[louthy]

A lot of words there. But the word ‘console’ is there exactly once.

Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games.

I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.

PCs survived because they were genuinely used for business, not just games.

[evaneykelen]

> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.

The Amiga was used worldwide by TV stations for CGI and titling effects, for digital signage eg arrivals/departures at airports, and video walls, besides being a tool for countless digital artists. I know because I wrote digital signage software for the Amiga and sold it to customers in 21 countries.

[louthy]

Just to be clear, because there have been a number of similar responses, I am not claiming the Amiga couldn’t do anything else, nor that it wasn’t used for anything other than games.

But, the vast majority of people who bought Amigas did so because it was a great machine for games and had lots of high quality titles.

When the majority of your market disappears and moves to cheaper options; and all you have left is video walls in departure lounges, you’re fucked.

[vidarh]

But as I pointed out elsewhere: The subsidiary that survived the longest did so on the continued strength of sales driven by games - that market continued to do well for the Amiga until the end in the markets where the subsidiaries actually focused on gaming bundles.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

The Video Toaster was the first successful competitor to the horribly expensive Avid system ($100k+) for non-linear video editing, titling, SMTPE code syncing, etc. and ran on an Amiga 2000 as a double card. I think it was $3k.

It was used to make the first 3 seasons of Babylon 5 and all of the sub graphics for Sealquest DSV.

As an aside, Dana Carveys brother was one of the lead designers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster

[leoc]

> Games consoles killed the Amiga, just like they did all other home computers that were primarily used for games.

Wait, which games, and which consoles? Arcadey sprite-based action games were popular on the Amiga, and there the consoles caught up to it by about 1990 (the Sega Master System) or 1992 (the SNES) in the European market. But 16-bit consoles would have been a depressingly bad substitute for the Amiga when it came to games like point-and-click adventures, Lemmings, Populous, the Freescape games, or XCOM, when those even received a 16-bit console port at all. The Amiga was in actual use mostly a games system, yes, but to a large extent the successful, beloved games were the kind of thing we now think of as PC games. That's also probably a big part of why finally losing pace with the PC over DOOM was such a bitter blow. The 32-bit consoles only started to take off in Europe with the release of the PlayStation there, well into 1995 when it seems the Amiga's goose was mostly already cooked, and even those systems weren't a great place to have a PC-like gaming experience. Then there's the awkward issue of downloading a car: famously, many Amiga users were piracy-happy, and would not have welcomed the game prices and relatively successful copy protection of '90s consoles.

(Data mostly from Wikipedia. I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.)

[snvzz]

>1990 (the Sega Master System)

Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive).

>I'm not an expert on the Amiga's commercial history, and it's a complicated topic.

For anybody curious, the Amiga Documents[0].

0. https://sites.google.com/site/amigadocuments/

[leoc]

> Probably meant 1988 (Sega Mega Drive)

Yes, I meant the Mega Drive, but the PAL Mega Drive, the really relevant one here, didn’t come out until well into 1990 (if the easiest Internet sources are to be believed).

[vidarh]

Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games.

None of us replaced them with consoles.

While the use in business was of course important, that the PC survives is just as much down to the open platform and the clone market that prevented its future from being tied to a single company - in this case a wildly dysfunctional one.

[louthy]

> Most of my circle used the Amiga primarily for other things than games.

Are you claiming your circle is representative of the computer buying masses of the time? (whether the computers were consoles or not)

[vidarh]

No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much. Lots of people used it for other things. In fact, the US Amiga gaming market, for example, was extremely lackluster because unlike in Europe, in the US the sale was geared much more toward professional use, which was also reflected in e.g. US Amiga magazines like Amiga World, as well as in models like the Amiga 2500 which was aimed at the professional market and mostly sold in the US and Canada.

The profile varied extensively by country - Germany as well had a market where Commodore was big in the business market, and while that was mostly PC's, it was also the reason for much of the success of the Amiga 2000, which also largely aimed at non-gaming users.

Commodore UK meanwhile, did fit your "profile" for the Amiga and was very much focused on games.

But Commodore UK was the subsidiary that remained most successful despite competition from consoles.

In fact Commodore UK survived the bankruptcy of Commodore International and did well enough that management tried to put together a buyout offer (but had to throw in the towel after Dell and Escom entered the process).

In other words, while you're right that competition from consoles and PC's of course mattered a lot, it was a lot more nuanced than that.

E.g. in the US, Commodore had burned its relationships to the ground, and so failed to get the low-end Amiga's out there as gaming machines too, and were nowhere near as successful as some of the subsidiaries like Commodore UK, and Commodore B.V (Netherlands; also briefly survived bankruptcy).

Where Commodore did best, it did okay in both the game market and in various professional niches, but that meant actually working the game market hard. E.g. Commodore UK did a "famous" bundle with the game for the 1989 Batman movie which drove relatively-speaking huge sales.

Had the rest of the subsidiaries done close to as well as Commodore UK, the company as a whole would've at least weathered the cash crunch that killed it in '94. Whether that'd have let them rebuild (e.g. by completing their next chipsets) or if it'd have just made them linger on in a zombie state another year, is an open question.

[louthy]

> No, I'm pointing out that your anecdote doesn't mean much

Neither does yours, at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry.

Your anecdote is “not me or my friends”

[vidarh]

It wasn't meant to mean more than showing that yours was just "just me and my friends", and it did that.

> at least I have the evidence of the extremely large and vibrant Amiga games industry.

And for the business use we have the evidence of the sales of the bigger models that were totally unattractive for games, the multiple magazines targeting business use, and the number of businesses built exclusively on selling solutions that were for a long time only available for the Amiga, like the Video Toaster.

Nobody has argued with you that games weren't important for the Amiga (but your thesis that the Amiga failed due to consoles falls apart when we consider that the Commodore subsidiaries that focused more on selling it as a games computer survived longer when Commodore failed), but that it was not nearly as singularly sold as a games machine. Even Commodore UK, which was perhaps the most gaming focused of the Commodore subsidiaries also got significant revenue from business use.

EDIT: I'd also add that there isn't like there haven't been extensive analysis on this, such as Brian Bagnall's book series on Commodore, or Jimmy Maher's "The Future Was Here". We know a lot about Commodore's internal issues and their finances that was not public knowledge at the time. Commodore was horribly mismanaged more than anything else, and there are many competing reasons that contributed to the fall of Commodore, and while the consoles certainly contributed too, there's not much evidence it was anywhere near the only, or main, reason.

[ilkke]

And your anecdote is "not me or people I know of".

When you say the Amiga games industry is "extremely" large and vibrant, what contemporary platform are you comparing it to?

If there is an "extremely large and vibrant" aspect that makes the Amiga stand out, it is the demo scene.

[blakespot]

Most of my friends were gaming on consoles at the time. I very much preferred the Amiga (I also had Atari STs during this time) to consoles perhaps mainly due to the ability to use RGB monitors with a proper RGB signal. It was at best composite back then on the consoles of the era - in the states anyway (we didn't have SCART as an option). I know I'm odd here, but that was a major factor -- but also the fact that I used the Amiga for much more than gaming. I BBSed heavily, generated hundreds of images with paint programs, programmed on it, and then there was enjoying scenedemos as a huge part of my use.

Most people in the user group I was in back then (ALFA - Amigoid Life Form Association) were NASA engineers who used them as cheap and capable alternatives to the UNIX workstations they worked with at NASA (which was local, Hampton, VA). Many of these guys were older and didn't game at all.

[TheAmazingRace]

I heard NASA used their Amiga systems clear up to 2006, which is a rather unusually long lifespan for the application they intended them for. But I suppose commodity PC hardware and the software they needed just wasn't really there at a price point that made sense, plus, I guess as the old adage goes... if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[sillywalk]

> I heard NASA used their Amiga systems

Yes. "Amigas take in all the telemetry data from the spacecraft, scale it by applying coefficients of up to fifth order polynomials and convert the data back to engineering units for display to the engineers working the launch."[1]

[0] https://hackaday.com/2021/08/16/retrotechtacular-amiga-pips-...

[1] http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/amiganasa_en.p...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAPD9HA8Unw&t=1s

[drewp]

https://www.modd3d.com/articles/item/waterworld-show-control...

The document is sadly 404 now, but this was an awesome nerdy writeup of the conversion of the Universal Studios Waterworld from Amigas in 2007.

[blackhaz]

In my part of the woods all those consoles were frowned upon, back in the days when we had 386s, 486s and Pentiums. Yes, PS1 could display some interesting games, but you couldn't do anything creative on it.

As to what killed Amiga - I think it's in the article - the lagging behind the x86 performance, especially when 386DX-40 came about, and please allow me to propose one additional, if not the primary, factor - that our fathers suddenly began to require Word and Excel to do their work at home.

[District5524]

I'm sure that was an important reason for the US and UK markets. I don't know much about the Swedish market, but in the Eastern European markets, game consoles were not popular at all until the very late 1990s. Gamers in the early 1990s used Commodore (and less affluents ZX Spectrums and clones), and later, as the article says, more and more PCs. In these parts, people were very short of money, which caused piracy to grow HUGE. Computers were also preferred due to being multipurpose. And console games were difficult to copy, so if you wanted to be a serious gamer, you had to have a PC. Even if you had the money to buy games, you couldn't really do that, because nobody really was selling actual games in these markets. With different currencies and limitations on hard currency exchange, you didn't spend those limited funds on games, even if you travelled abroad. Probably also as a consequence, playing on consoles was considered to be lame. It was for kids only. Hah, for those born in the 1990s only! So that was a bit different over here.

[nsxwolf]

I had consoles and a PC and so did all of my friends. They offered very different experiences in the 90s.

Amiga could offer the PC experiences too, and did, until it ran into hardware limitations. Then it was suddenly competing with the Genesis and Super Nintendo, but with inferior European side scrolling games, with their single button controls, “sound or music not both”, etc.

[drivers99]

> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.

My Amiga friends used it for playing games and for creative things: writing music, pixel/digital art, some coding, making games (at least, in shoot-em-up-construction-kit), as well as dialing up BBSes and the text-based Internet (like me on my PC).

[tjr]

I used my Amiga 3000 for a lot of video production and graphics work, along with some word processing / desktop publishing, and a bit of programming. And games! In my observation of other Amiga users at the time, this was typical.

Besides random individual users doing these sorts of things, Amigas were used in local broadcast television studios as video switchers and graphics layover systems, and even in more major media production outlets for video editing and 3D animation. They were seen as a more economical solution to more expensive hardware built specifically for television or graphics, but could pull of the work on a comparable level.

[samastur]

I did (but also for games). That wasn't the problem. The problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have a future even if company didn't went to shit like Commodore did.

[77pt77]

> The problem was computers built on closed architecture didn't have a future

Like Apple/Mac?

[gapan]

> Like Apple/Mac?

One could argue that apple is the only exception to the rule. And let's not forget that apple almost went bankrupt in 1997, only to be rescued by Microsoft.

[77pt77]

Pretty big exception...

[louthy]

> computers built on closed architecture

Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures?

The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games. People completely misremember how little interest the general public had in computers (for serious tasks) at the time.

The only exception to that really was the IBM PC. It didn’t have an open architecture either. For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it.

[vidarh]

They gave lots of shits about access to cheaper clones, though, and to access to cheaper peripherals.

> It didn’t have an open architecture either.

It was open enough that the closed parts could be reverse engineered, and so the market was already full of clones by the time the Amiga was even released.

Meanwhile, the Amiga was tied to custom chips only manufactured by Commodore, and didn't get anything resembling a clone until Commodore was already bankrupt (DraCo, which ditched a lot of backwards compatibility)

> For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it

By the time the Amiga died, this hadn't been an issue for many years.

[badc0ffee]

> For a long time it was the case that if you didn’t buy an IBM branded PC, you couldn’t guarantee that any software would actually work on it.

I don't know if it was a long time. The PC came out in 1981, and by 1984 you had the fully compatible Tandy 1000 and Compaq Deskpro.

Except for the BIOS ROMs, which companies like Compaq rewrote themselves, the PC did have an open architecture.

[louthy]

I didn’t buy a pc until much later (I was an Acorn user), so you may be right, but the lore around that lasted a reasonable amount of time if my memory serves me correctly. Well into the late 80s.

I’d still argue nobody cared about architectures, they cared about where the type of computer was primarily used. PCs were for the office. Acorn was for education. Atari, Commodore, Sinclair were for games and therefore vulnerable to games consoles.

I seem to remember that PCs had quite a poor rep for games, even during the Wolfenstein -> Doom -> Quake era. Only really shaking that off when the first graphics cards arrived

[badc0ffee]

PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, like arcade-style games, platformers, shoot em ups, fighting, and racing games. But the PC did do well at puzzle games like Lemmings, text+graphics games like King's Quest, and sims like SimCity. That disadvantage was gone, at least on a technical level, by 1992-94.

I think PC graphics had two major leaps forward in this era: VGA in 1987, and VLB graphics (on 486 machines) in 1992. The former brought an expanded colour palette, and the latter brought enough memory bandwidth that you didn't need dedicated blitter/sprite chips.

[spankibalt]

> "PCs were definitely at a disadvantage for anything involving a lot of motion, [...]."

Not on a strictly technical level, especially not in the world of 3D. 2D arcade games à la Silpheed came out for the PC in 1989, running maxed-out on machines that were already a possibility, with VGA graphics and Adlib or MT-32 sound, from late 1987 onwards, roughly the same time the A500 was released in the United States. The notion that PCs had "a bad rep for games" after the release of titles such as Wing Commander doesn't really hold much water.

It was mostly economical factors and some specific usecases that made home computers an excellent, and often superior, choice for many of its future users.

[drivers99]

> Do you honestly think that the general public gave ... about closed architectures?

Not consciously, but they could see more and more capable and affordable systems and upgrades available from a lively and competitive industry.

[spankibalt]

> Do you honestly think that the general public gave two shits about closed architectures?

First, this specific argument is about the computer-buying public, not the general public. Furthermore, yes, many people also bought into the IBM-PC & Compatibles eco-system because it was much more open. Many young(er) urban professionals of the time took their work home, to be continued on computers. I think financial mobility, supply, as well as culture (incl. generational divides) are more much important factors.

> The vast majority of people, who were using computers, were using them to play games.

Do you have data to back that up? Because where I'm from (East Germany), strictly based on my observations, this didn't track; many PCs were used as intended: general-purpose computing. That means work and play.

[zozbot234]

The Amiga platform was originally built on game-console hardware. Incidentally, so was the Raspberry Pi, which is why the first Raspberry Pi models were comparatively very cheap.

[louthy]

The platform is irrelevant. They were more expensive than games consoles. So they lost, just like all other true personal computer manufacturers. They had too many components and couldn’t compete.

[actionfromafar]

I think it was lack of vision and financial mismanagement that killed them more than anything technical.

Edit: an interesting take with the games consoles, I never really thought about it from that angle before. But it makes a lot of sense. Console makers get a cut of the revenue stream of the games. Commodore never saw a cent of that and the only commercial niche they briefly owned was low-budget TV production, like cable channels and such.

[zozbot234]

The end of the Motorola MC68000 architecture killed a whole lot of platforms around that same time. Amiga was just one of them among many, but the fact that Atari ST also died, NeXT was ported to x86, the Mac was ported to PowerPC, Sun Microsystems went SPARC etc. etc. all pretty much simultaneously, is not a coincidence.

[rasz]

Piracy made Amiga cheaper. SNES and two cartridges/Genesis with three was more expensive than Amiga 500.

[mrits]

Were they? I bought my Amiga 500 around 1992 for $200 USD at Software Etc. I think the Nintendo was around $100 USD and the games were often much more expensive. Not to mention most games were just the cost of a floppy disk if you had Amiga friends.

[louthy]

$100 < $200

[Retric]

A console without games isn’t useful.

[louthy]

And a printer without ink doesn’t print. Yet we all continue to fall for this initial low price bait.

[wlll]

Were they? I had an Amiga 1200, a friend a 500, both of which were around long before games consoles became mainstream.

[FireBeyond]

> I don’t know anyone that used the Amiga for anything other than games.

I mean TV studios and media houses, but admittedly, that's not exactly a huge market.