It's a time to light those candles upon that tasty cake, as the Commodore Amiga 1000 is celebrating its 40th anniversary. That's right, it's 40 years to this day that the Amiga 1000 was launched. It's amazing to think that when I was a child all I wanted was an Atari ST, and the best thing in the world was to happen, I got an Amiga 500.. Although I missed out on the A1000. A gaming system that I personally spent so many hours playing, with entire summers having gone in a flash and it was back to school. With games such as Deuteros, Dragons Breath, Shadow of the Beast, Moonstone, Eye of the Beholder, Millenium 2.2 all of them fantastic and that was just a small taster of the incredible releases that came out in the 90's!
I even had friends that actually came round and played games such as Settlers or dualing it up on Lotus, even now when I pick up a box those memories coming flooding back! For those that didn't have an Amiga 500 or 1000, I even had a chance to play the Atari ST at my friends house and to be honest I hold no grudge against either system. Even if some people still have their hate of it to this day. But yet this isn't a time to fight, this is a time to celebrate, just check out all those fantastic games on both systems. Such an amazing time, that I will never forget... Happy Birthday Amiga 1000!
I felt the same things you felt. I couldn't believe I got an A500 at last. It was the closest I'd ever been to heaven. After that, life would be much harder and more ungrateful.
ReplyDeleteBut let's congratulate! At least we were happy once in our lives! Others haven't even had that.
¡VIVA EL AMIGA!
All hail the king.
ReplyDeleteMe too! I wanted an Atari ST because a game I cannot remember was better, at least in the screenshots.
ReplyDeleteThen I realized it would be a mistake and made the right choice, hell yeah!
A500 was clearly the last machine for me before I switched to PC forever. I also had the ST from 1988 to early 1990. More a 12 bit ;)
ReplyDeleteI first remember seeing an Amiga 500 when I went on holiday as a kid, I meet another kid and he had brought down his A500. This was early 1990 and the holiday place had two arcades. They were 10p a credit back then! One arcade had Gauntlet 2. He had the Amiga version and seeing this arcade port blew me away, starting from the intro and the sampled sound. Coming from a spectrum, this was the first computer I saw showing what the 500 was capable of, 16-bit arcade ports that were close enough to the arcade. Suffice to say the 10p glutton machine got no money from us during that holiday! Later in the year I got one and enjoyed many more great arcade ports, not to mention great Amiga original games.
ReplyDeleteLater on classic games like the Settlers which you mentioned and Syndicate pushed what I thought the machine was ever capable of. It is cool people still remember it today.
My friend and I used to take the bus to our home town to this shop called CompuCade - kind of a proto-pre-internet cafe that had networked Atari STs and Amigas. It's where we played our first 16bit games whilst we saved hard to upgrade our C64's to Amigas, which took a long time!
ReplyDeleteThey had a couple of A1000's too. Was amazing just to get a taste of the future for a couple of hours, choosing games from their menus, playing Blood Money, Populous, RVF Honda, Lombard RAC Rally, Starglider 2... really great times.
A little later I'd work in a computer shop selling Amigas and borrowing many games as a perk. A teen in heaven!
Happy 40th Amiga. Looking good on it, the years have been kind!
My family bought the original Amiga on release here in the U.S. It was late 1985 or early 1986, can't quite remember the exact month. We went in to see a demo of the machine (it wasn't labeled the model 1000 yet) and the sales people played Axel F in that glorious four channel digital audio. Nothing even came close to that audio quality on a computer at the time. It was the first computer to give me butterflies in my stomach. First game we had, of course, was Mind Walker. I don't think I ever fully understood that game, but I was just enamored with all the on-screen colors and HAM mode. Nothing like it for at least a few years to come. It stood on its own and became more stable as the months passed by with OS updates. Some of the best years in computing for me were the monthly user group meetings we had in our city. Just a blast and a lot of new friends were made. I think that's what made the 1980s and early 90s computing hobby so much fun. The face-to-face social aspect to it.
ReplyDeleteOnly Amiga makes its possible. Happy 40th to all Amiga fans and owners world wide.
ReplyDeleteWow! 40yrs! Feels like yesterday I wanted one. They were never sold in our country, but a friend went to Germany and came back with an A500, only one game , North & South, the memories....
ReplyDeleteBoth were computers of awe, the Amiga a bit more so because of its custom chip set. Still both, particularly the Amiga could've been better out of the box if the product had more R&D and market research before launching.
ReplyDeleteStill have incredible memories of seeing them both in store and being fascinated with what they could do.
Started with an A1000, still using them, an A1200 with PiStorm and an X1000 are the main two
ReplyDeleteI was watched the demoscene for the first time on Vectrex and then Amiga, of course! Still, it's been four decades since before 2002 but you know. I think Atari ST has a speech synthesizer for Zero-G's Datafile for many yearsm but WOW! I knew it really is saw that coming but well… That's how has been a story for now.
ReplyDeleteI have 4 A1200's, 3 A500's and an A600, I love my old Amiga's :) I started out on the C64 and moved to the Amiga which I used until I got a PC in 2005, I still have my original 500 and 1200 and I still use them when I have time. The kinds of advances in home computing we saw back then will not be repeated any time soon I think. I have a few accelerators, An 030, 060 and PiStorm, I think the 060 is my favourite, The PiStorm feels a bit like cheating :)
ReplyDeleteI mainly code, but sometimes play games or watch demos.
AMIGAAAAAA
ReplyDeleteStill got my working Amiga 500 with over 100 games, all the accessories including the cd ROM drive. Looking to pass it on to an Amiga user group.
ReplyDeleteI own a 500, 600 and 1200, i use them more than i do the latest consoles. Games today are great graphically but nothing seems to hold my attention like the old games. Completing games on the amiga was hard to do, nowadays my nephews seem to complete every game which was not the same as back in the day.
ReplyDeleteStill got an A500 and A3000T in the shed. Great machines!
ReplyDeleteA3000T don't see many of them about , im currently building an amiga 4000d into a tower
DeleteAmiga
DeleteGreat to see you are playing the greatest game ever released.
ReplyDeleteWhy is this in the Atari section ? Or did I miss something ?
ReplyDelete