[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).