90's WeekSeptember 17, 2013

90’s Week: The Best Of The Amiga

Ian Garstang

90’s Week: The Dawn of The Game Boy

90’s Week: The 10 Best Games for the Mega CD

The Commodore Amiga started life in the early part of 1983 and for the most part it was expensive and had a limited collection of games. It wasn’t until around 1987 when the A500 came out that people really took it under their wing. Sadly, it was around that time that Commodore decided to take over the running of the smaller ‘offshoot’ company and move it all to their main headquarters (losing some key people in the move).

It was the A500 that got the video game developers interested as Martyn Brown from Team 17 said ‘there were no license fees, no dev-kit, no enormous enormous resource required’. This meant that there was a great boom in creativity and developers such as The Bitmap Brothers, sensible software and bullfrog joined the cause. This all came to fruition in 1993 when Amiga’s pinnacle machine was released: the A 1200 and the company enjoyed five long years of prosperity before being sold in 2000. We take a look at some of the Amiga’s best bits: