The Commodore Amiga: The Definitive Review
Multitasking for the masses, not the classes
The Commodore Amiga occupies such a distinct place in my memory, not to mention commanding a bona-fide ‘legendary’ status in computing and videogaming history. It stands out as a kind of highly charismatic wonder-machine, a computer endorsed by Andy Warhol, that contributed massively to Drum and Bass1, which played home to the teams that would create the original Grand Theft Auto, Wipeout, Tomb Raider and so on. Given that we now live with hulking great big monomachine platforms that dominate entire sectors, the fact that the Amiga was able to build itself a pedestal amidst competition from Sega, Nintendo, Atari and the PC surely marks it out as something very special. There are, of course, obvious business reasons for this. The Amiga was marketed so heavily in Europe that the A500 became an immediate de facto successor to the 8-bit home machines for Commodore heads. For Spectrum and Amstrad crews, the binary choice between ST and Amiga was trickier and perhaps determined by budget as much as the machines’ complimentary and contrasting capabilities. The ST built a decent user base and the two did co-exist for a while, their shared 68000 CPUs removing some friction for cross-platform development. Yet in the end, the Amiga gained the legendary status as a pre-multimedia multimedia machine. Famous showreels like the 1988 NewTek demo always dazzled audiences raised on 8-bit expectations, as were crazed multi-disk releases of Don Bluth’s laserdisc arcade spectaculars like Dragon’s Lair2 and Space Ace. Aside that, Lightwave 3D and the Video Toaster3 powering the special effects for TV sci-fi shows Babylon 5 and Seaquest DSV assured Amiga zealots with an snobbish air of superiority over Atari ST fans who only had its ‘music capabilities’ from which to derive any cross-cultural pride4. This wild expansion of capability for the platform signalled a great stride forward for the consumer computer in general.
In my 11-year-old mind, what the Amiga had in spades was an irresistible lust factor. I don’t think I’ve seen a machine since that generated quite the same excitement and desire as seeing the Amiga on the BBC’s Micro Live or seeing coverage of it in magazines like Commodore User. Perhaps only the original PlayStation carries the same charge, the same bolt of boiling possibilities and seemingly inexhaustible power for me. With its GUI, it seemed so futuristic - and bearing in mind that the only GUIs we’d seen prior were the monochrome windows of the original Macintosh, the bright blues and oranges of the 1.3 Workbench allied with, of course, the bouncing ball made the machine seem stupendously advanced and futuristic. Upon seeing screenshots of early games like Defender Of The Crown, which delivered on the 16-bit promise of higher resolutions in far more colours than our quotidian 8-bits, it didn’t really matter that the game was a bit shit - it looked amazing. Likewise, shots from Magnetic Scrolls’ Guild of Thieves in the magazine text adventure pages illustrated how giant the leap was from 8-bit. This machine was lightyears ahead of everything we’d experienced. A couple of years later and the comfortably middle-middle-class kids would be inviting you round to play New Zealand Story or It Came From The Desert, Batman The Movie or Supercars or even the laughably poor-to-play Kung-Fu Master tribute Shadow Of The Beast. Much like Defender Of The Crown, this game was more a graphical ambassador for the next generation than anything worth seriously playing. Though I do have a slight pang of remorse that we never again saw over-the-top parallax scrolling carry a game to wild commercial success. It was perhaps the visual uptick of the 16-bits that drove Psygnosis’s early successes, although seeing as its routes were in the bombastic profligacy of a pre-Ocean Imagine Software, it’s hardly surprising. Though on Psygnosis’s journey to becoming Sony Liverpool via PlayStation’s Wipeout, the publisher managed to find a place for DMA’s Lemmings and thereby define an entirely new genre of puzzle game and perhaps help DMA along the road towards Grand Theft Auto. Certainly, DMA’s graphically splendid horizontal shooters Menace and Blood Money showed the Amiga’s capabilities to look like a 16-bit arcade powerhouse, as did the Bitmap Brother’s Xenon and Xenon 2: Megablast, even if all four suffer terribly from not being Japanese and somehow fundamentally missing some crucial ingredient that actual arcade shmup contemporaries always had. But in period, this didn’t matter. And for me, seeing those games in the magazines only cemented the fervour.
On a Discord I frequent, it was mentioned by a friend called Jon that he’d buy The One (a multiformat 16-bit magazine) just to windowlick the games he couldn’t play. I distinctly remember doing precisely the same, and with issue 11, no less. I’d bought it on holiday and was desperate to read the Xenon 2 coverage, but was drawn into Andrew Braybook’s discussions of porting Rainbow Islands to the 16-bits. Andrew was an absolute hero of mine from the Commodore 64, second only to Jeff Minter in the depth of my unquestioned worship. And lo, when I eventually did get an Amiga, Paradroid ‘90 was one of the games I absolutely hammered. But this was several years later, in 1993. I was a late adopter with an ECS5 Amiga 600, so had a wealth of Amiga games to wade through. This was mostly thanks to a friend dumping a huge box of pirated disks on me at sixth form, his Amiga days well behind him. Back in the late 80s, I took a different route. I was buying the best 16-bit multiformat mag on a monthly basis. This was Dennis’s Zero, which would eventually morph into the legendary PC Zone. Zero inherited a wonderful energy from Your Sinclair, and was by far the funniest of all the videogame mags on the market. And despite it fuelling my Amiga screenshot addiction, it actually introduced me to the newly-launched Sega Megadrive late in 1989. Hence, after selling my Commodore 128 setup for £200, and finding myself £100 short of an Amiga, I imported a fucking Megadrive instead. Unfortunately the Megadrive arcade-quality credentials would undermine the Amiga’s less-than-silky framerates for me, and it was apparent that the Sega machine was somewhat more capable at delivering the classic JAMMA arcade mode. In a way, the arrival of the Megadrive and SNES began the displacement of the Amiga’s reign at the top by letting the cracks show. No longer looking down on the ST’s bare-bones architecture with it suite of high-octane custom chips, the Amiga now had to look up to the likes of Super Mario World and Sonic the Hedgehog, and no amount of superhero frogs, piscine secret agents or ninja ants were going to reset the balance6. The PC would soon rush in to fill the vacuum created by the 1200 and 4000’s specs falling well short of the horsepower that the next five years would demand. Little did Commodore know that in being able to valiantly hold together glacially-running versions of Frontier and Wing Commander, that the gulf between the Amiga’s abilities and that of contemporary PCs would be exposed. The raw horsepower of the 386 left the now-ageing Amiga chipset trailing far behind. When 486s started their ascendency, there was no way even the highest of high-end Amiga 4000s could compete.
When I did my disastrously short stint as a playtester in 1993, the developer I was at was practically an Amiga-dominated business. PCs were used for admin and console development, but the art department was entirely an Amiga 4000 affair. Pixel art was being done in Deluxe Paint still, a tradition that seems to have been upheld for nearly a decade at that point. Naturally any 3D work was being done in Lightwave. One day, a Silicon Graphics rep turned up with an Onyx workstation to show off the 3D rendering capabilities of the machine. Despite the obviouas leap forward in quality and realtime ability, the old guard insisted on championing the Amiga. When the rep mentioned Silicon Graphics’ multitasking OS, one programmer chipped in to say it wasn’t real multitasking like, you guessed it, the Amiga. Afterwards, one of the 3D guys insisted investment in SGI machines would be a waste of money because you could buy highly specialist 3D accelerator cards for the 4000s they already had7. It was all head-in-the-sand stuff as anyone could tell the next generation was going to be all about 3D, and thus specialist 3D workstations would become the norm, but what it underlined was the sheer love and devotion these people had to the Amiga. Not just as a brand, but as a kind of friend, a companion. Not to overstate the likely higher-than-background rates of neurodivergent attachments that individuals at the company may have had, but there are deep reasons why the Amiga was so defiantly championed then, and why it’s still so deeply loved now. Just the fact that Workbench as an OS was kept going well past the demise of any functional form of Commodore as business, when the Atari ST’s GEM is now a widely-forgotten obscurity, shows how special the platform was. As I said in the opening paragraph, it was seen at launch as this incredibly charismatic wonder-machine, and that cachet never left the platform. Partly this has to do with that wonderfully exotic architecture, with custom chips named Agnus, Denise and Paula, its fancy bitplane approach to graphics, its touting of 4096 colours and so on. A lot has to do with the bouncing ball and the famed Amiga juggler animation, which were essentially demoscene-like trickery or simple bitmap animation playback. But perhaps the most important aspect was the sense of the machine’s vibrancy. It felt very much like the finely-honed thoroughbred it was designed to be, thanks to its initial intention as a supercharged gaming platform. The journey the Amiga 1000 went through as a business machine (with 4096 colours, advanced graphics hardware and four-channel digital sound) to become the home-gaming Amiga 500 carries a sense of democratisation, of the exotic and untouchable falling into reach for the (financially comfortable) masses, as if you could get Ferrari performance in an affordable hatchback. The Amiga 500 hardware itself had its own unmistakable presence - a vast slab of futuristic tech compared to the relatively humble and compact 8-bits. While I never had my own 500, I’m lucky enough to have an original Amiga 1000, which does not work properly. It never did, and back in the late 90s (just after I got it), I opened it up to see if any chips were loose or whatever8. I was stunned to see the moulded signatures of the development team on the underside of the case lid, complete with a dog’s paw print. I think it’s things like that which gives the machine its magic, not to mention the quality and richness of personality in Jay Miner’s team. This wonderfully quaint 1992 video paints the development picture far better than any flashy, modern YouTuber version, and I doubt the ST or PC had such a band behind their births.
Naturally, I can’t do a piece on the Amiga without referencing the games that I loved on it. I was never that big a fan of its arcade wannabe titles. I’ve already mentioned how I found Xenon II and Blood Money to be poor relations to their Japanese inspirations, and likewise I was never that thrilled by the likes of SWIV or Silkworm. But I was utterly captivated by things like Hunter, which gave you the chance to enact mayhem in an open 3D-polygon world a decade before Grand Theft Auto 3. Similarly choosing polygons over bitmaps was the incredible Another World and its gallic cousin, Flashback. I was never that enamoured with Stunt Car Racer, but I loved Papyrus’s Indy 500, a superb realtime polygon racecar sim that did an amazing line in crash physics. I distinctly remember howls of glee over the replay cameras in Ocean’s F29 Retaliator, a superior flight sim from DiD (which would become Evolution Studios under the Sony umbrella). And of course, the joyous multiplayer of Super Cars, the Lotus Turbo Challenges and the peerlessly great Speedball 2. I harbour colossal amounts of shame that I was never able to play my personal hero Paul Woakes’ epics Damocles and Mercenary III in period, although I did give the sweetly upgraded Elite+ a damn good go. Bringing up the rear in the realtime polygon future-game front was Starglider 2 and Mike Singleton’s superb expansion of Lords of Midnight, the neo-ice-age themed open-world resistance sim, Midwinter. I mean, I can carry on listing fucking amazing Amiga games for ages. Alien Breed! Late-night stoner couch multiplayer epic Worms. Cannon Fodder! Sensible Soccer AND Kick Off 2! The catalogue is simply fantastic and wonderfully broad, showing hundreds of ways in which the 8-bit archetypes could grow and expand with the vastly increased hardware capabilities. But the truth here is that many of these titles are also on the Atari ST. It’s that the Amiga is that bit more classy in playing them, a crucial touch more smoother in the delivery. But for me, a key marker beyond gaming, where the ST had barely any domain, is in how the Amiga carried on the demoscene from the 8-bits, and how spectacular the resultant fireworks became.
When a friend showed me the Red Sector Megademo, he was unable to describe what it actually was. He said it was a demo, but we understood those as game previews, not multimedia animations you were supposed to sit and watch. The vectorballs section just blew me away. This was shit far beyond my experiences, far beyond what I expected the machine to be capable of. In the early 1990s, the Amiga would play home to the legendary Jesus On Es demo, closely followed by the mind-boggling State Of The Art, both of which adeptly drew on the rave scene to capture that zeitgeist and hence gained viewerships far in excess of the standard demoscene fare. The upshot here is how the Amiga had become an instrument of the wider youth culture. It wasn’t just a gaming machine, it was something else. Something that was not only more powerful than the 8-bits that came before, but more versatile, more culturally relevant. The demoscene kept Amiga coding alive throughout the 90s and up to today, where it’s still a much-respected format, with the scene celebrating fun releases right up to the month this piece was written. Of course, the demoscene keeps other formats alive too, but it has a very special romance with the Amiga, one that’s perhaps even more devoted and obsessional than the torch-carriers of the retrogaming culture and professional nostalgists. I’m not sure if any of my examples will help the uninitiated understand the cultish adoration that the Amiga enjoys, but I hope they at least illustrate how it came to be. But one thing about the Amiga remains clear - it was among the last of the truly individual computers. From its very earliest design phases, it had a definite spirit all of its own. A spirit not for the drudgery of daily computing like a PC or Mac, but for that wide expanse of possibility, of everything a computer could do. Perhaps it landed at the right time for a critical mass of children raised on 8-bits to become precocious, furiously creative teens to grab the cultural reins and explode the fundamental idea of democratised computing with a vibrancy nobody expected to be so intense, so profuse. In that crazed way, perhaps the real romance builds because the Amiga taught the other computers where the real horizons of imagination lay, and made the future far more colourful and bright than we’d ever hoped for.
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Most notably, Urban Shakedown's Some Justice which reputedly was done on two Amiga 500s running Octamed, running into a mixing desk and synced by hand, pressing the spacebars simultaneously. Given that the tune is the Run's House Funky Drummer break (with massive 808 overlays), two hits (one a car horn!) and a sub, I struggled to see why it needed 16 channels. Until you consider Cee Cee Rogers' singing and strings from Someday, which presumably filled one A500's entire RAM. Nonetheless, the legend was born and the tracker becomes part of dance music production history. I for one learned so much pissing around with Protracker from a magazine coverdisk, but the real MVP has to be contemporary producer Pete Cannon's use of Octamed to sequence external gear, as covered in this fucking brilliant video.
Infamous for being the game with literal cartoon graphics that always broke down (was the laserdisc reader just not up to the rapid accessing?), Dragon's Lair gained a reputation for being an elusive treat. I never saw one working in period, but saw at least two dead cabinets. This gave the game such an enigmatic status that 8-bit conversions were contrived that attempted to translate the movie-quality animation of Don Bluth into 8-bit gaming formalism. The Amiga, ST and PC versions however were chunky re-draws of the original animations and therefore entirely accurate, causing much delight in people who loved proto-QTE slideshows of fairly decent cartoons.
Of course it should be noted than any serious CGI on the Amiga was done on the higher-end and far more expensive 2000,3000 and 4000 models rather than the home 500 and 600 machines. But it's perhaps in that strategy of running a clear hierarchy of models, with the X000 machines having faster CPUs, PC-like internal expansion slots and more RAM, that Commodore beat Atari. The ST suffered from a confusing set of models with the same fundamental capabilities but different RAM and disk drive configs that absolutely fractured the platform.
And of course, that meant 'came with MIDI ports as standard'. The ST undeniably has a legendary status as a sequencing platform and was absolutely the machine of choice for arranging just about anything that used samplers and synths in the 90s. See Norman Cook showing off his ST-controlled setup here.
The ST's reputation for being 'good for music' had its pitfalls for the less informed. A friend of mine bought one, thinking it was all he needed to make banging Techno, was sorely disappointed to find it didn't even have Cubase or Creator as standard, let alone be able to spit out floor fillers with a few mouse clicks. It's still not 100% clear why the ST ended up with MIDI ports as standard. Some say it was down to specific requests from musicians, others think it was down to the originally-planned sound chip being a quite capable instrument in its own right and MIDI being part of allowing it to be treated as such. Or maybe Atari just had a fuckload of DIN sockets and needed to get rid of them? As for me and Atari's 16-bit machines, I have two STs. One from a friend with a very dog-eared but intact box featuring stills from this classic ad.
My other ST was recovered from a skip at my old 9-5 in London. In the basement below us was a music production company run by a lovely guy, who turned out to Stephen Patman of shoegaze band Chapterhouse. I asked if the ST was his and if I could have it. He was happy for me to keep it, even though it was just the machine, no monitor or mouse. He'd used it in the 90s for, yep, sequencing samplers. However post-DAW, it had been propping a door open for years, bless it.
The ECS chipset was an Enhanced version of the classic Amiga 1000/500 chipset, known as OCS. ECS covered the 3000, 600, 1200 and 4000 machines but came too late in the Amiga's cycle to really matter. The 1200 and 4000 (and CD32) also got AGA, the Advanced Graphics Architecture, which made it up to par with PC 256-colour VGA.
There is something profoundly endearing in the British response to the onslaught of Mario and Sonic. However by drawing on the cod-surrealist light-heartedness of the classic Britsoft 8-bit mode, the presentation was a bit too Beano-and-Dandy, a bit too Bananaman, and not enough Danger Mouse. Zool, James Pond, Putty, Superfrog et al were just a touch too childish to break through. Sonic and Mario were obviously for kids, but they weren't torn from the pages of imaginary, ersatz Beano rip-offs.
A friend got a job at the company a few years after I left and now embarking on the PlayStation era, the company had dumped all its Amigas for, you guessed it, a full suite of SGI workstations! I kinda wish I'd been privy to the changeover, as there probably would have been a lot of top-spec 4000s in a skip at one point. Currently, one sits with a Buy It Now of £3,900. A lone motherboard commands £799.
My Amiga 1000 is from the era before the Kickstart booting software was in ROM, and need to be loaded from floppy. Only the floppy drive is fucked. There are, of course, shitloads of solutions for this now, which I am yet to undertake as it'll be a good £200 - £300 to get it on the road.