How much time did you spend playing games on your Amiga vs creative tasks?

[ImmortalA1000]

Well I bought an Amiga 1000 to play Defender of the Crown and Marble Madness but also because of Digi-view.

Probably 50/50 for me during my ownership of my A1000 as my main daily use Amiga.

[Weasel Fierce]

In terms of hours, probably 60/40 games?

I used mine for school, primarily for writing stuff and I got my start writing creatively using Wordworth.

[ImmortalA1000]

Around 84/85 there were loads of educational TV programs and some of them focussed on computer graphics and animation. My interest in that and the Mac GUI is what made me choose a 520ST vs similarly priced Commodore 128+disc drive in 1986 (I already had a C64). So that was really a big plus, nothing like HAM mode existed on any other machine than Amiga and you can't really do digital photo-montage without that sort of screen mode below something like the Quantel Paintbox.

I bought a RAM expansion before 1mb games really existed I think. I was already done with ST Dungeon Master so never needed to play that 1mb Amiga game. It was specifically for the shared clipboard digi-paint and digiview allowed under multitasking.

The awesome 2.5D animation tools of Dpaint III were another thing that used up a lot of my time. I would build up looping anims of Sega arcade games using my own pixel art and Dpaint's zoom feature to create the 2.5D effect of sprite scaling hardware.

[Karlos]

I'd probably say 5/95 gaming/creative. I'd have short gaming sessions but I could spend days on end in OctaMED, writing code, messing around with dpaint, ppaint, etc.

[Megalomaniac]

Probably 90% games. I got Amiga Format now and then and did dabble with some of the serious software, learned the fundamentals of Blitz Basic (not going into programming, perhaps games programming, is a lingering regret I should probably put right), but I don't think I ever finished anything useful or creative with. In my defence I was 10-14 when Amigas were my main system, but someone I went to school with produced multiple songs on his A1200, so maybe it's a poor excuse?

[fxgogo]

It was 90% creative for me. Imagine, Deluxe Paint, Imagemaster, etc. I was all about 3D animation.

[gimbal]

100% gaming for me. I think I used the Amiga once to type up some kind of essay but that is hardly worth taking into consideration.

[zx80]

About 80% of the time I used my Amiga for gaming, the rest for programming and creative stuff.

[jizmo]

Perhaps around 20% gaming, 80% creativity. I played most games like I viewed demos: to be awestruck and inspired – and of course to study and mimic how they were made.

Most of my 'productivity' use revolved around Protracker (never became a musician, but got some of my music published in early mobile games), writing (graduated in the early 2000s as a screen writer) and Dpaint/Brilliance (eventually worked for 10 years as a game artist).

Amiga formed a solid foundation for everything creative I do still today. My life would have definitely turned out quite different if the platform and brilliant individuals therein would not have existed for the inspiration.

[Arne]

Mostly creative for me, primarily hobby gamedev, I'd say around 75%, but it's hard to know since I didn't exactly keep a log. The slower strategy and sim games that I played could eat a lot of time, but not as much as DPIII, Tracker, Programming and 3D software with day/week long sessions. I didn't do any serious DTP until the mid '90s Mac days, and never did any bbs or early web stuff on the Amiga as it required extra hardware. Demo disks didn't really circulate in my community, but I remember playing around with DemoMaker. I had some friends who primarily used their Amigas for gaming, but maybe that's just the impression I got... friends getting together meant gaming.

[ImmortalA1000]

I am surprised at the number of creative users, nice to see actually.

I remember when I worked the night shift at the bank (managing the batch jobs on the mainframe etc) I never slept more than about 5 hours so I had all this spare time until 10.30pm before I had to leave for work and I was home by 8.30am so I used to spend hours with Digi-view and Digi-paint in the afternoon and maybe some gaming depending how well/bad the Digi-view sessions had gone. Watched Miami Vice (with Amigas in them sometimes) then off to work.

My best friend never even loaded up Dpaint once, he was only interested in games too. My cousin was probably about 95% gaming too, but he did do something for some demo group called Alpina or maybe Alpina was his handle, dunno googling is no help.

[d4rk3lf]

Games first few months, but then I started to draw (amateurish) in Deluxe Paint, and I remember I was playing with some great program that had vectors, and you could animate them. Then I tried Octamed, and the first melody I composed was in Octamed on my Amiga.
Then it lead me to Real 3D.
I managed to write some 3D letters, some simple models (chairs, desk, lamps) made out of primitives, and I figured out how to animate them and render them.
Soon after my first 3D rendered animations, I sold Amiga (stupid - I know), my brother got PC, so I continued working in 3DS Max...
Today.. My living is with 3D animation (vfx)... all started with beloved Amiga.
All above is with A1200...
Currently, I am a proud owner of A500, that I purchased several years a go, and I still use it.

[phx]

When we talk about the 80s and 90s: Probably 70/30 creative (mainly coding and research). Although I frequently had some extensive Civilization, UFO or Player Manager sessions. Since 95 the coding reached nearly 100%.

[TCD]

I coded a bit in AmigaBasic (one lost text adventure got quite elaborate), but I'd say it was 20/80 creative/gaming + watching demos for me.

[chip]

0% Gaming, 90% Watching Demos, 10% Ripping music modules

[itsmedoofer]

20% University stuff, 20% BBS related stuff (FidoNet mainly) the rest on Frontier, point click adventures and of course Demos...

[Predseda]

I think 70 games / 30 other stuff (mostly Dpaint and AMOS). Later on I used to write game reviews for a local magazine in Cygnus Ed

[ImmortalA1000]

First thing I ever loaded on my ST was Neochrome but I can't remember if my used A1000 came with Dpaint II. I remember having an original of Dpaint II but don't remember buying anything other than Dpaint III in 1990. If it came with Dpaint II that's probably what I loaded up first.

Pretty sure first game was Marble Madness, did play that a lot for sure.

[Oriens]

30 gaming / 70 coding demos
Still today I prefer coding instead of gaming (in fact depends on the game, currently I'm 100% cyberpunking )

[outsiderz]

good question. 90% gaming