Earliest memory of an Amiga...

[DamienD]

I think for me it was 89.

I had a Commodore 64 at the time with loads of games that my cousin used to download via phone line and give to us.

Then I went to a girls house who had an Amiga 500. I remember playing Double Dragon, Rockford and Thundercats, and being blown away

I think 6 months later my step-father purposed his mate's old A500 with 512KB expansion for the family.

[RichL]

Would have been around the same time, late 89 early 1990.

Me and my mate had Atari STs and another mate ‘dogger’ Dave (we were kids the word had no meaning then!) had an Amiga that he used to bring round to show off with.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by DamienD

Then I went to a girls house who had an Amiga 500. I remember playing Double Dragon, Rockford and Thundercats, and being blown away

Imagine being introduced to the Amiga by those games... because they're not exactly top-tier Amiga games, so your mind would continue to blow for some time more

[DamienD]

Yeah I know

Imagine though, having / playing Double Dragon on the C64 and then seeing it on the Amiga (and it's not a great port to be honest)

Once I had the A500, I think the first games we got were Defender of the Crown, Blood Money, F18 Interceptor, Firepower, POW and Shadow of the Beast.

I also fondly remember the first time I played Another World and Flashback.

[chip]

Ahhhh , Another World and Flashback ....... wonderful games !

I played them both on Amiga and PC from the beginning to the end

I dislike that today i am not able to play games anymore

[DamienD]

Originally Posted by chip

I dislike that today i am not able to play games anymore

Why?

[chip]

I don't know why actually

I simply don't like to play games like i did in the past

Something is changed, really no idea of what

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by chip

Something is changed, really no idea of what

It's probably not so much that you can't play games anymore, it's more that you need to rediscover what games you like today. Probably 100% different from what you used to like.

I suffer from that a little too, I can't invest emotionally into games the same was as I did when I was a kid and my reaction times are not what they were so I look for different things in games now. Games which allow short gameplay runs such as rogue-likes, or lore-heavy slow paced games such as Dark Souls. Or games which focus on building and planning, such as Factorio or Civilization. Or games with exactly my cartoonish sense of humor, such as Borderlands.

[chip]

You used the right words gimbal

I don't "feel" games like happened in the past

Perhaps i must discover the right games

[bwldrbst]

I must have heard of them but I was at a friend's place and we visited the kid over the road who had an A500. I think the first game I saw was Dragon's Lair.

My friend and I both managed to convince our parents we should swap our C64s for Amiga 500s.

[quantum8]

Dad decided having a computer at home was what we needed in 88 and he bought an a500 for us. Very glad he did!
Although Rick Dangerous was quite a tough game to jump straight into the world of computers with!

[outlawal2]

Not sure the year, sometime in the 80s but I walked into a computer shop that handled only Commodore equipment and in the corner was a 500 showing a demo of Dragon's Lair. Since I was used to CGA, this was AMAZING and led to my saving money for my first Amiga, the a500. Followed by the 2000HD. I don't believe the 1200 or 600 was available in the states (at least I never saw one) so I went the big box route and bought the 2000HD and lusted after the 4000 but could never afford that beast.

[DanScott]

1985.. The Micro Show or Tomorrows World on BBC TV... they were showing off the "capabilities" of the A1000, the next big thing in personal computers.

A few weeks later, there was one sitting proudly in a local computer shop in the city... used to go in there most days after school, to blag posters, and mess around on all the display computers that were set up.

Of course.. roll on 1988, and I was in another local shop to buy an Atari ST, having saved up the money I needed to get one... of course, there was the new A500 in the store, they were running some early demos... I had to plead with my mum to give me the extra £100 i needed I walked out with an A500

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by DanScott

Of course.. roll on 1988, and I was in another local shop to buy an Atari ST, having saved up the money I needed to get one... of course, there was the new A500 in the store, they were running some early demos... I had to plead with my mum to give me the extra £100 i needed I walked out with an A500

Sounds like you made the right choice to begin with

We did get the Atari ST at first, but after I kept nagging just how much better Amiga was, my father kept the Atari for himself and got me an A500. We then had two opposite camps in the family trying to prove the other one wrong.

It was a totally friendly feud and he did get me an A1200 eventually after seeing I had sticked with the platform for years.

[mydma]

1989 I had a CPC 464 that was gathering dust and an IBM compatible 8086 with CGA graphics that was used for college work.

A friend of mine lugged his A500 and monitor on a bus for 1 hour to show me it.

First thing I saw was the Red Sector Megademo. It had me at the "First there was exorcet...". The other that sticks in my mind from that day was the Mad Monks Megademo "are you there, speech in the amiga". Few months later I had my own A500. Really should look that dude up and thank him.

[Keithmac]

For me it would have been `89 ish. A lad brought his A500 into school for a music lesson.

Everyone was gobsmacked (me included!) watching it run Protracker and belting all the tunes out. Took a year or two but I finally got my own!.

I was running Protracker at the weekend and still to this day it`s amazing what people managed to squeeze out of 4 channels!. Can remember running OctaMED years ago on my accelerated A1200 and that was just as mind boggling (8 channels out of 4 hardware channels all by magic!).

Having a perfectly useable Workbench on 512kb is something Windows can only dream off..

[StingRay]

Everyone was gobsmacked (me included!) watching it run Protracker and belting all the tunes out.

Can't have been '89 as the first Protracker was released in 1990.

[Spyros]

My first encounter with the Amiga was in the first computer magazine I ever read, called Electronics and Computing in June 1985. It had a feature about operating systems with a GUI. There was a paragraph near the end that read something like "The Amiga computer, when released, will have a Graphical User Interface".

My first memory of actually seeing an Amiga was a couple of years later. I was in a cab passing through a street where all the computer stores were. I saw a monitor showing some pictures that looked like insane quality to me then, but I didn't know what it was.
Anyway, that was a Deluxe Paint slide-show with pics by Jim Sachs and probably others too.

[Misclegend]

in 1989 a computer shop had a video in VHS playing in loop in a sony trinitron monitor in the shop windows
it was seen from the outside and you did not need to enter the shop to look at it

in the video they were promoting a new fantastic computer with 4096 colors and stereo sound , the Amiga 500
for 1989 such video impressed the ppl because the 8 bits computer most ppl had only 16 colors, buggy gfx and mono sound


OK
the video featured the Amiga 500 running Dragon's lair and chessmaster 2000 in a 3D mode
about chessmaster 2000 they said that you surely can't beat the computer in the hardest levels
for dragons lair they showed some animations but not all the time it took to load from floppy

also they showed some women pics and some crap in Dpaint and deluxe music which they assured that you could compose any song on the staff and the computer would play it faithfully


TOday we now that all of that was bullshiiit propaganda, nothing of that was real
The games do not featured 4096 colors just 16 or 32, Dragons's lair was a total crap unplaylable game, the program deluxe music was slow and very buggy and incapable to play melodies faithfully because the Amiga have only 4 sound channels etc

anyways I had 16 years old which had only a spectrum 128k so I was really impressed by such crap so the next year I purchased an Amiga 500

[Turran]

I bought games for the C64 on tapes back in the day. He sold them as "Bestgames", so we had "Bestgames 1", 2 etc etc. Usually "Crapgames" as we called them.

Anyway, one time I was up there buying a new tape when he had an Amiga 1000 with the juggler demo running. That was it for me and I bought a 500 not long after that. Man, that was pretty.