30 years ago today, Commodore died

I read a book recently about the Amiga specifically, and getting to the part where Commodore went belly up was a really sad, and really frustrating moment. Basically execs over in America ignored any advice given, especially to those in the UK/Europe (where the computer was doing great) and instead just sunk the entire company with stupid decisions after stupid decision.

It didnt really affect me back in the day so much as reading about it now, but I owe tons of my gaming interests to that machine. From stuff like Turrican (2) to Switchblade II, to Team 17's various outputs, and just this gigantic variety of titles, some insanely ahead of their time. In many ways its the first actual games machine that I put real time into (I was too young to recall the Spectrum much). But I put 100s of hours into the Amiga, and while you'd have a few duds (Street Fighter II springs to mind!), there's also some crazy good ports like Rainbow Islands.

Amiga was a legendary computer for me... while Ive since moved over to PC/Linux, Ill always appreciate getting into computers via the Amiga.

With the PET, V20, C64, and Amiga they had some of the best microcomputers of each generation. Real shame the company was so mismanaged at the end and made a few too many mistakes.

I still love going back and playing old C64 games. I have one of C64 minis for nostalga's I keep on a shelf as well as the bitmap books COMMODORE 64: A VISUAL COMPENDIUM which is great to look through. Also ordered one of the 8bitdo c64 style keyboards and can't wait for it to arrive.

That was a sad day.
Maaaan I really loved my Amiga 500 back in the day.

The world simply wasn't ready for Kang Fu

DECK'ARD said:

My mum always reminds me of the first time I saw an Amiga. It was an Amiga 1000, soon after they had released in the UK.

She said my face lit up like nothing she had seen before. The Amiga was mindblowing for its time, it seemed like it was from the future. I'd never seen graphics or sound like it outside the arcade.

My mum says she went straight home to dad and said we have to get him an Amiga. That wasn't possible with the Amiga 1000 because of the cost, but when the Amiga 500 released in 1987 they worked extra shifts to get me one. I'll always be indebted to them for that, as it set my on the path to achieving my dream.

Having that level of technology in the home was a game-changer. Whether playing games, or making them, to messing around in Deluxe Paint, playing with sound-samplers and video digitisers, exploring 3D modelling and ray tracing, the Amiga covered it all and was the reason for many people's entry into those respective fields later.

As a computer it was very special, it oozed creativity and practically demanded you do something with that.

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Same. We went down to Mays computer store and my dad bought an A500, and a philips 8833 monitor. I still have the receipt it was so crazy expensive to me back then - £499+VAT just for the Amiga. Couldn't believe it

The first time I saw Ports of Call and Defender of the Crown I was blown away. Coming from a C64 I simply could not believe the jump in quality.
I spent so much time animating stuff in Deluxe Paint III. But my biggest time sink was definitely S.E.U.C.K - Shoot Em Up Construction Kitt. I even did a conversion of one of my Amiga projects to C64.

Amiga 500 was amazing for its time, shame about what came after.

If Commodore hadn't pushed out underpowered turds we might be posting from Workbench/AmigaOS version 40 today.

When you realize 30 years ago was 1994. 🤦‍♂️

Yeah, and it was only a couple years before that where I was first exposed to State of the Art from Spaceballs on my friend's A1200. It was like looking into the future. My brain couldn't compute how visuals and audio like that were coming out of a home computer when all I had at home was an Apple IIe and 16-bit consoles. Amazing stuff.

And then the first time I saw Ghostbusters on my friend's C64 (around 1985, I think), once again I couldn't quite believe it. Even my other friend's Atari 800 put the Apple to shame, and yet it was the Apple that ruled in the US... probably because of the stranglehold it had in our schools.

Edit: Around 1997 I would buy my first Amiga: an A500 and GVP genlock to do some LaserDisc/SVHS anime subtitling. Completely caveman-style compared to the digisub tools that were emerging around that time or shortly thereafter, but it was still awesome. Played lots of games, watched demos, and listened to .MODs on it. I have the A500 mini, but wish I still had the original.

Windrunner said:

Amiga 500 was amazing for its time, shame about what came after.

If Commodore hadn't pushed out underpowered turds we might be posting from Workbench/AmigaOS version 40 today.

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I don't know if they lucked into lightning in a bottle and didn't know how to follow it up. The custom chips were unique but they never really made similar jumps with later chipsets

I followed the death of the Amiga monthly in dedicated magazines (who had already started pivoting to PC because they saw the writing on the wall), and it was a constant case of "could this company save the Amiga" followed by "no, because Commodore are idiots" the next month. I read the Commodore: The Amiga Years book and while it only covered the creation of the Amiga, it was clear early on that Commodore were probably the worst possible owners and hamstrung it every way they could, while the British and German offices were brilliant. It was like Sega USA vs Sega Japan, only this time they actually managed to kill the entire company off.

Like imagine you have the Amiga 500 and a game plan to reduce the cost further, and instead you go "no, what the world wants is another C64 version" and accessories.

I wonder what would have happened if Atari had gotten the hardware instead. MS-DOS PC:s really took off right after that, but I wonder what would have happened in another generation of Amigas. If they hadn't stalled, could we have seen a next-gen Amiga and then have Doom developed for that instead?

He is long gone and couldn't defend himself, but I'm pretty confident Irving Gould killed the Amiga.

So incredibly ahead of its time.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB_UZsJUbwQ

Loved the a500, but the a1200 just wasn't powerful enough.

The Amiga was a large part of my teens and for that I'll be forever grateful. The snes killed it for me though and the era of sf2 was unstoppable.

DECK'ARD said:

The engineers never had the proper resources and direction to capitalise on what they had in the Amiga. Commodore was spectacularly mismanaged. A lot of projects like the 64GS, CDTV, 500+ and the 600 were unnecessary.

AGA was meant to hit 2 years earlier, which would have kept the Amiga in front, and by the time of the CD32 we should have been on true next-gen Amigas with an entirely new chipset.

What might have been.

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Yeah they should have been more focused given their limited resources.

AGA in 1992 was pretty underwhelming and its A500 holdover audio HW was pants: shouldn't have to choose between sound fx and music on a 90s computer because of the limited sound channels.

DECK'ARD said:

Yeah, AAA had an entirely new sound chip. The poor bloke was still working on it after everyone else had left following the bankruptcy announcement.

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:( what could have been.

Too bad Escom didn't let him complete it and instead put out some overpriced desktops/towers.

I'll depress myself but is there any good reading or other materials on AAA?

DECK'ARD said:

This was so impressive in 1985:

Then having the tools at home to create things like this yourself was amazing.

If only Commodore had survived a bit longer so we could have seen what the next-gen Amigas could have done. In Dave Haynie's film in the OP you actually see a near-finished AAA board just lying on a table.

So depressing we never got our hands on it 😞

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I was going to post the picture, but of course it's here already.

A friend of mine (who ironically has turned out not to be that techy) got one, and I remember taking my mum and dad round to show it to them and "prove" it was for sensible things and not just games. So we noodled around in work bench and deluxe paint etc.

I think I got the A600. Have great memories of lemmings and cannon fodder. The "Let's go!" and creak of the hinge in the trap door still live on in my memory.

IMHO underappreciated gem was stunt car racer. Tracking G force via cracks in the chassis and screen was amazing. Spent ages trying to make short-cuts work by jumping from one bit of track to another, and trying to land softly enough to not kill the car.

The Amiga 500 was my 1st direct contact with 3D polygonal graphics through F-18 Interceptor.

I was 7 years old. The coolest thing I had ever seen. My life was never the same after that.

Those 1st steps in 3D graphics is what made possible 34 years later the following coolest moment I ever had with entertainment in any medium, experiencing Resident Evil 8 in VR...

My first computer/console was C64. RIP

I never had a C64 as a kid, I had a TRS-80, but I always wanted one. A couple of years ago I picked up a C64 Maxi to explore the library and program in BASIC again. It works beautifully. Here you can see it running with my iPad Pro as a portable monitor, but it works with any HDMI monitor.

DECK'ARD said:

The C64 gave me my love of electronic music. We should all give thanks for the SID chip.


View: https://youtu.be/It7yJh-NwPY?si=zFOYfr8oXA0Dl0yK

View: https://youtu.be/4EcgruWlXnQ?si=6rffxQ04pIXGdp1I

View: https://youtu.be/qrQuR1LHAVI?si=cJ40d0pFIVJZxeDT

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Yes SID was wonderful!

My mom used to work for Commodore back in the 80s. I used to get free Commodore hardware and games for free. It was the beginning of my journey into PC gaming.

DECK'ARD said:

The engineers never had the proper resources and direction to capitalise on what they had in the Amiga. Commodore was spectacularly mismanaged. A lot of projects like the 64GS, CDTV, 500+ and the 600 were unnecessary.

AGA was meant to hit 2 years earlier, which would have kept the Amiga in front, and by the time of the CD32 we should have been on true next-gen Amigas with an entirely new chipset.

What might have been.

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I actually got a CDTV, it was one of the worst purchases I ever made. Not only did you have to buy a lot of accessories to even have basic functionality (like a disc drive and a trackball to even have "regular" 9 pin D-SUB type connectors to use a mouse or joystick) but one of the biggest flaws was the it had 1000kb of RAM instead of 1024kb like a regular Amiga 500 with a memory extension had. This caused games that actually used the full 1024kb of RAM to crash constantly (looking at you Secret of Monkey Island, I still beat it but I had to save after every move I made...).

So many memories with the Amiga 500. Was THE machine to own in the UK at a certain time.

I remember a friend getting a hard drive version or add in. We thought all the clunking and chirping was the physical switches of the memory turning on and off 🫣

gyrspike said:

8bitdo c64 style keyboards

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Shit the bed, i need one of these.

DECK'ARD said:

As well as the picture of Tutankhamun and Defender Of The Crown, the Juggler demo also blew my mind on the Amiga:

The first time I had seen ray tracing. Pre-rendered of course, but generated on the Amiga and displayed in its 4096 colour HAM mode. In 1986!

I later got the software package used to make it, Sculpt 3D, and had endless fun experimenting with 3D modelling.

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don't forget the boing ball!


Used to use deluxe paint to make little colour cycling bouncign ball animations. so much fun. mouse based graphical interface blew my mind honestly

We had an Atari 2600, Atari XL, C64 and Amiga later at home (amongst other stuff). I used the C64 and other stuff, but the Amiga was really my childhood and youth when it comes to computers and gaming. I stuck with the Amiga for longer than most people did, I switched to PC very late. Proud owner of the failed Amiga CD32 ^^. My brother had an Amiga 1200 with some extras, I went for the Amiga CD32 and its first expansion SX-32, which basically made it an Amiga 1200. I added 4 MB of memory, 3 disc drives, a small HDD, etc. But at some point it was just time for the switch to PC (sadly).

Still have my Amiga CD32, in working condition. :)

It may have flopped, but I was there doing my part. Still have fond memories of many games from it, and actually enjoyed that Oscar/Diggers combo it was sold with.

My neighbour's Commodore 64 was my first encounter with videogames. Flimbo's Quest, a Robocop game (I think?), some game where you shot a clown out of a cannon...

didn't the 500 support dual button controllers from the start? They just never really got adopted. I think either it supported megadrive ones out of the box or with some rewiring. I did something like that for captive

It infuriates how little respect the Amiga (and by extension, non-PC home computers) gets. If not the first, certainly these platforms were home to some of the earliest examples of open-world (Hunter, Mercenary), strategy (Deuteros), arguably FPS (Driller, Total Eclipse), fighting games (IK+), and "sad-Dad" cinematic games (Defender of the Crown, It Came from the Desert), and so on.

Whilst obviously most of the Amiga catalogue is extremely dated, it's still probably my all-time favourite platfrom.

"We're running out of elephants!"

I remember how much of the early games journalism was driven by people who clearly had very little, or none, experience of Amiga, and to some extent of PC games.

Here in Sweden we hade games journalists who really seemed to think that the Nintendo invented analog joysticks, and called Super Mario 64 the first true 3D games. And they really should have researched a bit about what games like Hunter did 5 years earlier, and what games Hunter itself built on.

MrKlaw said:

didn't the 500 support dual button controllers from the start? They just never really got adopted. I think either it supported megadrive ones out of the box or with some rewiring. I did something like that for captive

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Lazy, shitty ports from the ST probably partly to blame too as that system really was one button.

It's tragic how much the ST hamstrung the Amiga.

So many great memories of my C64 and Amiga 500+. Still have my Amiga and also got an Amiga Mini, which is pretty awesome, for it's small form factor and the mod scene has really made the little thing even better.

had a 600 and played so much champ man italia, a friend had a c64 and we played a shit load of spy vs spy.

It's so sad how Commodore went under. The C64 and the Amiga were wonderful machines. So many great games, memories and let's not forget the awesome music, especially on the C64.