Why did the Amiga fail establish itself in the U.S?

[7-Zark-7]

I'm sure this wouldn't have been the first time this question has been raised, but it's always a curiousity that for a machine designed in the U.S., why did the Amiga fail to establish itself as a games machine there??

I know that companies like Sierra, EA, etc. all supported the Amiga, & yes there were some fine games that emerged from the States,but it never seemed to enjoy the level of success,it did elsewhere.

In the face of the console onslaught there, do you think CBM should have made a cartridge console version to take on the Megadrive & Snes consoles??

Commodore weren't exactly big on spending money...Creating an Amiga cartridge console = money

They did however create a C64 cartridge console once upon a time, although it wasn't successful. There are a few of these floating around, but they're incredibly rare

[7-Zark-7]

They were big on losing money!!
I'll be curious if the U.S. members will have anything to say.
I do remember Zzap etc. all plugging the C64GS,& of course the ill-fated CDTV project.

I suppose it came back to the old argument of whether they chose to push it as a computer vs a games machine. But given the success of the C64 way back at the time of the Amiga's launch they already had the press...

[Bloodwych]

For some reason the Americans got into PC's instead of Amiga's (pre-wingcommander times), even though superior games were being released for the Amiga at the time.

Ugly CGA, 16 colour VGA, poor sound were holding many PC titles back and paled in comparison to the Amiga, which was by far the most superior/advanced machine during this early period.

I've never truly understood this issue either, and would love it if someone could educate me why American's missed out on the huge Amiga scene enjoyed over here in Europe.

How did the ST do over there as well? Atari's 16bit seemed more popular...........................

[Amiga1992]

Originally posted by 7-Zark-7

I know that companies like Sierra, EA, etc. all supported the Amiga, & yes there were some fine games that emerged from the States,but it never seemed to enjoy the level of success,it did elsewhere.

All the corker software came from Europe, and sometimes conversion to shitty NTSC machines was not arranged, thus the people in the US missed on some great titles. Most of the US titles are poor, I consider most of Sierra's games to be of poor, shovelware quality. Gameplay-wise tehy were untouched but they could at least take advantage of the machine's capabilities,. If not graphics-wise, at least sound-wise!

Of course, Commodore's marketing, as always, is to blame. I'd say that the Amiga's death upon consoles was suffered in Europe and not in the US! By the time the console craze hit european markets, in the US the Amiga was already suffering a lot, and a lot of users jumped to the shitty PC platform already.

I Know Tiwstin' will have a lot to say on the subject

[Ian]

...... Right

Marketing is the key to any machines/softwares success, people will by any piece of shit as long as it's been well advertised.

Example's are far too numerous to list here and peoples ideas of this will be vastly different, one example for me is the festering piles of shit that are the Tomb Raider games, but many people here may think it's a good game.

Am I off-topic yet??

How about those Atlanta Braves

There I'm done

[Twistin'Ghost]

Oh, yes...I do have plenty to say about it. Mainly because I lived through it. I was out and about all over BBS's stating the same kind of messages as I do now about Netscape vs. IE - and getting the same kind of reaction. People adamently and coarsely argued with me to the death that the PC was....well, the same thing most of you all say IE is.

Of course they were all as wrong as [SNIP!]

I have more to say on the real reasons and the points PC users made in their defense, what they didn't like about the Amiga, as well as some personal observations. Only I am at work and can't take enough time at one sitting to adequately respond to this topic, so I will revisit this thread when I get home later.

[Twistin'Ghost]

Ugh. Now I am home after working a 12.5 hour day and I'm too thrashed to reply here, but I will try and get it over with.

During those turgid years of battling with what we called 'Beamers' (IBM'ers), I was active in posting to bulletin board message areas. Every one of the good boards had a token machine wars base where it was almost always dominated by Amiga vs. PC (as opposed to the Amiga vs ST wars from the UK). Beamers would claim they had more apps and business software, even though all these arguers ever ran was games and telecom software. Beamers were the most miserable lot of users I have ever come across.

They would visit my offices where I used Amigas for graphics and video production. They would ooh and ahh over multimedia, which simply did not exist in any form on the PC for love nor money. They frothed at Eric Schwartz anims, they gasped at Euro demos, they had to be dragged away from the games -- yet they stood by their overpriced, overblown, buggy, cheesy PC's as if they were the most stable hardware man had ever created. They ran lame utils that promised multitasking because with a few keystrokes, you could halt one program and bring another to the front screen!!! They snickered at us lowly Amiga users because they had sound cards with hundreds of voices (although only one DMA channel and the rest were FM synthesis...something none of them seemed to understand...)

I would download a new game (for example, Gods or SWIV or Robocod) on a single floppy disk with arcade quality gameplay, gfx and sound, while they would download some poor strategy game that was 25 (high density) disks, barely managed to install properly, would take an eternity to configure the gfx cards and sound cards (Ad Lib? Disney? Soundblaster? PC speaker?), com port conflicts, mouse issues, unsynchronized sound errors, jerky static anims that consisted of 2-3 frames, etc. etc. etc.

Despite this troublesome task that the IBM 'sceners' lived with everyday, they stood by their bulky boxes to the end. And had the temerity to laugh at me and called my Amiga nothing but a games console.

How ironic. All they used their PC's for was games and BBS'ing. I was the only one who used my machine for other things (databases, word processing, video production, graphics, creating music, sound editing, creation of kiosks, emulation, etc.), and despite showing them all of these things, they still laughed at the Amiga and called it a toy! I hated them and still hate them because their ignorance spread and ultimately elevated their machines to dominance. The worst OS imaginable became the defacto standard just for copying the look of Macs and Amigas. It hurt. It really hurt.

(cont.)

[Twistin'Ghost]

There were other machines trying to jump into these battles. The Apple II GS crowd were tiny, but arrogant. They couldn't hold their own in the wars very well because they had no army. The ST crowd? We had one - count him - one user who defended the ST. He was a programmer and wanna-be scener named STratohackSTer. Nice guy, but almost as good at arguing as me. He tried to dominate the flames with technical lingo and bragging about how many dialects of BASIC he could code, or how well he knew 680x0 assembler, among other machine language variations. Whilst I couldn't keep up with that part, I was surrounded by brilliant Amiga coders who fed me my lines and I eventually buried him so bad, he stopped posting.

The Amiga had quite a cult following and appeared to actually have a shot at pouncing on the flimsy PC market. IBM was as hated by us as Microsoft is today, but they made some mistakes and allowed M$ to take over the world in the process. The Amiga was making earth-shattering headlines in all of the multimedia mags that were just starting up when desktop video became the buzzword of the moment, thanks to the Video Toaster and a handful of other brilliant tools. Amiga multimedia apps were dwarfing their Mac and PC counterparts in mags that catered to the genre, but all at once (literally from one issue to the next), the Amiga was abandoned in reviews. PC cards that were laughed at by these mags were in one flash suddenly being praised. Months later, CBM disappeared with the loot. Coincidence. Hehehe, yeah, ok. Whatever.

Medhi Ali (or was it Irving Gould) was quoted in one magazine explaining why CBM didn't market the Amiga, that if a product is good, it doesn't need to be advertised. ?!?!?!?

The dream machine never had a chance, people. And now we reside alongside all of the other 'retro computers' and consoles as a novelty of the past. A toy to play with. A handful of fanatics.

And a geek (in the ugliest sense of the word) named Bill Gates rules the world.

[Drake1009]

And unfortunately now that the geek has had the hold of the PC world so long it means that it's harder to move away to one of the adversaries. For example I'd like to run Linux, but what about all my games? I use the PC a lot for gaming and surfing. Surfing will work find under Linux, and gaming might work, especially with Wine, but how about the old games for Dos? I've finally gone through the battle of getting my Sb Live to work with my old dos games again outside of windows. That would be close to impossible if I used Linux

The people I was with at about the time of the Amiga/PC/ST battles were pure Amiga gamers. The PC was the underdog, and I must say that the only thing I heard of the Atari ST was the cruel jokes every now and then like "I love Atari owners. I just don't know how long they take to cook properly". At that time unfortunately I was still sticking to my C128 because I didn't have money to get a new computer. My brother on the other hand bought a PC. I liked the command line interface and captain comic, and that was about that. I still liked the games on the C128/64 and would prefer to have an Amiga any day.

By the time I got enough money to get a new computer other than the C128 times had already changed, the Amiga was hard to find any longer. My friends who had Amigas had sold them and gotten PCs and thus I got a PC as well and there played some of the great games which had been converted like Chaos engine and Gods.

[RCK]

- wine - for Win9x emulation
- dosemu - for DOS emulation

[Amiga1992]

Originally posted by s4murai
The answer is: emulation! I think VMWare (correct me if I'm wrong) is an emulator for Windows. I just don't know if it runs any games

Well, to run VMWare you need to install a copy of Windows, so it kind of beats the purpose. Of course you could pirate it, but what is the point of running Windows inside Linux?? Its the same thing! Even if you run Windows apps under Linux. The fact is that this OS has no neat support. There is no decent alternative to Windows because developers just cant get their heads out of their arses and keep producing stuff for Bill..

Of course you can get a Mac. That's what I'll be doing. costs money but does all I want to do. And I dont even have to cope with any of Bill's shite. And hey, Motorola inside! A complete way out from the Wintel garbage.

I agree with everything Twistin' said. I didnt live in the States back then but I was subscribed to a US mag and I could see what was going on. How one day, my Compute!'s Gazette turned into a SECTION inside a PC MAG, and a few months later, disappeared completely without notice. They kept sending me that PC shite even when it was USELESS to me, since I had a 128 and an Amiga. Lucky for me my uncle was paying for the subscription, so I let the mag keep coming while I kept buying The One, Amiga Format et al.

Hating Microsoft is the direct evolution of hating Beamers (nice word ) IMO. Back then I actually didn't hate them, I was feeling sorry for them and their poor hardware. Unluckily, around here, the Amiga was a luxury not to be had by most people, thanks to the insane prices put by the local Amiga reselers, so teh number of meega users I knew could be counted in one hand. We still had a nice laugh in expense of IBM compatible hardware.

One thing that still amazes me is the stubornness of them all beamers. How could they defend it even after seeing true evidence of the Amiga's superiority? Sheesh.

[Ian]

As most American's have probably discovered the joy that is one of the greatest computer's of all time, thanks to (win)UAE.

Too bloody late though to save Commodore's ass

I live in the US and I understand that when the Amiga first came out that it was not well advertised, but when the Video Toaster [by newtek] and Amiga Gen-Lock devices came out, there were rushes for them by professionals and video enthusiasts, they are still used alot today for television graphics [especially in schools, but also by professionals]

I propose a simple theory on this subject:

Micro$oft......shit products, great marketing.

Commodore......great products, shit marketing.

I (in America) remember Amiga. I loved Amiga...

I started on a TRS-80 color computer 2 (w/32K). Next was a "hand-me-down" Timex/Sinclair 1000. After that, a "hand-me-down"" VIC-20. This was in the day of Apple][ and C-64. I was poor.

Later, a guy my mother worked with got me into Macs. I wanted one, but I couldn't even afford a ][GS. And for all the Macs sharp looks and display, I missed the color. It was then I got a "hand-me-down" C-64. It was a great machine, but the disk access was sooo slow. I envied my pal w/ a Apple][e.

Finally, (a little too late) I discovered the Amiga. At a time when a black-white MacPlus was $2500 I could get an Amiga for $500, with color, great sound, and a monitor for another $400. I bought one and no longer felt the pain in my heart for a Mac. My Amiga did it better for so much less cash.

When Commodore "screwed the pooch" and Amiga started to die, I was heart-broken. I didn't like using a PC and was too poor (still) for a Mac. I gave up on being excited about computers and took up music (guitar, which got me more girl than computers ever did). In 1998, my wife (girlfriend at the time) wanted to buy a computer and out of Pc hatred I convinced her to buy a Mac, an iMac. It has been a great computer (finally a Mac I could afford!), but I still didn't feel the excitment I felt about computers, that I had not felt as strongly or as deeply as my Amiga experience.

Finally, I discovered BeOS (after being turned off by apple's move to Unix-style OS) I felt it all over again. BeOS rocks, but I discovered it a week before Palm's buyout of Be.

I still use Be and Mac sometimes, but as of late I have scouring the second hand stores looking for my favorite Amiga, the A600.
Which brought me here.

I had heard Amiga enjoyed a greater following in the UK, but until going through your forums... I had no idea how great it was.

I'm still looking for an Amiga (I must have the hardware). You guys Rock!!!

I'm glad my first true love has, still, such a strong following!!!

Rock&Roll,
John Norris

[jmmijo]

Welcome Mr. Norris, be sure to sign up on this great board. I'm pretty new to this board as well after dusting off my 500's and 4000, luckily they were in boxes in a closet. As soon as I connected up the 4000 and installed AmigaDOS onto the HD, I had a rush you couldn't believe, well, perhaps you can