Quote:
Originally Posted by dlfrsilver
in UK, even in 1990 the games on tapes where still big, on Amstrad CPC, but also on Spectrum and also C64.
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This all tallies with what i thought...
Maybe we forget how privileged we were to have Amigas, most people i knew had old 8-bit machines or consoles, only the richer kids had Amigas, they were considered something of a luxury product. Most parents just didn't want to shell out that much for their kids just to play games on. In the early 80s home computers were marketed as useful for all sorts of things besides games: business, educational use &c but i don't think it really fooled anybody, even though Amiga could do all these things it's not why most people bought them. My family wasn't rich but my dad was a bit of a technology enthusiast so he bought all the fancy stuff anyway...
Consoles were cheap. And we all got games for birthdays and Christmas presents, you can hardly give someone a pirated game for Christmas, my brother had a Megadrive and i had an Amiga, we had plenty of bought games for each, and by brother rented them from Blockbusters, too.
How anyone can think that a cartridge port would have done anything either to increase sales, or to improve the quality of the games, i don't understand. But as said previously, it would have had to be there from the start, and then if we had a disk drive anyway we've already got the equipment the console pirates had to shell out extra for... and then the A1200 would have came out and it would need a different cartridge port because the bus would be different so we wouldn't be able to play all our old games, and compatibility was a big enough complaint as it is but at least a disk-based system is platform-agnostic enough in principle to allow it. Sega did well to make the Megadrive able to play Master System games with an adapter (i don't know what it did, exactly)... imagine though, if Amiga could have played C64 games.
Also how could you market a computer with a cartridge port? It would mark it out immediately as a games console, making it a difficult sell as anything else despite its pricepoint and its capability.
The only person i knew at school who had a PC, had one with a monochrome display and just the beeper for sound, because his dad used it for business. When i went to Uni though, so many people had PCs, and they were playing games like Quake and Descent... of course it's easy enough for a student from a well-off family to convince their parents to get them a PC for University, even if it costs 3 times as much as an Amiga (although my A1200 got me through my degree just fine). Then there was the Playstation. There was no way the Amiga was going to compete anymore, on any level.
The real shame of it all is that we never found out just how good the Amiga was until it was getting quite old. If games had been becoming right off the bat, if we'd seen a slew of Shadow of the Beasts
with good gameplay back in 1987, we might have stood a chance. But what did we get? A conversion of Wizball that wasn't as good as the C64 version, and a half-baked copy of Super Mario Brothers with graphics the NES could easily have pulled off.