It couldn’t last however, and the emergence of Japanese consoles like the Sega Mega Drive and Super Nintendo put an end to the Amiga’s good run. Being an ST owner at the end of the ’80s was a depressing experience, as more and more smash hit titles became Commodore exclusives. The Atari ST was the leading 16-bit home computer when the Amiga 1000 launched in 1985 but slowly lost market share. Every schoolchild of the period will have known some lucky so-and-so with an Amiga at home, and playgrounds up and down the country hummed to the tune of kids arguing about which was best – Commodore’s machine or the Atari ST Six million units of the A500 were sold, most of which will have been used to play classics like Shadow of the Beast, Speedball 2 and Turrican rather than running boring spreadsheets and word processors.Īs a kid growing up in the late ’80s and early ’90s, you will have fallen into one of two camps – the have and the have-nots. The first model – the Amiga 1000 – launched in 1985 at a star-packed event which included the likes of Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry, but it wouldn’t be until the release of the A500 in 1987 that the machine really took off, leaving its bitter rival the Atari ST well and truly in the dust.įurther hardware variants would appear – including the A500+, A600 and A1200 – but it would be the standard A500 edition which confirmed the brand’s status as a true gaming legend.

Doting parents purchased the system under the pretence of assisting their offspring with their homework, but the computer was instead used for mammoth gaming sessions thanks to the flood of amazing games it played host to. The Amiga celebrates its 30th birthday this week – a fact that will probably make many people reading this feel very old indeed.Ĭommodore’s seminal 16-bit platform was initially marketed as an affordable home business machine, but was something of a Trojan Horse for many youngers. OPINION: Damien McFerran looks back 30 years after the Commodore Amiga was launched and the games that made it a legend.

Amiga game character little man