al says:
Acorn Archimedes FTW. Now *that* was a machine ahead of it’s time.
25/04/2008 at 09:00 Schadenfreude says:
Which Amiga systems did you need the Kickstart disk in the drive for? I know the 500, 500plus, 600 and 1200 would all boot freely without it. I thought it was just the early model 1000′s?
25/04/2008 at 09:02 Dan says:
There’s still an Archimedes A5000 languishing in the back of my parent’s living room. I’m occasionally tempted to borrow it, just to play Cataclysm again – one of the finest action/puzzlers I’ve ever played.
My strongest memory of my C64/Amiga days is the Powerplay Cruiser (the pink/yellow/green version). Best joystick ever.
25/04/2008 at 10:16 Matthew says:
No way! Zipstick Super Pro 4 lyfe!
25/04/2008 at 10:43 Zoso says:
I did have a PC, the nuclear escalation of “we bought it to help with your homework”. Not that I was jealous at all of the Amiga with a mighty Amstrad PC1512 instead. Who wanted more than four colours on the screen anyway? And monotone beeps, clearly superior to all sorts of disappointing “music” or “sound effects”. If you wanted perseverance, try finding PC games around 1988… Still, on the plus side I got to play classics like Zork and Rogue in full ASCII-vision glory…
Actually by the early 90s it was a 386sx with VGA and an AdLib card, most big games were finally coming out on the PC as well as the Amiga, and people like Apogee, id and Epic were just starting up with some fun stuff. But yeah, they were expensive, though you could pick up systems for under a grand from careful combing of the adverts in Micro Mart and PC Plus.
25/04/2008 at 10:45 Tom Camfield says:
Re: Amiga
The best way to understand the Amiga, I think, is as a PC with a joystick. You had a keyboard and mouse for homework and strategy games, while the joystick was there for sports games and platformers. Control-wise you could play any game, so every game found a home on the Amiga. It was kewl.
Re: Amiga Power
Although the humour and attitude come up a lot, it also embraced a wide range of (pop) culture. I learnt about Sam Rami before Spiderman, the Coen Brothers before No Country for Old Men (or Fargo) and John Woo before he made lots of terrible Hollywood films. Yet it also championed Calvin & Hobbes and Chuck Jones cartoons, and included an expansive array of lyrics from bands I never knew. There was also a lot of socialism going on and recommendations for wooly jumpers and converse trainers. The diversity of the mag matched the games.
Although I haven’t pondered this a lot, I think the The Onion / AV Club is closer to AP than most games based stuff I’ve read, just in its general willingness to investigate everything, be both high and low brow, be funny and mock the war dead.
25/04/2008 at 10:49 Kieron Gillen says:
Tom: Yeah. I always recall the first Reservoir Dogs parody I’d ever saw was in AP, months before everyone else did one.
(The reason I try and namecheck bits of culture in my games writing is exactly for that reason – I kind of believe as culture as gateways to other culture. You need to lay trails between it all)
KG
25/04/2008 at 11:04 Dan (WR) says:
The Amiga is my first love – a piece of hardware that I actively want to cuddle. My entire family had Amigas at one point or another. All of my English uncles and my grandfather played games on them. I think it helped that there were point n click adventures like Monkey Island and Lure of the Temptress which were accessible to anyone.
And oh for the joys of a zipstick – most joyous of all the sticks.
I do feel slightly embarrased now about the sheer volume of pirated games I had. I remember my uncles taking me to a place in Northampton that had been closed for a private function, and the place was full of Amigas and people swapping and copying games off each other.
I used to get the One magazine as well as AP, but oddly all I remember about it is Matt Broughton’s beard. I fear there’s something wrong with my brain.
25/04/2008 at 11:05 Chaz says:
Well Amiga Power may have been the best selling, but erm actually I always enjoyed reading The One Amiga more, I rather liked their tongue in cheek attitude.
25/04/2008 at 11:36 Arnulf says:
Digging through Youtube for some Amiga videos I discovered a treasure chest full of play videos. Apparently there are dedicated people out there who want to record every Amiga game made.
Some of my favourites:
The Kult
Cadaver
The Immortal
Marble Madness
Obliterator (as a side note, Brataccas & Barbarian)
Chaos Engine (my friend tried to coax me into beating this game, but I was just too clumsy to be of any help. I love the succinct character descriptions “Beware, his perverse nature is not to be trusted!” :D)
Space Hulk intro
25/04/2008 at 11:44 Malibu Stacey says:
You are correct to the best of my knowledge. We had an A2000 in our house (big box version of the 500+) & I saved up for a year to buy a 2nd hand A1200. Plenty of mates had A500′s, A500+’s & a few poor souls had A600′s. None needed a disk in the drive to boot but when have the facts ever got in the way of a good old fashioned fanboy arguement.
My older cousin had an Atari ST. Oh how I mocked him (and was subsequently beaten up).
25/04/2008 at 11:53 drunkymonkey says:
Oooooh. I loved my Amiga (or rather, my brother’s Amiga). From watching him play through Monkey Island and banally helping with the puzzles, to getting stuck on Premiership Manager screens involving Paul Gasgoine, the Amiga really gave me the start in gaming, that, like most others here, set me on track for being the gamer I am today.
Street Fighter 2, and the bonus stage wherein you beat up the car, make me as giddy as could be.
25/04/2008 at 11:55 Kieron Gillen says:
Malibu: I believe Kickstart 1.3 versions of the Amiga 500 – which is when they were getting popular – needed the disk.
KG
25/04/2008 at 12:16 Schadenfreude says:
My first Amiga was a Kickstart 1.3 Amiga 500 (The pack that came with Batman: The movie, New Zealand Story and F/A-18 Interceptor) which would have been in ’89 and it definitely didn’t need a Kickstart disk.
Here it is: http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/a500batman.html , best Christmas ever :D
25/04/2008 at 13:04 C0nt1nu1ty says:
The whole Amega thing passed me by I think, I only ever saw one once or twice, games really exploded for me about 1996 when we got a Dell (with a Pendium MMX processor no less) but even then the shockwaves of the Amiga age were still being felt. I feel sad looking at the increasingly shrinking PC section in game stores and look back to the days of big flashy boxes advertising things like Syndicate wars, quake (and a strangly diverse collection of addons), Gene Wars and a small nebular of dirt cheap bargain bin DOS games.
Still graphics are shiny now and gameplay maybe more polished but I wonder if we will ever really regain that sense of weirdness we got from the late 80s-mid 90s
25/04/2008 at 13:05 Cooper says:
These kind of reminiscences always pull on the heart strings, pining for the British gaming industry of the early and mid nineties…
25/04/2008 at 13:51 phuzz says:
Lucky you Schadenfreude; that’s the same pack my best mate at school had, we got the slightly rubbish “Class of the 90′s” pack, all the better to do your ‘homework’ on.
(mind you, my amiga effectively made me the nerd I am today, and now I’m paid to be an IT geek, so in a way it did exactly what my parents hoped).
I also could go on about the amiga probably all day, and for most of next week too, so I’ll restrict my self to just one moment in my life; The first time I ever saw full screen video on something that wasn’t a TV or video:
Sounds daft now, PC’s have been able to pump out a tv quality picture since forever, but back in the day it was crude graphics or nothing, video was just waaaaaaay to big to fit on a floppy disk, and even if it could there was no machine fast enough to play it.
Until one day I was looking at some demo’s (for the uninitiated: here), and came across this. Nowadays it’s pretty crude, but look! There’s people dancing! On my screen! Coming out of my Amiga!
The youngsters among you will be wondering what the hell I’m so excited about, but up until this point you would not, could not get a moving image of something that was recognisably a real human being out of a home computer.
Those of you who are now shouting “oh fuck yes!” should look here:.
Actually I’ve got one more thing to say:
Ataris suck, Amiga forever!
;)
25/04/2008 at 14:13 bobince says:
The Amiga, ST and Archimedes were way ahead of the PCs of the day. How did we all end up using these things again? I think there’s been some kind of mistake.
25/04/2008 at 15:04 Kieron Gillen says:
The Kings of Convenience may have something to say on that one.
KG
25/04/2008 at 15:40 Voidman says:
Like few others here I was a proud owner of A600. Small, compact, whitish. Moving to it from C64 was like seamless evolution. Many happy an hour went by while I celebrated the benefits of a built-in FDD drive. Games… too numerous to name them all but I have the most fond memories of:
Hired Guns, Black Crypt, Ishar2, EOB series, Frontier, Syndicate, Silkworm (co-op), Perfect General, Dune 2.
Happy days…
25/04/2008 at 16:11 Max says:
Lotus Challenge! That was it! Thanks guys.
25/04/2008 at 18:00 deadlock says:
Only the original Amiga A1000 required a Kickstart floppy to boot. The rest came with the kickstart on a ROM chip and you could purchase a ROM for the A1000.
My first Amiga was the little-known A1500, which was basically the same as the A2000 but without a HDD and with an additional floppy drive.
We later got an A1200 with a 256MB HDD and 2MB(!) of RAM. I think I still have it somewhere in my folks house.
25/04/2008 at 21:35 groovychainsaw says:
Ack – dune 2! I forgot that one. I remember it took an AGE to load on like, 5 disks? It absolutely blew my mind when i played it though.
Also, civilization. took about ten mins to generate a world! Which is why im so familiar with the music, love that it was back in civ 4.
anyone remember a game called onslaught? It was part of the crappy bundle that came with my 500+. Involved much violence, i seem to recall….
01/05/2008 at 00:50 Donald Duck says:
Anyone interested in making Gravity Force 3? Could be done with a small team as a hobby project.
Remember that Gravity Force 2 wasn’t developed by the same people as Gravity Force, they just got their blessing to use the same name..
04/05/2008 at 08:59 Dave H says:
I miss my Amiga :( I started with an A-500 with the RAM upgrade when I was stationed in Germany in the 80s. I even got to be vice-president of our base’s user group, and I appeared on Armed Forces TV to plug the club! Then when I got back to the states, I “upgraded” to an A600HD, the one with the whopping 40MB hard drive — unheard of space!! I too spent days in huge rooms of people exchanging disks for, um, ‘preview purposes’… but why hasn’t anyone mentioned Fred Fish?? Am I the only one who had a nearly complete set of Fred Fish disks?
06/05/2008 at 18:11 Sgtmajor says:
I use to have a Amiga it was a good computer in its day i use to have a game cold Dizzy it was fun to play i had 3d pool Sky high stunt man WWF Weslling it was a good gaming Machine
SgtMajor
26/03/2009 at 18:27 Hajimete no Paso Kon says:
I wish Amigas didn’t cost an arm and a leg. I’ve been trying to buy one for ages.
18/05/2009 at 14:34 mashakos says:
oh, so many memories :)
I remember trying to understand what “retry” meant, and pronounced it “retree” heh. Using the mouse for the first time was a revelation. My brother and I would spend as much time gaming as we would on Deluxe Paint. I was the better drawer but he managed to beat me with an awesome drawing of Veronica from Archie.
22/07/2009 at 08:54 JonnyBase says:
If anyone’s interested, you can get a remake of pinball dreams for the iphone on the appstore – search pinball dreams! Nightmare is great!
10/10/2010 at 02:03 Amyante says:
I absolutely agree with your article — and i’m not even a Brit!
Ah, the contests me and my dad held over 1942… We actually listened to the game music for fun… *starts humming BGM*