Article about the Amiga in The Guardian today

[mark_k]

https://www.theguardian.com/games/20...y-uncool-amiga

[DisasterIncarna]

nice article, and from Dominik Diamond no less.

[dreadnought]

I know he overall praises Amiga in this article, but it's really hard to read past "I read the reviews and was surprised at the appearance of two words I never associated with the original Amiga: cool, and love." which forms the general premise of his musings.

WTF? Amiga was as cool as all get up and really, really hard not to love. Both ST and A500 aesthetics were really good compared to the rest of the bunch (Even the x000 models), including Macs and PCs, definitely not "uncool".

So, while I appreciate that there is an article in the Guardian in 2024 about Amiga at all, its whole premise is rather flawed.

[DisasterIncarna]

"looks cool" varies person to person, he did say the games were awesome/cool, he just didnt seem to click with the visual appearance of the a500.

[khph_re]

The ST did look cooler.

Don't know when he got one, but the Amiga was certainly lusted after by many from '85 till '91? Probably not for it's looks though, it's just a pc keyboard with depth! Was certainly seen as uncool a wee bit after that though.

Really it was the PS1 that made gaming cool, wipe out, lara croft etc.

Notice he's only talking about games, obviously knows nothing about it's creative uses.

[trixster]

Anyone describing the Amiga as uncool and unloved isn’t qualified to write an article about it, in my opinion. And I don’t care that in this case it’s none-other than Dominik Diamond, who really should know what he’s talking about.

As a teenager in the Amigas golden years the Amiga was one of the coolest and most-wanted machines you could possibly yearn for here in the uk. It wasn’t until the snes came along with SF2 that the magic of the Amiga started to dwindle in playgrounds a little, but it remained a highly coverted machine amongst everyone I knew.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by DisasterIncarna

"looks cool" varies person to person, he did say the games were awesome/cool, he just didnt seem to click with the visual appearance of the a500.

Nah, I think he just had this "uncool and unloved" high concept for an article and then tried too hard to write it from this angle.

Sure, looks are subjective, but honestly what other machine from that era looked cooler and more modern than Amiga 500? maybe one or two, definitely not many. And definitely it did not "looked like something you’d see a bank teller use, but it withstood heavy battering", that's just a bad hyperbole which evokes Soviet Era computer terminal, but not Amiga.

And saying that ...

It might seem strange to say the Amiga wasn’t loved, because a lot of people bought and used one. But people use things every day that they don’t love: electric shavers, patience, door handles, the train.People loved the ZX Spectrum. They loved the Mega Drive. If you talk to an owner of any Nintendo machine, from a Game Boy to a Switch OLED they sound like Romeo talking about Juliet, Meredith Grey talking about Derek Shepherd, or Elon Musk talking about himself.
As someone who was actually there for the 80s and 90s, the Amiga just didn’t enjoy that kind of love. Why? Because it looked uncool.

...is just crazy talk.

[TCD]

As someone who was actually there for the 80s and 90s, the Amiga just didn’t enjoy that kind of love.

Did he live in a parallel dimension?

[Retroplay]

Bizarro world, most likely.

Where I'm at, in the mid to late 80s/mid 90s, Amiga was the system, nothing else came close to it.

Also, this comment

Phwoar … vintage 80s Commodore Amiga 500 games console

Console... Yeah, no.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Retroplay

Console... Yeah, no.

Indeed, what a bunch of lamers

[Galahad/FLT]

It's nice the Amiga got featured, but any suggestion the Amiga wasn't "cool" is weird as I thought it was cool as fuck when I saw it for the first time, I can appreciate that as it had more and more competition it wasn't the coolest anymore, but when the A500 was released, coolest shit I saw.

[kriz]

Indeed it was extremely cool, pc lamers were not even in the same league back then

[malko]

Nice to see an Amiga related article in such a newspaper.
But for sure he is wrong in one of his point : the Amiga was cool and loved and I don't know one user from BitD that was not liking using it as a daily basis. So for sure the coolest of all given all the amazing available applications and games this computer was able to feed us with.
He is on the other hand correct while saying that you only have to look at console controller to break them and that the Amiga was made of different material. Which means that even in its conception it was pampered

[Amigajay]

Does seem a strange comment from Dominik, as anyone who lived through that era knew full and well that the Amiga was loved as much if not more than any console, purely on it’s multi-use capabilities, the average user used the Amiga more than they used a console.

Perhaps he had an off day and wrote that article just comparing looks of the machines, yes it doesn’t look as cool as a Mega Drive, but was cool in every other avenue.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by khph_re

The ST did look cooler.

I suppose, if you think diagonal function keys are cooler... ;-)
To me, I always thought they both looked about the same.
Wedge shaped computers with built in keyboards.

[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.

More broadly though, for most of the time I had it, at secondary school age, it felt like the uncool plucky underdog, the last 'home computer' fighting the consoles and PCs. I think it was cool before the Megadrive came along, certainly less so after the SNES. By that time it was less cutting edge, no longer the very best at console-style games - like it or not, Mario, Sonic and Street Fighter II were what was cool, and the Amiga lacked equivalents that could compete on both audiovisuals and gameplay for most of its lifespan - our great platformers were often run 'n' gun (Turrican, Ruff 'n' Tumble) or quite old-school in style (Rainbow Islands, Rodland, Qwak, Rick Dangerous) or a bit quirkier (Putty, Soccer Kid). Shadow Fighter and Fightin' Spirit showed what the Amiga could do for 2D SFII-style beat 'em ups, but most of the world didn't care by then. A stock A500 from floppies was certainly behind an expensive PC for Sims / adventure/ strategy etc by 1992 too, even if only the rich kids (or those whose dads needed one for work) had them.

And yet, most of the most fondly remembered Amiga games are from that later era where the 16-bit consoles and VGA-based PCs were rivals. It was still good at most things, but it excelled as a system where new, original ideas with innovative gameplay over graphics and sound could still thrive. Dom mentioned Lemmings, Cannon Fodder, Sensible and Speedball 2, you can add Chaos Engine, Hunter, Settlers, Worms and Pinball Dreams, for starters. Likewise earlier innovations like Populous, Kick Off, Defender of the Crown, Stunt Car Racer or Dungeon Master or North & South (ST originally those last 2, admittedly). Often unspectacular to look at, but great fun. Could those games have originated on consoles? Plus some great PC ports (Civ, Dune 2, the Lucasfilm adventures, the Beholders) and the odd decent platformer or shooter, and the Lotus games and the like. Maybe we put too much stock in the thoughts of those who were there in the earlier days, when the Amiga lead on the technical quality of its games, but hadn't reached the kind of mainstream presence that the C64 and Spectrum had in Europe, and when perhaps most of the games generally regarded as having truly great gameplay were still to come?

All for less than half the price of a PC, and with cheaper games than a console, even before you consider coverdisks or PD - and all the other stuff from word processing to making music to programming. It may not have been cool for at least half its heyday, but it was pretty loved by those who had it.

[Daedalus]

Yup, I think many in the community are just feeling a little personally attacked with this. Maybe that was the intention, who knows... But as some have said, he's talking about the looks, and indeed the A500 is pretty bland-looking, and does have more in common with an oversized PC keyboard than any console then or now.

The games were cool. The experience was cool. The case was functional and beige.

[copse]

What is cool really? The Apple people thought it was cool and they were cool. If you look at cool as being the posturing and marketing of Apple, and anything else as being not cool, it could be considered correct and not meaningful to not be "cool".

[fxgogo]

As I have said elsewhere, this felt very click baity. The Guardian is seeing traffic on retro articles way above other content and they are now pushing for more of the same. They are coming unstuck by not actually understanding the core history and community.

[Megalomaniac]

I didn't feel like I had the 'cool' system when I had an Amiga at secondary school age, in the age of the SNES and Megadrive on one side and Wing Commander towards Doom on the other - which is the era that most of the greatest Amiga games were made (as a quick benchmark, only 34 of the 100-vote OCS top 100 on LemonAmiga are from 1990 or earlier, and only 4 of the top 30). I certainly struggled to convince friends to get an Amiga rather than a console, or a PC if they were rich. 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?

When the competition was C64/Spectrum or EGA on one side and Master Systems and NES on the other, the Amiga was cool (I'm not sure the ST ever was, except in music-making circles), but I wonder if the people from that era are a bit louder than the people whose main Amiga era was slightly later?