Article about the Amiga in The Guardian today

[Fiery Phoenix]

It was pretty uncool looking - especially with that ugly modulator stuck in the back if you did not have a monitor!

[trixster]

I’m astonished by the number of people here who think the A500 is boring / ugly / uncool looking. There are better looking 80s wedge machines out there but to me (and my mates) the Amiga looked amazing, especially compared to the 8bit machines that came before. It looked like the future.

[CCCP alert]

The best coverage Amiga[1000] ever got was by Guy Kewney in PCW magazine.

[malko]

The Amiga was perfectly designed for it's time. Like the DeLorean

[damiraga]

I agree, the wording of this article was a deliberate bait and click. Just look at the number of comments already.
As for being visually cool or not, this was probably partially caused by Commodore not having an idea what market to target. The A1000 with its PC sidecar was targetting businesses, so it was not supposed to be cool. The A500 tried to fix this and for a few years, it did manage to be cool, at least in Europe - remember those designer's series of A500 or the cool game bundles/packs.

[Geordie-Jedi]

As others have said - I think that there is a certain amount of "Click Bait-iness" to the article.
However I'll bite

1. Which model Amiga "Looked Un-cool" ?
As they show both an A1000, and then later an A500 for the images in the article.

I'm probably gonna get lynched here but..............
BITD the A1000 may have "resembled" a boring beige IBM PC
(I know better now).

However the A500 looked Cool AF back then.

I'll also admit that the function keys on an ST did look canny funky and cool at the time.

I still think that the A1200 is a beautiful machine to this day !



2.

People loved the ZX Spectrum. They loved the Mega Drive

Yep, I had a ZX Spectrum myself (and also loved that as it was my first computer as a kid).
However those rubbery keys were a pain in the arse to type with
but still better than the older ZX81 keyboard !

The Megadrive and the SNES (the EU and JP curved versions) looked incredible !

3. Despite the Amiga "Looking Un-cool" (it F****g didn't !)
What was under the bonnet was phenomenal !

A fully fledged computer, who's GFX and multi-tasking abilities were unparalleled at the time.

Apart from the games, I spent countless hours using D-Paint, OctaMed, Vista Pro,
countless utilities to enhance my Amiga (the OS, and my use of it).

Dominic does try to redeem himself by listing some amazing Amiga games
and he does appear to have genuinely loved his Amiga.

But being or looking un-cool, the Amiga is certainly NOT !

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

If you wanted Mario / Sonic / Street Fighter II, did the Amiga have effective rival games, even if it had the technical ability to get pretty close?

Not really, but we had DPaint, Protracker, Lightwave. That sort of thing.

[Cris1997XX]

People are seriously reading these crappy click-baity articles...? I'll go back to playing some Amiga games, like everyone else should do.

[Megalomaniac]

The non-games side of what the Amiga could do will have contributed to it being 'cool' in those relatively niche circles (how many people had Amigas capable of running Lightwave, or the time and inclination to create anything that did it justice?). It was cool to know that (expensive derivatives of) the machines we had were used to make The ITV Chart Show, Babylon 5 and so forth, or that people made hit records with Amigas (though less so than with STs). Clearly, the Amiga trounced contemporary PCs for creativity, and undercut Macs on price by a long way.

Did it matter in the playground, though? Maybe my having got an Amiga relatively late, and at a relatively young age, is altering my perspective, but (not for the first time recently) I seem to hold a minority view here. Ultimately the Amiga was a relatively small deal on a global level - 50 million SNESs, 30 million Megadrive / Genesis, 5 million Amigas. It didn't feel 'cool' to have an Amiga when I did. 'Cool', in that secondary school (or younger) setting, was the biggest SNES and Megadrive, and to a lesser extent PC, games. The sad reality is, if our SNES-owning mates showed us Donkey Kong Country, or Mario Kart, or Super Metroid, or Zelda, what direct competitors were we to show them in response? Zool and Body Blows? Or the wonderful-but-much-more-complex F1GP or Eye of the Beholder?

We were the plucky underdog. And I wouldn't've missed it for the world. We had great games across a range of genres, often innovative and quirky, often things which couldn't have originated on consoles (Sensi, Lemmings, Cannon Fodder, Speedball 2, Settlers etc etc). Our games were cheaper, even before you consider coverdisks and PD. And you could do so much more with it than just games. All on a system that was far cheaper and far friendlier than a contemporary PC.

[Geordie-Jedi]

@Megalomaniac

You make some interesting points, and I think that you're right (in that) -

How "Cool" the Amiga was, would definatley depend upon -

1. How old you were, when you got into the Amiga

2. What year you got into the Amiga (what was the Amiga scene like)
when you encountered the Amiga.

3. What your previous history with computers and consoles was, when you first used or got an Amiga.

I think a lot of people my age (early 40's to 50's) hit the Amiga at the perfect time.

We had seen the beginning of the home computer age (with the 8-bit machines)
And were totally blown away by the 16-bit Amiga's and their capabilities.

So we could appreciated the quantum leap in SFX/GFX and all the other features that the Amiga had,
over the older machines and it's current rivals.

We could appreciate all the awesome games, and then delving deeper what the Amiga could really do
with its custom chips, multi-tasking OS, ect, ect.

Others who came to the Amiga later, didn't seem to appreciate the history
and the restrictions of the older 8-bit machines, so they just saw another "computer".

Not knocking anyone for that, but it does help if you were old enough at the time,
to fully appreciate the machine and what it could really do.


@Cris1997XX
You're probably right - we should stop whinging about articles in papers and just
enjoy using the Amiga (whether that's playing games or using utils or reading diskmags).

[Dunny]

I mean sure you might not think trading protracker mods was cool but it sure was in my school.

[Megalomaniac]

Admittedly I was never one of the cool kids, and my taste in music was at least partly the cause (or the consequence?), but if there was anyone trading ProTracker mods in my school, it's not a scene I was ever invited into. Someone my age did make music on his A1200, and did work as a DJ and producer for a time afterwards, so it certainly could be done.

I do slightly wish I'd been born 5-10 years earlier though, to live through the full evolution of home computing and home videogames. I started with a second-hand Spectrum +2 for my 9th birthday, and I do wish that start had instead been a 48k Spectrum or CPC or C64 (or second-hand Vic-20 or Electron, perhaps, to move on from in a couple of years, as I did to Amiga in reality) in its heyday at that age. There were times when (for example) Amiga Power disks contained versions of old VCS / C64 games (or the Spectrum games I didn't come across) when I did wish I'd been 'there' for the real thing originally - having delved much more into the earlier systems since, somehow I've been able to square the circle.

I can certainly understand how cool the A500 was when it was new, but that just wasn't my experience of the perception of the people around me. To a point, the Amiga not being cool when I had it almost made it more fun, maybe I've got an underdog complex?

[aeberbach]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

I do partly understand where Dom is coming from on some of this.

I preferred the look of the ST, with the Amiga's protruding modulator another point against it (though at least, unlike most STs, the mouse and joystick ports were in a sensible place). The A600 was an improvement for some, but for me looked too in-between computer and console. The A1200 was probably the sleekest looking of the mass-market Amigas for me. Other than the ugly BBC Micro I'd say most 8-bit computers looked better.

I totally agree. I always thought Atari industrial design was way ahead. The BBC though, that looks like a proper computer. Magnificent. (I have a Master)

And in mentioning games let's not forget the excellent Star Wars, very close to the sit-in arcade vector machine, and that the Amiga was definitely one of the best machines for Infocom adventures (the BBC didn't get those unless you count the few that can be run under CP/M if you have the extra hardware).

[Wavemaker]

We are not used to see the Amiga in mainstream media so we forget that's what passes for journalism these days... write a controversial, edgy headline that annoys people so they actually click on it AKA clickbait.

The aesthetics of the Amiga probably won't turn any heads and if we speak purely on that level the Spectrum was probably the closest to an 80s design icon. But in the real world of the 80's, the Amiga was cool because you could play the most incredible games on it while the Spectrum was a joke with chewing gum keys that would spit out BASIC for some reason when you pressed a key.

That reminds me a bit of how kids who are into retro fashion idealize 80's bedrooms as having some vaporwave aesthetics while in reality most of us had grandma's wooden furniture because, noone was going to post a picture of it on social media.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Wavemaker

Spectrum was a joke

Location: Poland = "Atarowiec" detected