Most evil person against the Amiga development

[oscar_ates]

I was thinking who was the most damaging person against the Amiga development and its demise around late 90's.

1- Irvin Gould: Fired successful CEOs and hired yes-man puppet/money plundering/inept CEOs and managers.
2- Mehdi Ali: Totally inept/unaware of technology and computers and He was the high man of commodore for years. His only thinking was lining up his pockets with high salaries.
3- Bil Sydnes: Intentionally stopped AAA development, tried to re-pack 1985 Amiga in 1992 (A600) and sell it. People did not bite the bait. Might be a real hired saboteur from PC world to kill Amiga

[dirkies]

If you read the books from Brian Bagnall, you may discover these guys were more nuanced than most thought, and that it was more a "collective effort" that killed Commodore.

[saimon69]

For MODERN killers i might put definitely uncle Ben, for different BUT not too different reasons, like putting NDA, threatening other NG projects and treating Amiga IP like was the darn recipe to Coca Cola, while instead the platform survival and preservation would require more openness

[Bruce Abbott]

1- John Carmack: Refused to support porting Doom to the Amiga and repeated the lie that even an A4000 with RTG wasn't fast enough to do texture mapped 3D.

2- The XOR Patent troll: Prevented Commodore from selling the CD32 in the US, at a time when they desperately needed sales.

3 - The engineers in Commodore who spent years trying to create a chipset so powerful that it was beyond their design skills (Bill Sydnes was right to kill it off).

4 - Millions of Amiga fans who refused to spend any money on their machines (including buying software) while constantly complaining about its supposed faults, then jumped ship to the PC after seeing 1 or 2 games for it.

[saimon69]

Expanding:
5 - Hardware producers that kept accelerators and RAM prices high (sometimes artificially) to maximize profits on the dwindiling Amiga market
6 - Retro scalpers that made Amiga retro hardware price to Mars Orbit

[stevelord]

Continuing the expansion:

7 - Vendors who take people's money for stock they don't have, don't communicate with their customers, and sometimes just shut up shop after taking peoples' money with no product to show for it.
8 - Trademark and IP trolls who'd rather make money flogging a dead horse than open things up for people to build on it.
9 - Vendors who do little beyond acting as middlemen between buyers and builders, repairers etc. and just exist to inject a markup (more common than you might think).

[saimon69]

10 - Sellers of Fake/mislableled CPUs

[Predseda]

11 - Jay Miner dying too early.

[d4rk3lf]

12 - Mehdi Ali living too long.

[SunChild]

13- Steve Bak!

Every interview of him I've ever come across solely consisted of chanting how glorious the Atari ST was, and how atrocious garbage the Amiga machine was in comparison...

And he certainly seemed commited to prove his point, as — needless to say — every single one of his games on the Amiga was exclusively coded on the ST, and then straight ported to the Amiga with absolutely zero improvement or adjustment (something he was proud enough of to boast about in aforementioned interviews): Karate Kid 2, Goldrunner, Jupiter Probe, Battleships, Return To Genesis, Leatherneck, Spitting Image, Fright Night, Dogs Of War, James Pond, James Pond 2, Bad Company, Yolanda...

Even when mere reality forced him to acknowledge the ST slowly but surely loosing ground in favor of its main and much more capable opponent, he would still talk shit of the A1200, unfavourably comparing it with... The 3DO, of all things! How clever.


Still, as much as I hated his guts back in the day (I was after all just as dumb as the next teen, and I certainly took the Atari/Amiga war to heart at times), I must now recognize he and his games are also a part of my cherished memories now (*rose-tinted glasses on*).

He died in 2019 (aged 68), of diabetes. His son had rather moving words about his childhood with his programmer of a dad.
Well, RIP and so long Steve! I still enjoyed several of your games, flawed as they are, and I'm myself too old to hold a grudge now...

[jotd]

Isn't James Pond / James Pond 2 the work of Chris Sorell? And using the blitter and all, hardware scrolling... The disk format of James Pond was ST all right.

[Megalomaniac]

Steve Bak was hardly the only person to port games from ST to Amiga with no improvements - most Bitmap Brothers games added little beyond extra sound, for a start. I think Steve ported Robocod from Amiga to ST, and that version is horrendously unplayable - multidirectional scrolling jumps like that are probably unrealistic for the standard ST.

I know the A600 is still controversial, but I can't see how it was ever going to change the minds of people who'd decided to buy a console rather than an Amiga, plus it being released as a replacement for the A500+ rather than a budget alternative had the unintended effect of alienating developers and players of flight sims and the like until the A1200 was ready.

Ideally, Commodore would have got AGA ready for late 91 or early 92, as it was more than enough for the timeframe (perhaps in a £700 020 hard-drive-equipped mid-range system aimed at heavy games and light productivity?), and gone back to AAA for launch in maybe mid-late 1993, by which time it could have kept up with the PC and stole a march on the 3DO and Jaguar, though maybe not the Saturn and PS1

I don't think we need words like 'evil' on here. Most Commodore employees wanted the best for the company, and every machine attracted shysters of one form or another.

[SunChild]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Steve Bak was hardly the only person to port games from ST to Amiga with no improvements

But he certainly was the only one I ever knew to brag about doing it, proudly so...

[TCD]

All of us and them and everyone! Evil! To the core even!

Oh and I heard that blaming the customer for not liking your product is a foolproof way to ensure your product will stay relevant.

[SunChild]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

I don't think we need words like 'evil' on here. Most Commodore employees wanted the best for the company, and every machine attracted shysters of one form or another.

Reliving (and relishing in) the golden old days sometimes also mean reminiscing about our /foes/ and /wars/ (felt almost real at times)...

Besides, there's a difference between wanting the best for Commodore and actually doing good by it — hence some of the disastrous company choices. Aren't we entitled to poke fun retrospectively at some corporate execs?



C'mon man, don't take it too much to heart, where's your sense of humour? Remember it's all in good fun in here, right? Certainly nobody's wishing anyone else ill anyways...

[Torti-the-Smurf]

Petro Tyschtschenko (maybe not evil; but stupid )

(according to David Pleasance, which i believe in;
he is the reason why Amiga was such a success in Europe )

Listen to this interview and skip to 37:35
[ Show youtube player ]

I highly recommend listen to this interview !
We where so close ..... and then came Petro and F.it all up

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by SunChild

Remember it's all in good fun in here, right?

Oh, just wait until this thread hits around three pages.

[TCD]

Oh yeah: 14 - David Pleasance

[Torti-the-Smurf]

Originally Posted by TCD

Oh yeah: 14 - David Pleasance

You are kidding, right ?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Torti-the-Smurf

You are kidding, right ?

He's a person, so surely he's as guilty as anyone else.

Should we start the 'Most good person for the Amiga development' thread now?