Some consoles had a much larger impact on the course of video games than many of us realise…
…one of those is the Commodore Amiga!
Commodore’s attempt at competing with IBM PCs and Apple’s newly introduced Macintosh, 1985’s Amiga was an impressive piece of kit for its time though most of us don’t remember it for its computer productivity features and, instead, reminisce about its awesome library of games.
What made the Commodore Amiga capable of handling some of the best, most cutting-edge games for its time is its Motorola 68000 processor. This allowed for it to do all sorts of tricks when it came to pushing graphics and sound. Using dedicated hardware to provide this kind of experience, the Commodore Amiga also had some of the first hardware dedicated exclusively to multimedia performance. Not only that, but it also had a unique AmigaOS to run it all.
Those of you that know your personal computer history probably already see the flaw in Commodore’s plan to make a run of it with PCs but we all have to remember that no one could have predicted that Windows and Mac OS would go on to dominate the personal space. It is kind of unclear what anyone thought would happen – after all, imagine a world where there are as many computer OSes as there are computer manufacturers and you quickly get a vision of the nightmare – but no one in 1985 could have predicted how things would go.
Though it was introduced in 1985, it didn’t really hit the market in a major way until 1986. As far as models go, the most popular model sold on the market was the Amiga 500 which moved some six million units between the line’s premier and the beginning of the 1990s. As we mentioned, the Amiga line
