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The Amiga was not originally meant to be a game console - the Amiga 1000 launch event featured Andie Warhol and Debbie Harry ("Blondie") using the computer to m
by toyg 3y ago
The Amiga was not originally meant to be a game console - the Amiga 1000 launch event featured Andie Warhol and Debbie Harry ("Blondie") using the computer to make art. For a period, the Amiga was the gold standard for video FX in TV stations and film studios. It just so happened that its features were very good for games, so the gaming industry produced a lot for it.
The abortive successor CD32 was a game console (trying to do what Playstation did a couple of years later), but it was a late hail-mary from an already zombified company.
The original Amiga was built with expansion ports, but Commodore saw them as a way to sell more widgets - very few add-ons were produced, and they were very expensive. Aftermarket manufacturers existed, but they couldn't grow significantly: unlike IBM-compatible PCs, the Amiga never managed to get a presence large enough to sustain a large hardware ecosystem.
- Findecanor 3y agoThe Amiga had been intended as a games machine in early development when it was still only a project at Amiga Inc. However, when the 1983 video games crash happened, they started looking at other purposes and decided to add keyboard and mouse support. When they got funding from Atari it wasn't entirely clear if it was going to become a games console, a home computer, or both. Then Jack Tramiel was ousted from Commodore and took engineers with him. Commodore had to abandon the Commodore 900 project: a 16-bit business computer running Coherent (a clone of Unix), and was looking for a replacement: a hole which the Amiga filled, and then some.
- Findecanor 3y agoSelf-correction: the company was called "Amiga Corporation". "Amiga Inc" is something more recent.
- vidarh 3y agoThe Amiga did not originate under Commodore, and the original business plan was very much a game machine. By the time Commodore snapped it up right under the noses of Atari, that was still the goal. While Commodore changed that goal, the artefacts of that origin is all over the system, from a built in dual "play fields" graphics mode, to the OS support for sprite multiplexing.