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Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Tue Jun 16, 2020 9:03 am

I am not a fan of the history in that article at all. The video game crash of 1983 was not like some huge media event plastered all over TV here. I didn't know it was a thing until decades later. I got a C64 that year and there was no shortage of new games coming out for it regularly. 1983-1986 saw a ton of C64 games come out. I started High School in 1983 so it was a great place to find tons of new games and countless people to trade with.

As for the Amiga, it was never ever an issue finding games. Most of what Shot says above is probably closer to reality. There was no shortage of games or peripherals in the USA market. If it was such a dog here in the USA why were there so many US based companies making hardware for the Amiga? There was also no shortage of places selling Amiga stuff, at least in my small area. I don't get it.

<rant>
The article mentions buying a PAL A1200 and a step up converter. That is all pointless. First you don't need a Euro PSU if you buy a PAL Amiga. Any US power supply will work.
Second an NTSC A1200 can boot into PAL mode very easily from the early startup menu. Same with a PAL A1200 it can boot into NTSC mode. There are also boot disks for PAL games that put your A500 or A2000 into a mode that can support PAL for the games that are actually not available in NTSC land and I don't believe for a second it is 90% of games.

For the first few years of its life the Amiga was supported by mostly American game publishers. EA, Access, Accolade, SSI, Epyx, Cinemaware, Origin, Activision, Maxis, New World, Interplay, Sublogic, Microprose, Broderbund, Sierra just to name a small fraction of companies that were making software for the Amiga in the USA. There were also several companies that published PAL games to the US market, including EA, Mindscape, Advantage, Psygnosis and others. If it was such a terrible market why would they bother? I am betting it wasn't as bad as revisionists today say it was. In the past I have read that they only sold somewhere around 400,000 Amigas in North America for ALL models. Total and utter garbage. IIRC the Amiga 500 alone was touted to have sold in the millions. Are all these companies really going to pop-up for such a limited market as they say the North American market was? I don't buy it.
</rant>

PAL mode is really more useful for demos, in my opinion, since most demos on the Amiga were written in PAL lands.

User avatar
Mixel

Posted Fri Jun 19, 2020 7:05 am

Yeah the crash didn't seem to have any impact on the UK, I first heard about it from Youtube.. And.. IDK, parts of everyone's accounts don't mesh with my experience. Consoles, here in the UK seemed to be a complete non-issue until the 16bit era. Nobody cared much, they didn't have much store space or media attention. I was near the end of my family's Atari ST period before I even saw a NES, I knew like.. Two people with Sega Master Systems, but that was around the Megadrive launch, their parents were just being cheap :lol: .. And I still don't think I've ever played an early Atari console, nor knew anyone at all who owned one. Generally people had C64s, Spectrums, and weirdly - in my bubble - Amstrad CPCs. The multi format magazines didn't give much time to the consoles either until the 16 bit era? The Amiga definitely seemed to have a longer successful innings than any other platform save for the PC - which I have fond memories of going to friends houses and playing Commander Keen and Duke nukem and pointing out they're kind of.. shit? :D (Until Doom and X-wing came along, oh how the tables turned!)

Seems to me that it only really matters if you get a PAL or NTSC amiga if you buy one of the earlier models.. And even then it really depends on what you want to play. Occasionally I run my A1200 in NTSC just to speed up certain games and use more of the screen on games that just run slower and with a black border when set to PAL.. Usually I'll run at 50hz, as that's how I remember everything running, and some of my old favourites take advantage of the extra lines.

It seems crazy that people think the Amiga wasn't a success in the states.. I mean clearly it wasn't AS successful as it was here in the UK and Germany.. But.. There's so much US based software, and I remember seeing them on TV quite a lot, from all around the world. (Amigas used to turn up in Australian soaps a lot!) It doesn't add up that they weren't at least reasonably present?





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