My first recollection of computer gaming was our family Commodore Amiga 500. The competitor product to the Amiga was the Atari but I had no experience of it. I was recently chatting to a guy who runs a gaming trade shop and he said that the Atari was viewed as more of a serious machine and one that musicians were drawn to because of its MIDI capabilities. The Amiga was definitely seen as more of a gaming computer, although I vaguely remember using it for typing up the odd document and printing out on the dot matrix printer (also pictured). As a little digression: I dated a girl in the 2000s at Uni and we lived in a seven person house share. We’d all know when she’d have an essay due because she had an A3 dot matrix printer and oh my God, those printers were noisy.
When we got the Amiga, I was in awe: This was my first foray from the world of analogue into the digital world. The Amiga 500 had 512 kilobytes of RAM (and we did later get the 512K expansion module). Now to put that into perspective, Samsung’s current flagship mobile phone, the Galaxy S21, has 8GB of memory. That’s over 16,000 times as much memory as the Amiga 500 in a device that is a fraction of the size! And that’s not considering the speed of the RAM either.
The Amiga 500 was an all-in-one unit where the computer and (mechanical) keyboard were built into the same housing. There was a roller ball (not laser) mouse and we had joystick. It used 3.5″ floppy discs, which could each hold just under 1.5 Mb. I wouldn’t be able to even fit a single photo taken with my phone on one of these discs now. Although they seemed so small now I actually still saw some businesses using them well into the 2000s. As you can see from the picture above, the Amiga displayed on a(CRT) TV – definitely not high-def.
We must have bought games for the Amiga but I can’t recall seeing that many game boxes and without DRM, floppies were easy to copy so perhaps we got copied games. I’m guessing the game, Batman (released in the same year as the movie), was bundled in with the Amiga. This is the first game I remember playing. I was in awe of the movie and the game. It’s funny to see that the franchise is still very much alive, decades later. Here’s a few videos of the games I remember most fondly – it’s the sound effects that invoke feelings of nostalgia for me more than anything else for some reason.
My favourite game on the Amiga was a flight sim, F/A 18 Interceptor. This truly was a marvel as it was the first 3D game I played. The game had a physical code wheel which you turned in order to provide the correct responses to code prompts and launch into the game. It really added to experience of being a fighter pilot, in the late hours of the night. Sadly, we lost the code wheel once the Amiga had been relegated into storage and when I attempted a retro gaming session years later, I just couldn’t get passed the code screen. The game was superb. You could land on aircraft carriers as well as, of course, conclude a dogfight with a timely sidewinder missile. I think this game started my penchant for combat flight sims later on the PC; although I never found a good console flight sim.
The Amiga range of consoles were actually still being sold until the early 1990s and games until the mid-90s but the demise of Commodore International was protracted and not expected, with huge losses over the latter years.