Amiga, Commodore and lucky countries!
 

Well friends, I opened this thread because I often wonder what could be happened if I were born in another contry or another continent and I would not have fully enjoyed these very nice years!
Back in the days I lived Commodore 64 age in Italy and then Amiga age and had a lot of excitement running an Amiga BBS!
I see ... ie from the World BBS Ghost List :

http://www.defacto2.net/includes/doc...ckDoorList.txt

that some contries in Europe like France or Spain didn't have the same lucky of other contries talking about BBS's and about machines sold I guess!

Not to mention that some continent never saw Commodore and Amiga times like South America ( except Argentina with the Drean Commodore 64 ) and Asia!

Then ... if I recall most of software house were from UK than US or other countries so I am led to thing that Commodore 64 and Amiga would never had the same fate without all the software production from the United Kingdom!

What do you think about this?

Different countries, different things.

Many Americans who were kids in the 80s think the NES was the best thing since sliced bread and think that we Euros missed out on a lot since it wasn't as popular here. I never had one, for example, so I can't get misty eyed over Zelda. They naturally can't get misty-eyed over Lotus II and Super Cars II.

I've chatted with quite a few who have this opinion. Americans who frequent EAB and other retro computer sites naturally do not fall under this. :-)

In 80's here were only 2 options - expensive computer from Pewex shop (payable only in $) or second hand hardware without possibility of testing or returning.

I had quite a lot of friends with a C64 and later the Amiga, so that was certainly a 'pro' :) Not sure I would have gotten into computer and games that early, if I wouldn't had friends that had them and ruined my life by letting me play :D Can't complain, especially since we had the best Amiga mag here :great

I remember at school most people i knew owned Spectrum's, C64's and Amiga's.... I don't think i knew anyone who owned an Atari ST :confused and i had a mate who was into his Amstrad's.

Also the Nes, Gameboy, Master Sytem, Megadrive and Snes were pretty popular consoles to have back then.... though i think the console that got the most attention was the good old Megadrive :)

Not only can we not get misty-eyed, we don't even know what Lotus is. Non-NASCAR racing is DOA in the US, and such games would have flopped even if released on popular systems here.

Did I say "would have"? I meant DID flop.


Different cultures, different tastes too. North America got all crazy over the NES and other cart based consoles for many reasons but my betting favorite is this... After the famous "Crash of '83" computers actually were popular here. Commodore 64, IBM clones, Apple IIs and to a lesser degree Atari 8-bits had quite a foothold in North America.

Then came the NES and it's "Game Paks" and most importantly - no loading times.

It's not that setups that have loading are bad (see every modern day console) but from about '85 onward the culture here was "ME ME ME" and also "I want it NOW". Loading games was a non-starter to the culture on the whole, and as such consoles ruled the day.




Only now as some of us want to digest and absorb game libraries from systems we didn't use are people finding the older computer scenes. Just like now, I know quite a few Europeans that use Digital Press to help them catch up on what they missed in the console era.



What games did you play on it? NES is a 'great' system mainly because it has a good amount of quality titles... but if a game's good on it it's AMAZING and if a game's bad on it it's HORRENDOUS.

Didn't see a lot of middle ground NES games. The first TMNT and T&C Surf Design spring out as examples of mediocre NES games but honestly, there aren't many. It's rather black and white on that front.

I went from Speccy, to Master System, to Amiga... unwittingly every time with a system that was huge in the UK but really obscure in the US!

EDIT: Did the video game crash really have much impact in Europe?

I'm curious too. I know in Japan there was no crash at all since the Famicom was the first main console to go big there (Atari 2600 had very little impact in Japan)

iirc the crash of '83 mainly hit the US... i stayed loyal to my atari 800xl and later the amiga 500.....

I started off with Atari 2600 (Woody version!), then BBC Model B, I got given a ZX81 that I didn't do anything with, then I had a brief dalliance with an Atari ST, and then a couple of weeks later it was onto Amiga and i've pretty much stuck with the machine ever since.

Console crash didn't affect the UK, because the UK market was predominantly home computers, NES and Master System had only a minor role to play.

Obviously the arrival of Megadrive and SNES changed that, but home computers were still able to hold their own.

Problem with consoles is the games were so ridiculously expensive in comparison to the C64, Spectrum and Amstrad, which is why they couldn't compete.

Americans seemed to have more disposable income over the Brits.

I would say the amount of good vs bad released NES games was app. 20:80. The best besides the Nintendo/Konami stuff were good Japanese Fantasy RPG/Strategy games. Unplayable for us westeners unless the first fan translations were released.

Good point, and one I didn't think of. Although another tweak might be preference of where the price was loaded.

In the US to buy a console ($199 for a NES when my mom got me one in 88) to play $40-$50 games on seemed a cheaper deal than buying a $499 computer (Amiga) or even $1200 (Early MACs) to pay for $15-20 and under games.

That isn't really mathematically true, but marketing is powerful in the States.

And that's the way they sell their silly overpriced ink cartridges today. :laughing

Well... for some of us it was more like $0 for the games *cough* ;)

I don't know if the US ever really had a cracking/demo scene like Europe did - even for DOS games I can't ever remember anyone having copied games unless there was zero copy protection on the disk.

Of course C64 wasn't big in my area of the woods, Canada or the US, so I may be wrong here.

I remember copying some C64 and Speccy games using a dual cassette player/recorder (i was very young at the time and it worked! :D) A school friend told me about it years ago as he used the same method copying some old Amstrad games :)