All language subtitles for From.Bedrooms.to.Billions.2014.1080p.BluRay.x264-nikt0_track

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

The demo which you're about to see,
and hopefully participate in...

(Decuir) 'The original inventor
of video games, Ralph Baer.'

He was sitting there working for
a defence contractor in the United States

In Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1968,

and he was thinking that this technology
would let us bring stories home.

And so he designed a box
called the Brown Box,

which was all discrete.

There were no microprocessors yet.

And he didn't use
any integrated circuits at all,

he just built discrete circuits

that would create simple objects
on a TV screen

and let a controller move them.

And he sat there, he got it to work,
he got a lot of broad-ranging patents,

but his company was
an aerospace company,

they didn't know anything at all
about consumer electronics.

So finally his company
hooked up with Magnavox,

and they came out
with the Magnavox Odyssey.

'Magnavox presents Odyssey,
the electronic game of the future.

'Odyssey easily attaches to any
brand TV, black-and-white or colour,

'to create a closed-circuit
electronic playground.'

(Decuir) That was demonstrated in
the San Francisco Bay area in 1972,

and Nolan Bushnell saw it,
and he was inspired.

Now Bushnell had been thinking about

bringing video games to the arcade world,

and he'd been starting trying to figure out
how to take Computer Space,

which was done with large computers
on vector monitors,

and trying to come up
with something that did that.

And that was all discrete logic too.

But then he saw
this easy, accessible game

and he took the idea and he asked
Al Alcorn to build an implementation of it,

and that became Atari Pong.

That put Atari on the map.

So that got Atari

to be the leader
in the arcade video game business,

as opposed
to the home video game business,

which Magnavox was the pioneer in.

Then they started building
more complicated machines.

They started with random logic,

and then they started experimenting
with microprocessors.

So then that set up a square
that was incomplete.

There were home Pong-type games.

There were arcade Pong-like games.

There were more complicated
arcade video games

and the place to complete was,

"How can Atari, and their competitors,
bring the complicated games home?"

That market problem was the one
that the Atari 2600,

codenamed Stella, was intended to solve.

(Kaplan) Nolan bought
a group of engineers

called Cyan Engineering.

They were up in Grass Valley:
Steve Mayer, Larry Emmons, Ron Milner.

They were the three engineers,
and Nolan tasked them

with building a consumer version
of a coin-op game.

They hired Joe Decuir,

and the four of them
built a giant bread board.

It was always gonna be a console,

we knew it was gonna be programmable
in some fashion,

but we were under a lot of pressure

to keep the bill and materials down.

To make it programmable
would have meant

to have some built-in ROM
with a language.

We would've needed some RAM

to put the programs
that you were gonna create in.

That would have made it more expensive.

And we would've had to put in the cost
of some kind of keyboard controller.

And we thought it was too big a jump

to go all the way to a personal computer
the first time.

Jay Miner and Harold Lee
were the main chip guys,

and Jay Miner did the whole design.

So he took that giant bread board,

and he was gonna push it down
to a single chip.

He basically produced the TIA chip,

which was the
Television Interface Adaptor chip,

which shrunk 150 chips on a circuit board
in an arcade machine

into one little tiny chip.

So he had to throw out a bunch of stuff
that the Grass Valley guys had done,

so we ended up having to do the software
and of course we complained bitterly.

"Come on, Jay. I don't wanna write
horizontal syncs every line, just do it!"

But the things that he threw out

perfectly set up so that we could do
what we ended up doing.

From the first crude
Tank and Pong games, till Pitfall!

We could've done a game
like Pitfall! graphics in 1976.

We just didn't know how.

The machine didn't change
over those six years, we did.

And so, part of that, or most of that,

was because Jay left off
a whole bunch of stuff.

People got very creative within the first
two, three years of the lifespan of the VCS.

And people did absolutely amazing and
staggeringly inventive things with that.

(♪ SQUEEZE:
"Take Me I'm Yours")

♪ Take me, I'm yours

♪ Because dreams are made of this

♪ Forever there'll be
a heaven in your kiss

♪ Amusing belly dancers
Distract me from my wine

♪ Across Tibetan mountains
Are memories of mine

♪ I've stood some ghostly moments
With natives in the hills

♪ Recorded here on paper

♪ My chills and thrills and spills... ♪

(Decuir) We were aware of Apple.

We knew they were going after
the appliance computer market

with much higher costs
and much different market.

You have the Apple II,
which was a really advanced computer.

It had all kind of capacity for expansion

that would help it do things for
business and science and office workers.

Meanwhile, Apple had cultivated a really
strong image as a computer company.

Then you have the first Atari,
which is very limited,

and gave them a reputation
as a game company.

(Decuir) And we went after
the console market,

because we were
an entertainment games company.

And it helped us a lot
that we were thinking in those terms,

and not in terms of productivity software.

We re-wrestled that problem later
with our next machine.

'Atari brings the computer age home.'

- Gotta run, gotta go!
- Late again, Dad?

'With an Atari home computer...'

Have a nice day at the office!

'...you can easily work at home

'or open your home
to a world of possibilities.

'In fact, the hardest part about owning
an Atari home computer isn't how to use it,

'but who gets to use it.'

Market's closed, Dad.
Mind if I do my work?

Hey, nope, no problem.

'Atari Home Computers.
We've brought the computer age home.'

Jay Miner had become
sort of head of the chip group.

Jay was the heart and soul behind
the Atari 400 and the Atari 800.

When I was programming the 800 in 1980,

I was stunned by just how clever
the design was.

The Atari 400 and 800
personal computer systems

have outstanding graphics capabilities.

These features are made possible

by three unique,
large-scale integrated circuit chips.

Jay had divided into three chips this time,

cos he couldn't fit it all into one chip.

So there was a new version of the TIA,

which we called the Colleen TIA.

It handled sprites, missiles, balls.

The ANTIC was the stuff that overflowed,

that did more of the playfield graphics.

And the ANTIC had something that
we invented called the display list.

So you give it a list of instructions,

very simple ones,
telling it what to do on each line,

so we didn't have to write kernels
to load the register.

So this display list would load
those registers for us every line.

And it controlled the line by itself.

And the third chip was the POKEY chip,

which stands for
"Potentiometers and Keyboard".

So it did the joysticks, the pots,

the keyboard, and the other peripherals.

I think the most important thing
about those early chipsets

were that they recognised that

computers could be about
a lot more than just crunching numbers.

That computers could be fun.

Computers could be
engaging, exciting, creative.

And that it required a degree
of technical ingenuity and creativity

that people simply weren't putting
into computers at that point,

certainly not into computing technology.

I mean, you look at
something like the Apple II.

It was a good computer,
it would run spreadsheets and so on,

and even some primitive games.

But there was a lot missing.

And a lot of the stuff that was missing
was in the Atari 400 and 800 chipsets.

(Kaplan) At Atari,
Warner Communications bought them,

they installed Ray Kassar as president.

Best is yet to come, we have
terrific games coming out next year.

We have E.T. for example,
a wonderful love story cartridge.

I think there's great interest
in home computers,

which Atari makes, and video games...

They were essentially owned
by a entertainment media conglomerate,

and Ray Kassar came from that culture.

Now you have to realise

that Nolan Bushnell
and Joe Keenan and Al Alcorn,

they were basically goof-offs.

Not quite hippies,
but you'd call them relaxed, casual.

They smoked dope.

We went up to Nolan's suite
where we smoked a few joints.

And so that was the Atari that we knew.

Ray comes in
with his, you know, $3,000 suits.

He had a chauffeured limousine
that drove him up to the city.

Ray Kassar was not a technical guy,
he came from the fabric business.

And he was a vice-president
at something called Burlington Industries,

that makes towels and socks.

He thought that you sold computers
to women in designer colours.

He gave a lecture to us
in Atari Engineering

in late January, early February of 1979.

And he told us this.

Most of the women who worked at Atari
in engineering left within a month.

They really just did not understand

how to treat developers
and how to do engineering.

He said, "I've worked
with towel designers at Burlington."

And they make those designs on
the towels, the fancy patterns and stuff.

And he said,
"They consider themselves artists.

"They think it's their art on the towel
that sells the towel."

And he said, "I had to tell them,
'You guys are a dime a dozen.

"'I could hire any idiot to design towels.

"'And I wouldn't have
to pay them anything."'

And so he basically said
we were a dime a dozen,

he didn't need to pay us anything cos
he could hire anybody to do what we do.

It was just like towel design.

And Jay Miner said,
"I don't like where this is going."

Jay Miner wanted to continue the work
he'd done on the Atari 800.

It was clear they weren't gonna be able
to make any new technology at Atari,

so he just left, and actually went to work
for a company making pacemaker chips.

Zymos was a chip company,
they made chips.

In those days, you do RAM chips,

you do peripheral chips,
any kind of chip that the company can do.

While I was at Activision,
after I finished Kaboom!,

I really wanted to do
a new game system.

Atari still had not come out with the 5200,

they were still selling 400s and 800s.

And Doug Neubauer had called me up
one day, and we were talking about it.

I said, "Look, I wanna leave Activision,
I really wanna do a new game system."

We both knew Jay Miner,
we talked about it.

And he said, sure he'd like to do it.

Bert Braddock, the president of Zymos,
he liked the idea.

So we put together, like,
a little business plan,

and he presented it to his investor,

who was a man named O.W. Rollins.

He had put a lot of money into Zymos,

so Rollins said he'll invest money.

It was just purely a game machine
with joysticks

and a simple console, nothing else.

I guess, at the time,
with Atari doing so well

and everybody was talking about games,

they really wanted to invest
in a game console.

It looked like it was gonna do
very well for them at that time.

June of 1982,

Rollins hired an executive search team
to find a president.

And they found Dave Morse,
Tonka Toys in Minnesota.

And so Dave and I worked on
the business plan over the summer,

and they basically approved it
in September.

So in October of '82,

Rollins agreed to spend $3 million
to fund, at that time, Hi-Toro.

This is, of course, the season to be jolly,

but the folks at Mattel
and Warner Communications

and a lot of other companies

are having trouble
getting into the holiday spirit.

Sales down dramatically
for home video game cartridges

and investors are bailing out.

Scott Barrett reports.

(Barrett) 'Warner Communications
down one and a quarter points today,

'16 and three quarter points yesterday.

'Mattel down
seven and a quarter points today.

'Both companies have one important
Christmas season product in common:

'home video game cartridges...'

What happened with Atari was that
they got really big really quickly,

and then they forgot that technology was
gonna keep going, it was gonna get better.

They started to think of their Atari
video computer system, the 2600,

kind of like a television,

thinking there's gonna be one of these
in every home, it's like an appliance.

And Atari, nevertheless, felt like they could
ride that horse for years and years.

Naturally, it was going to hit a wall
very, very quickly,

and they overbuilt the company
around that assumption.

And they didn't really plan that
effectively for a next generation.

And so it went up really fast, and then it
turned around and it came down really fast.

Just like the laws of physics,
what goes up must come down.

And then they made a great big implosion
when they crashed,

and they kind of sucked the entire industry
down with them for a while.

All the game companies were losing money.
Mattel, 20th Century Fox, Hasbro.

All of those others companies,
Imagic, they all went broke.

And retailers and distributors
refused to carry anything.

We were telling our sales people
at Electronic Arts

to go find all the guys
who are carrying Atari.

They came back and said, "They're all gone.
They all went out of business or shut down.

"They don't want to do anything
with any more video games."

It was very difficult in the early '80s
trying to rebuild all of that distribution.

Nobody, no single American
toy store, distributor,

nobody wanted to hear
the word "video game."

They'd all lost their shirt,
and they would never touch them again.

There is one encouraging note
for the industry,

while software sales may be slumping,

and of course "software" is
a computer buff term

for that video cartridge
that contains the game program,

hardware sales are still soaring.

Most hardware can double
as a personal computer,

leading most optimistic
industry experts to conclude

that video game players
may be tired of playing

and are now getting down
to the serious business of computing.

And so, the only market available
at that time really was the computer.

If you started in 1983
with an idea for a new company,

you could not do a video game.

There was just absolutely no possibility,

because there wasn't a distributor
or retailer that would talk to you.

And the Consumer Electronic Shows,
they disappeared.

If you went to the show
in, say, June of '83,

there were almost no video games
there at all.

Jay Miner had already begun a project

to design a low-cost super computer

based on the Motorola 68000 chip,

which at that time, was only being used
in high-end workstations.

Dave learned about it,

and the two of them decided
to go back to the original backer

and propose that they make
a few changes to the strategy,

but basically fund
the continuation of this project.

The changes were not only to target
the low-end business market,

which is what Jay had in mind,

but also to target
the home computer market,

including the ability
to do dazzling video games.

So that was the element that Dave added.

Dave Morse was what I consider
to be a marketing genius,

well under-considered in terms of, I think,
an awful lot of people.

Very creative.

And his directive to us was he wanted
to be able to animate cartoons in real time.

So we again listed,
"What do we need for a game?

"What do we need for productivity?

"Let's make sure we can cover
both of them in the same set."

At that point, the only real game in town
in the low-end business market

and also high-end home market
was the Apple IIe.

They had owned that market
for a long, long time,

and Dave felt it wasn't
a terribly exciting computer.

There was also
all the Commodore computers.

And Commodore was very big
at the time.

They had sold millions and millions
of these small home computers.

'Ghostbusters!'

So the idea of taking that idea
and really extending it

and giving those a lot more
graphic capability, a lot more power,

you know, the multitasking
as well as really good sound,

it was just the next step in the evolution
of personal computing.

(Decuir) I have a notebook from Atari
which has a preview of the Amiga.

I wrote that preview in June of 1979.

And so when Jay called me up
in the fall of 1982 and said,

"Let's come up with a new machine"'
I was ready to go.

So I went and met Jay in October of 1982
and we started planning out this system.

So I worked as a consultant
for Jay Miner.

I was badge number three
at what was then called Hi-Toro.

While I was working with Jay
finishing up the clock chip at Apple,

and of course we'd go out for lunch
every now and then,

I was in the Macintosh lab.

And my lab bench was
very near Dan Kottke's,

another early engineer
on the Macintosh project,

and he was adding a test connector
to the Mac motherboard.

And Steve Jobs comes over
and says, "What's that?"

There are various stories
about Steve Jobs

walking up to an engineer and going,
"What are you doing?"

And Dan Kottke says,
"I'm putting in a test connector."

And Steve goes, "What test connector?
What do you want to test?" And he says,

"Well, various things, like an option,
for instance, for a colour adaptor."

And then Steve goes on this rant

about how the Mac is a black-and-white
high-resolution monochrome computer,

"It'll never have colour,
I don't want you playing with colour.

"Please remove that test connector."

Right? And Steve rants about this
and goes tromping off.

So I'm saying, "OK, Steve doesn't
want to do a colour Macintosh."

At the next lunch I went to with Jay,
Jay says,

"I've got some investors who want to start
a company to do a colour game machine."

And I'm going, "Hey, I've always
been interested in colour,

"and Steve says he's not interested in it."

And so, I jumped at the opportunity
to do something new and creative.

I worked in the early stages, so I worked
with Jay and Ron and very few other people.

And we spent an awful lot of our time
on the whiteboard...

Saying, "No, no. That's all wrong"'
and erasing it all.

We went through several weeks there

of just throwing ideas around
of what we wanted to do.

And then we'd go to the giant drawing table
and start drawing all this stuff,

because we didn't have good
computer-aided design tools yet.

We were still designing on vellums

and we'd get these big tables
with fluorescent lights under them

and do it manually by hand.

It was just the three of us
for several months

until we had all the design,
except for maybe three features, finalised.

At that time
Amiga was looking to expand.

I go down there,
I get out at the Sunnyvale train station,

there's this big old guy with a beard,

in a Lincoln,
and this little dog sitting at one window.

And I thought,
"This is an interesting guy."

And then I guessed correctly

when he asked me the difference
between a flip-flop and a latch.

And we hit it off.
So I said, "I gotta work for this guy."

They invited me to come out and interview
and I blew off their invitation twice.

Two times!

I said, "OK, I'll think about it."

And then I decided I wasn't gonna do it
because it was just too wacky.

It's a bunch of people out in California,

they're going to go and create
a new computer,

and, sure, this is a great idea.

And my family, especially my mom,
were warning me, "Out in California..."

"California is the land of fruit and nuts"'
is what they all used to say to me back then.

And though I blew them off twice,
they kept calling.

Thankfully, they called the third time.
And the third time, I accepted and went out.

I actually missed my first interview.

What I'd heard about it was that there
was a small start-up company and so...

Scheduled an interview,
and it was on a Friday night.

And HP typically has these things called
beer busts, at that time, on Friday night.

And about 8:30,
after quite a bit of wine at the beer bust,

I suddenly remembered
I was supposed to go

to an interview at Amiga
with Bob Pariseau.

And so I called him up in a panic,

and he said, "No, no problem.
Just come in next week."

And so I went in,

they had the whiteboard with the 68000
as one of the key elements,

and then they showed the chips
and the basic architecture

and fairly quickly I made up my mind

that I wanted to leave HP
and join this company.

My wife got a call from a head-hunter
and then from Bob Pariseau,

who was the head of software at Amiga.

And it's funny because she felt
he was very rude on the telephone,

and said, "Don't call this guy back.

"You don't want to talk to this...
I don't want you working for..."

"For this guy and his company."

But I had a friend
who had interviewed there

for the operating system job,
and he decided it wasn't for him.

But he called me up and he said,
"You really should go talk to these guys

"because they want to create
a whole new computer system,

"and they want to do
a whole operating system from scratch,

"and I was thinking maybe
you'd be interested in that."

So I went down to the interview
and interviewed with Bob Pariseau

and met some of the other guys there,
Dave Morse.

And then they made me
an offer the same day,

and I couldn't refuse, I accepted it.

I was talking to, what was at that time,
"a talent agent" for technology people.

And he introduced me
to this company Amiga

that was doing something interesting.

I went down, I took a look,
I saw the whiteboard.

I just knew, without question,
that this is what I wanted to work on.

Of course, I completely screwed up
the interview.

And Morse threw me out and said,
"Go away, don't bother me, little boy."

But I was being massively,
totally arrogant. It was awful.

The next morning, I called back.

And I apologised and I tell Dave Morse
how sorry I am that I behaved that way,

and I really, really want
to just work on that machine.

And he says, "OK, fine. Come in."

And I came in
and he handed me off to Tom Cahill

who was running the lab at the time.

And they put me to work
sweeping the place clean,

picking up parts, putting them back
in the bins where they belong.

And so I started at Amiga as a janitor.

And loved it, and had to be there
and it was amazing.

(Sassenrath) One of the things
I saw during my interview at Amiga

was a little whiteboard.

I think a lot of the guys talk about this
that were on the original Amiga team.

And it was a whiteboard that had
a diagram of how the system worked

in terms of its system architecture.

And it was really quite elegant and it was
also a multiprocessing architecture,

where multiple things can be
happening at the same time.

And as soon as I looked at that, I knew

that multitasking was going to be
required to make that work well.

To be able to coordinate all the different
parts of the system at the same time.

The magical, incredible drawing
on that whiteboard

that showed an amazing architecture.

Multiple buses,

ways to get the graphics
out of regular memory and on to video

without stopping the processor.

Real audio? Holy cow!

It had additional features

that were already plotted out
on this whiteboard

that made it clear, in advance,
that Jay Miner and company intended

to create a real computer
not just a game system.

But they intended to create
something that could have a keyboard

if you wanted it to have a keyboard.

It could have external drive capability
if you wanted to expand it.

Memory expansion
if you wanted to expand the system.

So, the process of creating the Amiga
was one

where we went back and forth

between how much do we want
to make it a game machine,

how much do we want to make it
a tool or a utility like a real computer,

or like a IBM-PC type of thing.

And we tried to balance that

through the whole process
of making the computer.

And it was a difficult balance
to make along the way.

Because those are such different markets
and such different types of usages.

We relied on a lot of the concepts
that had already been developed.

Grand UNIX systems,
grand Sun Microsystems sorts of things,

where they had tackled
giant operating systems

and figured out the right way to do it.

We wanted to do that, too.
We wanted to create that kind of power.

But to pack it in a little box
that was easily accessible,

that was easily affordable by every man.

We wanted to have a machine that
was a magnificent game-playing system

that would run circles around
any other game system that was out there,

and yet cost less than all of them.

We wanted a machine
that had the graphics capabilities

that if you look at what was available
in the marketplace at that time,

a Silicon Graphics machine
or something like that,

you'd pay $20,000-$30,000

for a machine that would have
the kinds of capabilities

that we hoped to be able to launch
to the public at less than $1,000 price.

That was our big dream.

We were all in this together,
we all had kind of the same vision.

It really was more like a mission from God,

that we thought
we needed to bring this out

for everyone to be able
to experience and use.

And it had a friendly name, Amiga,
that...

Who could not love such a name?

When I joined Amiga
and saw the diagram on the wall

of the chip architecture
and the system architecture,

one of the things about it is,
to implement that normally,

it would require a lot
of different small chips.

And it would be a very complex system,

and take a lot of power and be very large.

But what was happening at that time
in chip technology

was very large-scale integration, VLSI.

And making custom chips,

and that's something that Jay Miner
had a lot of experience with at Atari

in creating the Atari products.

So, seeing that architecture and knowing
that those chips were really a possibility,

and that they could be made
at an affordable type of price

that would work in a home computer

was a huge breakthrough.

The chips, Portia, Agnus and Daphne,

which were their original names,

Agnus was the main DMA engine.

It was an address generator, AG,
so that's where we got Agnus.

And it was really the DMA engine
for everything.

Daphne was fed by Agnus,

and was given all the display stuff to
generate the displays, generate the sprites,

and do some of my stuff.

Portia, the port chip and the audio chip,
was also fed by Agnus.

So Agnus had all these huge amounts
of DMA pointers in it.

And it basically pulled stuff out of memory

and put stuff in memory
and then fed the other two chips

to do other things like the audio,
the floppy disk IO, the display,

and then Agnus also did, internally though,
it did the blitter operation.

So it did the graphics.

And based on that and
how well that was tightly integrated

with the 68000 and Agnus basically
stealing cycles from the 68000...

Cos the 68000 could only use memory
at half the speed of the RAM,

we were able to do all these things
in the background

without really affecting
the 68000's performance.

The way those chips worked is
they all got their little moment in time

to get on the memory bus
to talk to the main CPU

or to talk to each other on that bus.

And there were actually
25 different slices of time in that.

We called it 25 DMA channels.

So organising and orchestrating all of that
was a major accomplishment.

(Luck) You had audio bits being DMA-ed,

and you had video bits being DMA-ed,

and you the blitter
moving graphics around,

you had the floppy disk
DMA stuff going on.

In order to effectively get
all those things moving around properly,

all at the same time, you have
to have pre-emptive multitasking.

Because you can't be polling stuff
to wait for something to do.

You have to be event-driven,

so that when things need to be restarted

or things are done
and you need to start something else up,

it all has to be pre-emptive.

Yeah, so back then,

most computers, micro-computers,
were single-tasking computers.

You ran one application at a time.

You did what you wanted,
you shut down that application,

and then you ran something else.

So you could only run
one program at a time.

The idea of a multi-tasking
operating system

is to allow several different processes
to run in parallel at the same time,

and to share the CPU
between the different processes,

and to do that fast enough

that you don't notice
that it's switching between them.

The 68000 chip only had
a few of the features needed

to properly do what a full multi-tasking
operating system does nowadays.

And so we were only thinking
of doing the best we could

to let the software team take it beyond
what the basic, simple hardware could do.

Yeah, multi-tasking was
more difficult to implement

on a machine like the Amiga.

That was the early days
of microprocessors.

And they didn't have the concept
of protecting different process spaces.

So it was easy for one process to overrun
the memory into another process.

So, the design of the multi-tasking
had to be very careful

to try to avoid those types of situations
from happening.

Well, when I came into the project,
I started in August of '83,

there was no hardware, there wasn't
even a board with a 68000 on it.

There was just...
We had an Atari 800 that we could use

and we had a SAGE computer...

That was a fancy multi-user computer,

designed to handle
up to four users at the same time.

And we had 10 users
jammed on that tiny little box,

all hammering at that one CPU,
trying to get it to do our work.

Right around October, I think,
we had our first 68000 prototype

which was just a 68000
with some RAM on it and a serial port.

There was no fancy hardware
at that time, but it did allow us to...

It allowed Carl to bring up his pre-emptive
multi-tasking kernel.

It allowed me to get graphics
basically running

with a little emulator
for some of the graphics.

The architecture of the system
let the different developers

develop their components, their libraries,

independent of each other,

and actually load them
into the system independently,

and allow them to test
without having to coordinate

in a real serious way with everyone else.

I don't believe we got real hardware,

where they were plugging
the wire-wrapped bread boards in,

until basically about a month before CES.

We had one bread board
to represent the computer,

the 68000, the memory,
and it had some connectors on it

to represent the sockets
where the three custom chips would go.

Three 40-pin sockets to plug the umbilical
cords that went from the chip stacks,

which were between five and seven
sets of boards with high-speed CMOS

that emulated the functions
of the hardware.

And each one of those would plug into
a different 40-pin socket

on what we called then
the Lorraine motherboard.

But it was a very primitive way to mimic

something that's going to be turned
into an integrated circuit.

But there was no prototyping technology
at that time to quickly make a chip.

You had to do this preliminary step
and work out all the details and the bugs.

Then I finally was able to like...
Well, let me pull the emulator out,

and plug in writing these registers
to the hardware

and see if anything happened.

And after three weeks to four weeks
of concentrated work,

in the last week before CES,
we basically moved into the office.

So it was quite an amazing time period
when we're all pushing each other

to try to get more stuff done,

and trying to help each other
to get that stuff done.

(Sassenrath) The build-up to the CES
shows was actually insanity.

It was not a nice smooth, kind of,
"OK, we're going to go to CES."

It was like, "Oh, my God!
We've got to make this work for CES."

As we came up to that CES show,

I was already part
of the higher-level discussions

that were taking place in the company.

And so, unfortunately for me,

I knew a lot more than other people
in the company knew,

and I had a clear sense
of just how bad things were,

how close we were to the edge financially.

We were out of money.
And it was difficult to find money.

Jay mortgaged his house.

Dave sold at least one car.
He had some fancy, expensive cars.

So, I was very aware
of the emptiness of the wallet.

The CES show was kind
of a make-or-break thing.

If we didn't make it to CES,

it was gonna hurt.

We had to show something.

We had to show something to people
to impress them,

to either get additional funding
or to figure out a way to sell the product.

We knew things were bad,

but it didn't matter.

We were gonna do
what we were gonna do anyway.

The machine was always breaking down,
there were always problems

where something would go out
and all of a sudden

the blitter would stop working,
and those types of things.

So, it was difficult
because it was a very...

These were these separate boards
that were very complicated,

with lots of wires on them,
lots of things that could go wrong.

The hardware guys are doing their best
to make sure this hardware stays working.

Things would die, wires would break.

It was a giant set of wire-wrapped boards,
it was fragile.

We were very nervous about it.

And in addition, we were trying to add
new features up to the last minute

to make the CES demos
just blow everyone's socks off,

we used to say, and that was kind
of the terminology we used.

We blew everyone's socks off.

But how to do that
always was up to the last minute.

So many of us ended up staying nights,

and working weekends to try to get
as much done as we could before the show.

It was frightening. It was exhilarating.

And then, a software guy comes in

and wants me to make a major change
to the hardware,

a few weeks before CES,

to put in a feature for the graphics.

And I'm flabbergasted.

It is just, "No way. Are you kidding?

"We're not gonna make that kind of change.
We can't take that risk.

"This is the whole company.

"We mess this up and we have
no hardware, we are in big trouble."

The hardware feature
that he wanted was line draw.

Other more expensive graphics computers
already had kind of a hardware line draw,

but this was the first time that a blitter

was basically perverted
into being able to draw lines.

It was a great idea,
but there was no time.

And there was no schedule.

And I wasn't going to allow it.
No way, no how.

Bob Pariseau,
the guy in charge of software,

is trying to convince me to do this,
because it's very important.

And I absolutely will not do it.

He grabs my arm, and in a joking way,
starts twisting my arm.

"I'm twisting your arm,
you're gonna do this."

The dog, Mitchy, Jay's dog,

leaps to my defence, and I can't help it.

The dog jumped to my defence.

Of course I'll put it in.

And we took the risk,
and we took apart the wire wraps,

and we made the changes,
and we made it to CES with line draw,

one of the most astonishing things
to see in a machine of that time.

Thank you, dog.

When it was finally time to pack up
the office and take everything to the show,

some of us were still working
on our code, and they had to, like,

have our computers plugged
into extension cords so we could

walk out to the parking lot
with the computer and keep working

right until they had to unplug it
and put it in the van.

Because it was like that.

The changes were happening
all the way up

to when those boards were being taken
and put into aeroplane seats on aeroplanes

and flown down to Las Vegas.

It was chaos. There was nothing
smooth about that whole process.

Everyone's hopes and dreams
were pinned

to that moment
when the CES show opened,

and the first people
would start to see our baby,

and what kind of response would it get.

They had a booth there, all this Amiga
stuff that had been done before,

like the Amiga joysticks, the Power Sticks,
some of the Amiga games

that were actually designed to establish
the company as a real company.

When the people finally got a chance
to see our baby,

the response was overwhelming.

It was astonishing.

Every party that came in there,

every major corporation
that got a chance to see the device,

they were astonished at the magnificence
of the thing they had just seen.

That was the great endorsement
that we were on the right track.

We were knocking people's socks off
with this thing.

And that night, then, the Amiga
executives said to the rest of staff

they were so pleased with everything.

They took us out to dinner.
We had this awesome Italian dinner.

Drank a lot of Chianti.

And all through the meal,
Dale and RJ are over here at the side,

and they're conversing between themselves
and they're laughing,

and they're having the best possible time.

And so we get done and he's saying,
"OK, we're gonna take the van,

"and we're gonna go back
over to the show."

And I said, "You're not
gonna be able to get in."

I said, "They lock that place up
tight as a drum."

They said, "Don't worry."

Dale and I and that one six-pack
of warm beer.

We went back to the trade show,
and worked until we passed out.

Because the demo already existed,
we made it better.

The demo started
as a yellow and blue spinning ball

that Sam Dicker wrote, that filled
the screen, and it was a great demo.

And that was one of the canned demos
that we had for the show at CES.

Prior to that, I had started working
on a modification of that demo,

which was to basically shrink it
down to a small ball,

which I called a Quickie.

Using a play field, I could make it
bounce up and down.

Having a background in physics,
I knew the simple algorithms

to make something look like
it's bouncing up and down.

And also knowing exactly how
the play field worked with a colour palette,

I knew that I could put a trick in there
to make it look like there was a shadow,

and that the ball would actually
cast a shadow.

So I programmed that in there,

and it was just a basic,
simple bouncing ball

casting a shadow
on a simple grid in the back.

What happened was that
we managed to fall asleep.

I think I fell asleep first
and Dale went second.

But the last thing that he did
was he had created a build,

run it on the hardware,

and then worked on the software a little
bit more to make one more change,

and then while he was waiting
for that one more change to compile,

he fell asleep.

But what happened was then that
the two of us were in that room sleeping

when our co-workers showed up
the next morning

to clean up the booth and get ready
for the next day of the show.

Both RJ and I are sleeping on the floor
cos we were there all night long,

and I had left the bouncing ball
that we had just created that last night

bouncing on the screen.

The next morning we came in,
and we all looked at each other and said,

"What the hell did
those two guys do last night?"

When they came in, they clearly
recognised what was different,

but no one knew that we were
in the next room sleeping,

because we were in a room separate
from the main computer hardware room.

We had to be in this little side room
where we had passed out.

And so they didn't even know
we were in there for about half an hour,

until someone stumbled upon us cos they
were looking for a place to put their coats.

And they find the two of us
asleep in there.

The show was only gonna go on
for one more day.

Gary McCoy and Don Reisinger,
they'd already brought a lot of people by

to show off the capabilities
of the Amiga computer.

This was all behind curtains.
It wasn't open to anybody to just walk in.

You had to be invited in.

So it was like Sears and all these
other companies that were invited in.

They had already seen this stuff,
and they all immediately went out and got,

I think, just about every person
that they had already brought in,

they brought them back to see that demo.

You could not believe the number
of people that wanted to get in to see

what the hell was going on
inside that compound.

I thought it was incredible.

That was the most amazing thing!

Yeah, real-time graphics
was amazing to do in those days.

Now, of course, it's very commonplace,
but that was something special.

It reminded me of the statement
from Samuel F.B. Morse,

when he did the first telegraph:
"What hath God wrought?"

That's the first thing that came to mind,

"What in the hell have we done here
to this industry?"

(Hart) There was a lot of buzz
in the marketplace,

and even Steve Jobs had heard the buzz
and came over a couple of different times.

After he visited, we were convinced
it was strictly a fishing expedition

to see what it was
he might be up against.

We were constantly giving demos
to potential investors, or partners,

or someone that could
bring in some cash.

We had a number of the most
prominent venture capital people

in the tech business come and visit.

They loved what we had,

but in the final analysis,

they figured it was gonna take a whole lot
of money to get this thing to the market,

and they weren't willing
to go up against IBM and Apple.

We were pretty nervous that
if we didn't get an influx of cash soon,

or if the company wasn't purchased soon,

that we'd all be out of a job and
that dream would have just fallen apart.

When Amiga started running out of money,
Dave Morse had to start looking for some.

And he ended up going back to Atari,
where Jay Miner actually had some contacts.

So, they made a deal that Atari would
lend them $500,000 to keep going.

They would use that money
to actually make chips

of the prototype chips
that they had previously made.

If they didn't pay back that loan
by June 30th, 1984,

it meant that Atari would get
that technology for nothing.

The deal was made,
and it was a bit of a deal with the devil.

There was that point in time when
we were going to have to produce or,

you know, we were gonna end up
being part of Atari one way or the other.

They didn't think it was a smart deal.
Jay Miner knew it wasn't a smart deal.

But they really had no options at that time,
cos they were just running out of money.

But that deal was made
with Warner Brothers,

and between that time and the time
that Commodore came into the picture,

Warner Brothers sold the whole thing
to the Tramiels.

Warner Communications' sale
of its Atari home computers

may eliminate a big financial headache
for that company,

but the sale, for $240 million in notes
to Jack Tramiel,

who once headed
Commodore computers,

could cause headaches
for a lot of other companies.

Here's our clear-headed business reporter,
Barron's Editor Alan Abelson.

- Good morning, Alan.
- Good morning.

Well, that kind of deal, Bob,
was a Henny Youngman deal.

What does that mean?

That means that Warner said to them,
"Here, take my company, please."

The fact is that Tramiel
almost got it for nothing.

The terms were extraordinarily easy.

And, you know, Tramiel's a guy
who takes no prisoners.

So this ought to be quite a fight.

A real grudge battle
between Commodore and Atari.

So Jack Tramiel, when I knew him,

he was president of Commodore.
He had a reputation.

His history was that he was
in a concentration camp

in Germany in World War II.

And he came out of that
with kind of a certain attitude.

His attitude is "business is hell".

And if you get in his way,
he will send you there.

You don't want to be
in a negotiation with a man

who firmly believes
that business is war,

and all he has to do is figure out
how to bring you down.

He would be the guy
you want on your side.

But you still wouldn't
necessarily trust him.

Sometimes in a really intense meeting
if he wanted to show you how fierce he was

and how strong he was,
and how much of a survivor he was,

he would pull up his shirt and show you

the serial number
that had been tattooed on him

when he was in a concentration camp.

The man was an extremely intense man
and his family picked up on that whole vibe.

(Reporter) Are you prepared to tell us
why you left Commodore?

The chairman of the company
and myself have disagreed

on the basic principles
of how to run the company.

And I felt if I cannot go
into my office

smiling and being happy,
I better quit.

Commodore was a huge business
at the time.

Irving Gould and Jack Tramiel
built that company

to being a powerhouse
in home personal computing.

(Leonardi) When Jack went to Atari,
it was a good move for him.

He was going to try to duplicate
the Commodore business model.

He was going to try to turn
everything around.

He knew what he had to do.

And Irving Gould,
who was chairman of Commodore,

was uncertain as to how powerful
and how successful Jack could be.

As they started to approach
the June 30th deadline,

they didn't want to just give up
that technology to Atari

and they needed to be able
to pay back that loan

in order to get that off their back.

That half-million dollars
that came in from Atari

really did kind of get us a breath of air
for a short period of time.

But Jack Tramiel from Commodore
had moved to Atari

and then this was the idea
of going to work for Jack Tramiel,

which all of us were quite nervous about
and didn't like that idea.

It felt to us that
as the negotiations were progressing,

they wanted more and more.

And if it got to the point where we were
putting them in business to compete with us,

that wouldn't have made any sense to us.

And we kept telling them that,
but we couldn't budge them.

The Atari guys knew that we were
getting more and more desperate,

that we're almost out of money,
that time was almost up,

and they knew they had us
over a barrel

and they believed that it was too late,

that we couldn't find
another partner to go with,

and that Atari acquisition was
the only hope for Amiga.

Part of the deal that we made with Atari

was they would get
the detailed silicon drawings

of how to make the three custom chips.

There was some things that we did
to protect ourselves against Atari.

The set of drawings we gave them
were modified.

They wouldn't work.

There was only one set
of correct drawings,

and they were saved in a dusty old
attaché case here in this house.

They only wanted the hardware,
and they weren't interested in the people.

The just wanted the tool as a weapon
to point at Commodore

and try to sink the ship of Commodore.

Somehow Dave got in contact
with Commodore.

Dave and I had agreed to some
parameters of what was acceptable

in terms of a price for the company,
and Dave went ahead and did a deal.

Dave was very, very pragmatic about this.

And I think for him the thing was,

even though we can finish this,

we don't know if we're going to have
the marketing horsepower to market it

and that Commodore is
a better bet for that

because they do have
the marketing horsepower.

They've got the distribution system,
they've got the manufacturing.

There was a lot of animosity between
Jack Tramiel and Irving Gould.

And Irving Gould knew that
if they bought that technology outright,

Jack Tramiel would not be able
to use that at Atari.

So, what he ended up doing,
instead of just buying the chips,

was he bought the whole Amiga company
for about $30 million dollars.

And I was with Dave
the day we drove over to Atari

and presented the guy
with a cheque for $500,000,

which he was not at all expecting.

And he almost fell off his chair.

He had to excuse himself
from the meeting to call Jack Tramiel,

who was in the process of buying Atari.

And apparently, Tramiel,
not knowing anything about this deal,

said "When somebody gives you
a cheque for $500,000,

"you take it."

And so we left.
He took the cheque and we left.

Months later, Leonard Tramiel
was looking through some documents

and he happened to see
that there was this deal with Amiga

that perhaps wasn't fully honoured.

And that's when the lawsuit came.

Tramiel being Tramiel
sued Commodore and sued all of us.

The computer business is not dead,
it's alive and kicking.

When the lawsuit from Jack Tramiel
came along

and Atari started suing Amiga
and Jay Miner personally,

the judge ordered that they had to stop
work on it until things were sorted out.

The basis of the lawsuit seems to be that

the only way Atari was not
to get the chip technology

was if the chips weren't
in a working state.

When Dave Morse came over to Atari
and paid back the $500,000 on June 30th,

he told them that
the chips weren't working yet.

That got Amiga off the hook
about having to deliver the chips to Atari.

However,
when Leonard Tramiel looked at it,

he thought it was really suspicious

because they actually did have
the working prototypes of the chips.

They were demo-ing the computer,

and they subsequently successfully made
the chips in silicon that were working.

So, he thought there was
something fishy about that.

Yes, I am very happy.

When Jack Tramiel bought Atari,

he started pulling in all kinds
of engineers from Commodore.

And a lot of those engineers were taking
Commodore intellectual property with them.

Irving Gould really just wanted
to slow down Jack as much as he could,

so he did a lawsuit against Atari first.

Jack attacking Commodore back
is probably somewhat warranted

the way things were going.

So, there was a lot of animosity
between those two

and it really showed up.

Oh, God. There is more
to this story but, I mean,

we spent hours with our attorneys

preparing for a trial.

And I was dressed
and ready to go down to testify,

when we were told that
Commodore had settled.

We had been watching Atari,
and of course,

Atari had thought that
they were going to get the Amiga.

And when they didn't get the Amiga,
it was time to find a substitute

that could compete with the Amiga.

They wanted to drive the Amiga

and drive Commodore out of business
with what they were doing.

The Tramiel family was nothing
if not resourceful.

So once they took over Atari
and they were trying to revive it,

they needed a new product and it was time
to move into 16-bit technology.

Shiraz Shivji was the designer
of the Atari STE.

He came right from Commodore.

They knew of our specs pretty well,

and so they tried to copy that
as much as they could,

and throw together a machine
that would look as good on paper

and try to compete with us.

And what's the quickest thing
they could put together?

The 68000, a lot of RAM,
and a MIDI port.

'The Atari 520 STE has twice
the power of many business models.'

I didn't dislike the STE at all.
I thought it was OK.

It just didn't have anything inside it
that was exciting, really.

Atari ST was a little bit more purist,
I suppose.

By "purist" you can read "shit."

The Atari ST hardware and software-wise
was far more evolutionary.

Kind of what you would expect
somebody to have done.

(Ahmad) The ST had the same
processor, but it was slightly faster.

It was 8 megahertz,
instead of just over 7 megahertz.

The ST didn't have a blitter,
so it wasn't able to shift as many pixels.

The ST didn't have a Copper,
but you could kind of fake display lists,

of a sort... not really.

It didn't have sprite hardware.

'It can paint pictures.

'And make them move.'

The ST palette was rubbish.
I think it had 512 colours,

and they weren't even nice colours.

It didn't have sprite hardware.
The audio hardware was rubbish.

'Scroll and the music will scroll.'

(Man) OK, we're just using the Atari
right now, nothing else?

That's correct. The sound chip
in the Atari is playing all the music.

(Man) OK, we can stop that for a second.

The ST didn't have the capabilities
of the Amiga,

and the operating system,

because they were under
such time constraints,

wasn't as mature as the operating
system and the user interface

that the Amiga had when it was launched.

Its operating system was TOS.

Well, that said it all to me.

That it was
the Tramiel Operating System.

When it first came out,
everyone called it the "Jackintosh"

because it had a nice black and white mode
so it could do what the Macintosh did

plus a little bit of colour.

And it did it OK.

You know, it didn't multi-task,
it ran GEM-DOS or TOS,

which was really just
repackaged GEM-DOS

that made it a little more MS-DOS-like

so it was easy for people to write
programs for it if they knew MS-DOS.

But MS-DOS was the past.
It wasn't moving forward.

The ST had two things over the Amiga,
in my opinion.

The first was that beautiful little
monochrome display that made it look like

the 'Jackintosh' that
it is referred to as affectionately.

And the other thing that
it had over the Amiga,

which for me was a stroke of genius,

which is what defined the ST,
were a pair of MIDI ports.

And as a musician myself at the time,

I had an ST because it ran Creator,

which of course,
now is Logic Pro on the Mac.

They also had a buffered MIDI port, which
is what you really needed in those days

and unfortunately the Amiga didn't
really have a buffered serial port so

our MIDI could conceivably
break down faster.

On the other hand, once people got
better at writing multitasking code

music software worked a whole lot better
than it ever did when it was single tasking.

The Tramiels were good
at pushing less expensive hardware

and the ST kind of wormed its way
into the picture.

My idea is always to try
to bring the best technology

at the lowest price to the masses.

We are a company which we like to sell
to the masses, not to the classes.

I think the ST was
a really good example

of what a Commodore-like product was.

It was very simple mechanically.
There was a lot of integration everywhere.

You can put a chip to reduce
the number of parts on it.

They had done a very good job at that.

And it was simple to manufacture.

I have to give them credit because
for the amount of time they had,

the few months they had
to pull the Atari ST together,

it actually worked pretty well.

It wasn't an Amiga in terms
of the total capability of the system

and what it was capable of,

but it was something
that could definitely sell

as an increment above the Apple II,
or above the Commodore 64.

We were concerned that the Atari would take
away a lot of the thunder that the Amiga had

and in fact, it did,
because they did beat us to market

and it did have a lot of good capabilities.

Certainly when the Atari hit the ground

it did better at some things
in the first year or two than the Amiga did

because of all the stuff that was there.

The Amiga had a steeper learning curve.

We have introduced the ST
in the United States on July 8th.

We are selling everything we make.

It was the best launch I had
in the history of the computer business.

Jack Tramiel, of course, was
the boss of Commodore Computers.

Since his sudden
and rather startling departure,

Commodore, like many another big name,
has been beset by major financial problems.

But now they are fighting back.

And Frank Leonardi is Vice-President
of Marketing Business Systems,

Commodore Business Machines,
Incorporated.

I was hired by Commodore

and they wanted
to duplicate the market-entry

of the new Amiga technology

just as the Macintosh was done by Apple.

So, they brought me in to duplicate
the channel penetration,

the concept, the marketing,
put the team together

and try to see if they could go ahead
and get the Amiga out on the market.

When they look at the speed
and the architecture of the Amiga

compared to the speed and the architecture
of the Macintosh, there's no comparison.

When they launched the Amiga,

Commodore marketing did
a big, splashy launch in New York.

They had celebrities there,
they had all kinds of press,

the computer press,
but also just mainstream press.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Commodore welcomes you
to Lincoln Center.

My name is Bob Truckenbrod,
Vice President of Marketing for Commodore,

and I will be your host

for what promises to be
a very exciting exhibition.

For tonight is the world premiere
of Amiga.

The launch of the Amiga in New York
was a wonderful experience.

We were so impressed
that Commodore could pull that off.

You know, right there at Lincoln Center,
to announce the Amiga to the world.

And to have all of us in tuxedos

and the women in beautiful dresses
and that kind of thing.

(Hart) It really was fun, to see all
these dudes dressed in black-tie, man,

it was just too much, too much.

We did a satellite uplink on this.

So this thing actually
kinda went world-wide.

The same time we showed
that launch from Lincoln Center

and anybody that could sign on to it

was able to sign on and see
the launch exactly as it occurred.

Commodore really, you know,
they treated us very well.

I mean, they set all that stuff out for us

and in some ways I felt like

some of the complaints
about Commodore were overblown

because they really did take the thing
and they really ran with it.

The sales team and the marketing team

was involved only to the point
of trying to address the end use.

How were we going
to address the Amiga?

What was its main use?

And at that time there was a guy
named Bob Pariseau

who gave the presentation.

He was one of the engineers involved
from the original Amiga days.

The Amiga computer.

We've lived our dream
and seen it come to life.

Now it's your turn.

What will you do
with the Amiga computer?

Bob basically was kind of the overseer

of a lot of the technical stuff,
particularly the software side.

And he did have the ability
to translate the techno side of things

into terms that I think
most people could really understand.

So when we needed a spokesman
who could,

if he got cornered
on a technical question,

could respond
with a technology-based answer,

but he also could make that translation

into terms that would
be more consumer-friendly.

Good evening.

What you are about to witness

is the result of an effort
of research and engineering

that began in 1982

and which, to date,

has consumed over 100 man-years
of engineering talent.

The Amiga computer.

What we demonstrated at the launch

was just mind-blowing for these guys.

When we went after that launch,

it was to show audio, music,
graphics and speed.

And in doing that,

with the technology difference
of having the three chips

we tried to convince the world
that we had a better, faster

more colourful machine

and a distribution setup

that could easily be transitioned to.

To show off the graphics capabilities,
they got Andy Warhol

and Deborah Harry,
who's the singer in Blondie.

Andy Warhol was famous
for doing images of stars.

He would do a portrait of them
with very primary colour backgrounds.

And so they got him to do
one of those type of images,

where he would scan a picture
of her in and then colour it.

I was there for the rehearsals
that were going on with Andy Warhol.

And it was dicey, because the computer
was still not quite reliable.

And we were very concerned that
it might crash or just totally catch on fire,

burn up or something
in the middle of this big show

where we had
all of this press from New York.

We had this artist at Amiga called
Jack Haeger who was just a brilliant artist.

A lot of the early stuff
that was just awesome was Jack.

And Jack was also smooth
and a good talker.

And so, we decided he'd get up on stage
with Andy Warhol.

You found it to be very spontaneous,
didn't you?

Yeah, it's great. It's such a great thing.

What more can you say?

Well...

Andy Warhol is using
my Graphicraft paint program

to modify a digitised image
of Deborah Harry that he just got

into the Amiga computer,

and we had rehearsed with Andy Warhol
who was an artist.

He's not an engineer
and he's not a logical guy.

And so you can give him
logical instructions,

but he was an artist,
he wasn't an engineer.

And so we told him,
"You can do this, but don't do that.

"And do this and don't do that."

And he said,
"Yeah, yeah. I got it, I got it."

But he wasn't getting it.
And then, he was...

And he gets up on stage

and he starts playing with Graphicraft
like some crazy monkey,

when we know that the thing is so fragile,

and the hardware's just barely
holding it together.

And the one thing
that was a disaster was flood fill.

That the flood fill wasn't working correctly
in the hardware. It would leak.

And if you clicked in the wrong place
and made it flood fill the wrong way,

it would leak and fill the entire thing,
and wipe out your entire image.

And so we told him, "Whatever you do,
don't touch the flood fill."

So the first thing the guy reaches for
is the flood fill.

And he's all, like...
click, click, clickety-click...

And you gotta see, Jack's face is...

Oh, God, it's just so awesome!
He's filled with this horror.

It's going down! It's going down!

And he clicked on it
and he created the flood fill.

And I think all of us that
were on the engineering team,

sitting in the audience, were like,

"No! What's gonna happen now?"

And we saw that flood fill
and it kind of filled in.

You watched it progress,

and you thought it'd get to the end
and then there'd be a guru meditation,

the machine would've crashed.

But, no, it didn't.
It made it through and it was all...

And we were relieved by that.

The immediate reaction
after the launch was phenomenal.

The kinds of words that, you know,
you just...

You'd write for yourself
if you wanted to write them

to describe something phenomenal.

They responded very much
like people do to video games.

"Why have the graphics gotten better?
Why has the sound has gotten better?"

Because you respond to it
with your ears, with your eyes.

The tactofeel we now have
in game controllers and things as well,

with feedback, that's all a part of it.

Because as human beings,
that's what we respond to.

And we knocked their socks off,
absolutely knocked their socks off.

'Re-experience the mind unbounded.

'Amiga, the first personal computer
that gives you a creative edge.'

There used to be this massive,
massive disparity between the games

that we could play at home
and the kind of technology,

and the quality experience
you could get in the arcades.

And that was always really evident

when you would see, like, the Spectrum
or the Commodore 64 adaptations,

the conversions of those coin-op games.

I think Operation Wolf
was one that I remember.

It had the gun.
The graphics were actually really cool.

Then you'd come home and play it
on your 64 or your Spectrum,

and it was just nothing like it.

I mean, it wasn't anything
like Operation Wolf in anything but name.

And that was always
kind of depressing.

What I think is actually really interesting
about the Amiga generation is,

I think that was the first time
that we really started to close that gap.

By the time the Amiga came out,

there were already
coin-operated arcade machines

also using the Motorola MC68000.

And you could see in the arcades
what you could do

when you spent $5,000
or $10,000 on hardware

and built out a really fabulous game.

And I'm thinking about games at that time
like Marble Madness.

Of course, we later licensed Marble
Madness and brought it to the Amiga.

That's the kind of thing
that became possible.

Suddenly, you could do things at home
that were pretty mind-boggling.

When I saw Marble Madness
for the first time on the Amiga,

it was shocking, and it was shocking
because, as far as I can recall,

it was the first time that a video game
on a home computer,

pixel for pixel,
replicated an arcade game.

(Cambridge) It was the arcade version.
There is no difference.

There might be very slight differences,

but the quality of that Amiga version
was so fantastic at the time.

It looked like an arcade game.

And that was the big excitement.
You wanted that.

I just loved its clean clarity.

Marble Madness was
well-suited to the Amiga,

because it scrolled these playfields.

The background as the marble was rolling
was a perfect operation for the chips.

So I think what the Amiga
really did as a computer was

it sort of took the blinders off
game developers

and it allowed us to start creating
more immersive experiences

with better graphics and better sounds.

And it opened up the potential audience
to a much larger group of people

that were looking for something,
you know, a bit more entertaining

than what they were getting
from the 8-bit computers.

(Ahmad) The first time I saw
Defender of the Crown,

I had to ask the guy behind the counter to
show me that it was actually running code.

He said, "Have a go."
"OK."

"Oh. My. God."

I still remember playing the jousting.
The jousting was great.

It was like you were...
You were in a movie.

And yes, a pixelated movie, but still.

Compared to the games you'd been playing
only maybe a year or two before that,

the graphical fidelity was astonishing.

Bob Jacob at Cinemaware
absolutely loved movies,

and that's why he started the company.

He had a real passion for storytelling
and for creating immersive environments,

and the Amiga allowed him to do that.

It gave you this cinema experience
where you just didn't play a game,

but between the levels,

you'd see cutscenes where you, the hero,
was getting together with a woman,

or you, the hero, was demanding
justice from the bad guys.

We were able to do cutscenes
that had actual animation.

So when you rescue the princess
and you have the sword fighting scene,

you can have a cutscene at the end
where you have shadows on the wall,

and the hero embraces the princess,

and we could let your imagination
run wild with that.

And it was a game that brought you in
in a way that no other game had done before.

And the game design itself was good.

But there was this artist, Jim Sachs,
who was the art lead on that project,

and it was his magic

that turned that game
from a commonplace experience

into something like
no one had ever seen before.

Jim Sachs, I can say without
any hesitation, was a genius.

And Defender of the Crown
would not have been a success

if it hadn't been for Jim Sachs.

When I started doing the graphics
for Defender of the Crown,

the tools were extremely primitive.

It was still Graphicraft and Aegis Images.

So I was drawing castles
one dot at a time.

I'd do a sketch on paper, or I'd see
magazine articles about castles.

And I'd have that picture

and then do something like that
on the screen,

literally one dot at a time.

And put about five or six dots together
and that forms a block of stone.

And then, at that point,
you could clip out groups of pixels

and stamp them in as brushes.

So I was doing that.
Stone after stone after stone.

Finally, you have one tower,

and then draw the grass
and everything growing up to that.

Very time-consuming.

And after about probably two weeks,

I had drawn the first castle on a hill
and turned that in.

And it just blew them away, of course.

You know, it was just so much different
than anything else that they had seen.

So then, they could get an idea of what
the whole game was gonna look like,

and started to get really excited
about the whole thing.

The design itself reached for

the kind of softer entertainment
experience that is commonplace today.

Everyone's comfortable with the fact that
software does that movie thing that it does.

But Defender of the Crown,
the Cinemaware title,

was one of the first
that made that a reality

where you were no longer
just playing a game.

Because it demonstrated
not just graphically,

visually, this was a quantum leap
beyond anything we had seen in 8-bit.

It was certainly that.

But it was the kind of game
that just wasn't even possible.

There was nothing quite like
Defender of the Crown before it came out.

And it was definitely a signal
for where video games could go.

I didn't think all video games
would take that route,

but in terms of production values
and the ability to draw in people

who otherwise haven't been
interested in video games before.

The idea that a video game could be
a mass market activity and not just a niche,

I think Defender of the Crown was,
if not the first,

then one of the very first to signal that.

When the Amiga 1000
came off the manufacturing line,

most of us were...
"Amazed" is the wrong word.

"Distressed" was a better word,

at what appeared to be
wholly inadequate marketing

on the part of Commodore.

They didn't really have a good focus,
and I think part of that was the fact that

the Amiga computer was so capable
of doing almost anything.

Unfortunately, with the loss of the leadership
of Jack Tramiel that very same year,

Commodore was a little bit lost
as to what direction to take.

Their actions basically said,
"We don't understand what we got here."

They were shipping containerloads
of Commodore 64s.

They were shipping high volume
to these mass merchants.

And then all of a sudden, along comes
a good buy in buying the Amiga technology,

because somebody had the vision
to go after the Macintosh business

and the business side of the channels,

but nobody in the company
really had the experience.

They just didn't know how to market
any longer a computer like this

to that computer-based trait.

They really only understood
a no-mass market.

And the other part of it is that they yanked
the development, a support,

that had to be out there
in order to get software,

a meaningful software, done in this thing.

They were so used
to the software community

going and fulfilling the Commodore 64
gaming and productivity software,

that they never really programmed them
for the conformity

of dealing with the Amiga technology.

Commodore 64 software
was a grass-roots effort.

Software developers out in the field
went and did what they wanted to do.

Sometimes without the help
of Commodore.

Wasn't that easy to do on the Amiga.

You needed the books.
You needed some training.

You needed some support
back from the company.

And Commodore didn't provide it.

Almost all the first-line software
that came out of that machine

was written by internal Amiga guys
who just basically sat down and wrote it.

Because they understood
we had to have these applications,

otherwise we had a nice demo,
but that was it.

We travelled around to 30 cities,
launching the Amiga.

And we had everybody ready for it.

But then, when we went home,

we found out they had already had
a conversation with Kmart

and Wal-Mart and some of these other guys
who were just used to selling numbers,

and they could care less about support for
the people who wanted to do productivity.

They just wanted to sell tons of games.

But again, that's all they knew.

Their experience had said,
"Hey, we'll get started,

"and then we'll take it to the mass market,

"and we'll have another Commodore 64
on our hands."

It isn't a Commodore 64.

So, you know, to market it like that,
I mean, you just flunked Marketing 101.

And that's where we got lost.

We had no way to sell that product.

All we had to do was
give it to the mass merchant,

and the mass merchant would end up
sending back the product

when the customer returned it to them,
because they didn't know how to boot it up.

(Pleasance) The ethos of Commodore,
it never had a plan,

so therefore, it never questioned
what was happening.

They stumbled from crisis
to crisis to crisis,

and just firefighting more time
than they were in planning.

After the West Coast guys
left Commodore,

Commodore had to turn
to their own internal engineers

to continue development
of the Amiga system.

And so, what they said was,
"We're gonna go both ways.

"We're gonna have an Amiga computer
that's really aimed for business.

"It's gonna be very high-end,
even higher-end than the Amiga 1000 was.

"And we're also gonna do
a lower-end Amiga

"that's gonna be
a Commodore 64 replacement."

And so that's how the Amiga 500
came about and the Amiga 2000.

'You are about to step into a brave new world
of power, performance and productivity,

'made possible by the new
Commodore Amiga 500 home computer.

'Sit back and get set
for the ride of your life.

'I am the Commodore Amiga 500.'

(Haynie) Why do the A500?
I think the big idea there

was to make something
that Commodore understood better.

You know, Commodore was never
that good at selling higher-end systems.

And the A500 sort of hit the same exact
market spot that the C1 28 had.

You know, it was something that
a Commodore fan would recognise.

It was kind of what people thought
about home computers, at least in the '80s.

So, my recollection of the origin
of the A500 was

Gerard Bucas asked Jeff Porter,
George Robbins and I

to look at the A1 000
and see if we could cost-reduce it.

So we had the schematics
that Dave Needle had done,

and we just decided the things
that were gonna reduce the cost were

getting rid of the writable control store
and putting it into a singular case,

and having a brick power supply.

And we looked at the Agnus chip
in particular,

which ended up getting some stuff
rolled into it.

And it was a big cost reduction.
The A1 000 case was very expensive.

The lack of integration,

all those separate chips that got
dramatically reduced with the Fat Agnus

reduced the cost of it.

It was really just, "Let's deliver
the same level of technology,

"but mechanically, electronically,
whatever we can, cut the cost,

"so that we can make something that
Commodore people know what to do with."

Jeff and I took that proposal
to a meeting with Jay Miner,

and we showed the factoring
that we wanted to do.

There was some debate as to whether
the clock stuff was gonna work,

but Jay Miner was like,
"No. That should work"' you know.

And it was cool meeting him.
I had never met him before.

He was very much professional

about assessing whether what we were
proposing made sense technically speaking.

I'd been advised that
they were producing an A500,

that it was going to be aimed
at the consumer market.

And as soon as it arrived, it definitely lived
up to all of our expectations and beyond.

Because the capabilities of it
were equally as good as

the majority of things
you could do on the 1000

at probably 25%
of the 1000 price at that time.

I'm actually very proud of that machine,
cos I think it...

I thought it preserved
the spirit of the Amiga

while making it much more available
in terms of price.

We were a consumer company
selling game computers,

and it doesn't mean that should be
the only thing Commodore was,

but everyone knew
that's what our strength was.

(Ahmad) The thing about the 500 was
that it was very clearly a realisation

that there is a games market,

and we need to put something out that
people can play games on, and that was it.

So it served as a great games machine,

and as a really good
development machine as well.

But I think that was a case
of Commodore realising

they had to directly address
the market that they created.

(Cutter) Using the Amiga
for the first time was a revelation.

It was like a veil had been lifted.

It not only allowed us to dream,
it allowed us to dream big.

People who do game development
and some application development

can look at a PC or other machines

and see how much work it takes to get
the machine to do what you want it to do,

and how easy it is to get the Amiga
to do what you want it to do.

So your energy and your time

are not spent on tricking the machine
to produce a piece of graphics.

They're spent on your invention
and your art and your creativity.

The goal that Jay and I had

was to advance the state of the art
10 times beyond the competition.

And when you advance
the state of the art sufficiently,

you get into the realm where you're doing
something that people find completely new.

It expands their capability
to do things you can't do before

with 10 times more horsepower.
In some cases, even more.

Game developers now, who typically
might've just been writing assembly code

or were doing as much as they can
just to get the hardware to do stuff,

all of a sudden, they had a computer

that basically would do
most of the work for them.

There was the graphics chips

that were doing the blitting
and the moving of the graphics.

There were sprites that would just appear
where you wanted them to appear.

Multi-colour sprites.

You could do the play field animation.
You could do play field scrolling.

You could do simulated 3D perspective
stuff by using differential scrolling.

More colours using the run-length
compression in the Hold-And-Modify.

A multi-channel sampled audio
instead of beeps and boops.

So if you're a game developer,
and you saw the opportunity

to do what you could with the Amiga to
advance the state of your gaming creativity,

all of a sudden,
this gave you a new tool.

So it really appealed to the creative edge.

That was what the Amiga was about.

That was actually the slogan,
that it gave you the creative edge.

And it really did. And it took all the people

that were not just bland PCers
that just want to do PC-types of stuff,

but it just opened up this whole new world.

The first time I saw it,
I was just blown away.

It was difficult to believe
just what a huge leap it was.

It just felt like you were just touching
science fiction, it was so advanced.

(Cooper) When it comes to the Amiga,
the world was really your oyster.

It widened my world, cos I thought,
"Well, we can do anything we want to do."

So my mind just exploded.

Amiga was so smooth,
you know what I mean?

It was like a Porsche.

It had Copper.
It had this amazing sound chip.

Beautiful colours.

It was very fast.
It was a better machine all round.

And you could tell
from the games that were coming out.

To me, machines are machines,

and all I talk about with machines
is what's wrong with them.

I just only ever see problems
in machines.

Things that they're stopping me from
doing more efficiently, that I want to do.

But the Amiga, actually,
of all of the machines I've worked on,

was the one which gave me the most of what
you wanted to deliver the most painlessly.

From a designer's point of view,
it was a brilliant machine.

It was very accessible.

The programmers learned
to get very, very skilful at it.

But they didn't struggle too much
to get up and running.

So, still, in those days,

you could spend 75% of making the game
development time on making the game,

and 25% on doing the structure and stuff,
the routines to make it work.

What the Amiga did is it inspired people

to explore the boundaries
of what the machine could do.

There was so much hardware in there,
compared to the other machines,

that you could play around with, and there
was so much sneaky stuff you could do.

There was the Hold-And-Modify mode,

and there was the weird modes
where it only had a 32-colour palette,

but you could get 32 more colours

that were basically
half as bright versions of that.

And so, it does inspire people

to get into the idea that they're gonna have
to explore the different corners of stuff.

In the beginning, if you wanted to put
bitmapped graphics onto a screen,

you'd have to create them,

you'd have to use the computer,
the computer's CPU,

to actually draw those pixels
onto the screen.

And that would take time,

and while the computer was doing that,
it couldn't be doing anything else.

And very often, in the early games,
Jet Set Willy is a good example of that,

nearly all of the time
that the computer was spending

was spent drawing pixels
onto the screen,

and that left very little time
for anything else.

What a blitter does,

is it says, "Hey, I'm really good at this.
I'm really fast.

"I can take a bunch of pixels, which
correspond to an image from one place,

"combine them in fancy ways
with another bunch of pixels,

"like a mask or a stencil from another place,
and put them onto the screen,

"in whatever way you want
in any number of combinations,

"to form a final image,

"and I can do this 10 times faster,
20 times faster,

"than the processor can do it."

So what that meant was, the processor
was free to do lots of other things,

like Al for example, like collisions,

and the blitter allowed you to create
an immense amount of detail in the display

in a fraction of the time
that it used to take.

And the Copper lists allowed us
to change colours,

and shift things left and right slightly,
and do all these crazy things.

And we built a lot of the games
around these effects.

It's like, we could scroll things
and move them

without even
really having to put any effort in.

A lot of the hardware in there
is very specifically aimed

at the kind of things that we as game
designers and game producers require,

or certainly did back in the day.

To try and replicate the effects that
you get in arcade machines of the day,

you needed very powerful
hardware scrolling.

You needed sprite systems, ways of
moving objects in front of other objects,

and obscuring backgrounds and
restoring backgrounds quickly, easily,

and freeing up the processor to do
the main game loop, as it were.

So there was a lot of hardware in there
that you could see precious little use

for anything else other than games
or graphics demos, to be honest.

So it was a dream machine, really,

because it really felt like
it had been created specifically

to produce the kind of games
that you saw in the arcades

and the kind of effects
that you saw in the arcades.

I think the thing that impressed me the most
about the Amiga, besides the graphics,

was there was an actual
operating system on it.

Coming from the Commodore 64,

where you got a little prompt and
you could type in some BASIC commands,

the Amiga had a real OS.

There were files, and you could do
a shell and all that kind of stuff.

To me, that was very interesting
about the Amiga.

I think the biggest thing of all

was that the Amiga had a mouse.

So as soon as a mouse came along,
you had the freedom

to make the player be able to move
wherever they wanted on screen immediately,

and that was a huge thing.

And that you had these two buttons,

fire, hold for scroll round.

And they had up, down, up, down,
so that's four inputs,

where we were only used
to one and the four directions.

That was incredibly important.

And it's even small things
to do with the mouse.

I remember the PC version
of Lemmings versus the Amiga one,

and for me, the Amiga one always
played much, much, much better.

And the real reason for that was actually
the Amiga had a hardware cursor.

So no matter what speed your game
ran at, which was 30 frames per second,

the mouse moved
at 60 frames per second.

And on the Amiga, that was really nice.

You felt like you had really fine control
for when you were clicking as well.

Cos it could read the click
60 times a second.

The PC only had software mouse control.

So it was only moving the mouse
at 30 frames per second

and could only register a click
30 frames per second as well.

For me, those two differences
are really subtle,

but the fact that you could run the game at 30
frames per second but move your input at 60,

once again, just showed
how advanced the Amiga was.

And just smart things
about doing things like,

"We're gonna make it
so we have a hardware mouse cursor"'

to me, it's the small things
which just show the genius of the team.

There were suddenly all kinds of games
that were made possible

by not being restricted by just
the eight cardinal directions on a joystick.

The ability just to navigate
a mouse around the screen

just opened up all kinds of new possibilities.

Up until that point,
I think the transition from 8 to 16-bit

was the last generational leap
that we saw

that really allowed
new types of games to emerge.

Populous would not have been possible
on the Commodore 64.

I don't think The Secret of Monkey Island

would've been possible
on the Commodore 64.

It revolutionised the way
that graphics looked in computer games

overnight, literally.

And it gave us so many options
and so many new ways

to look at how you could realise
a scene in a game.

It opened up all kinds of avenues

to cinematic storytelling and cutscenes

and all kinds of things that we could do
in a game that you could never do before.

(Speaks French)

So it really paved the way

to enable beautiful graphics,
and detailed animations.

And therefore...

We could now develop richer content,

games that were

more emotionally engaging

and deliver a more
immersive experience.

(Malone) It pushed game development,

it gave it a rocket booster,

it gave a nitro booster,
and pushed game development.

It accelerated ideas,
people wanting to work on games,

what you could actually do.

You could actually do
a lot more with a game.

It was such a leap in technology,

even today, I find anyone who slags off
the Amiga needs their head testing.

Because it was such a great machine.
It really was.

(Cuisset speaks French) The Amiga
really was a remarkable computer

and when I started

I was fascinated by action games

as I was by adventure games.

And so, to be able to tap into

that kind of graphics power

in order to tell a story

was always an inspiration to me,

to push the limits and try new things.

(McLaughlin) It wasn't hardship.
I did have a lot of passion for it,

but you weren't surviving
on passion and coffee.

You could actually come in
at the start of the day,

have some ideas in your head and
you could realise it without being stressed.

And that frees up...

Or that sort of freedom, rather,
enables you to be more creative,

and to push beyond just fighting against
tools and fighting against hardware.

You can get to where you expected
to be pretty quickly,

and then you can go beyond that.

On an Amiga, you had your mouse,
keyboard, you'd be drawing, fantastic.

So you've got this bigger resolution,
more colours and a palette.

On the 64, you had 16 colours,
that was it.

On an Amiga, 4,096 colours.

Fantastic! "What colours do I need?
I'm spoilt for choice."

(Hawkins) I wanted to make
as many games for the Amiga as possible.

And of course,
we had a lot of our own ideas for games.

We even went back to our development tools,

and our development tools
were, at that time, PC-based.

And we had a really nice Paintbox program
that our developers used on the PC

to do the graphic art
that went into the games.

And Tim Mott, who's a really brilliant guy

that ran the technology side
of Electronic Arts for nine years,

it was his idea that we take that Paintbox
product and turn it into a consumer product,

Deluxe Paint, which was easily
the most popular painting app

in the mid-1980s on any machine.

And it was very commercially successful

because it was just so much fun
to screw around with it,

even if you weren't an artist or had
no professional reason to be using it.

Deluxe Paint came out for the Amiga
and it absolutely changed our industry.

We'd never seen anything like it.

The idea that you could grab an area of the
screen and pick it up and use it as a brush

was, frankly, astounding.

Nothing close to that, technically,
had ever been achieved.

You were watching it,
not actually believing your eyes

that you were able to paint
with a real bitmap.

It was just stunning.

It knew that I wanted to be able
to select things, cut and paste things,

move them around,
change colours once I put them down.

DPaint and the Amiga was a real change.

I'm using this magical device
called a mouse. Brilliant.

You'd move it around the screen
and it was great.

You'd just click and put your colour down.

Yeah, so first thing I did at Bitmaps
was Amiga, DPaint, Speedball 2.

Deluxe Paint came out about
halfway through my development time

on Defender of the Crown,

and it was a tremendous boon
being able to do things with brushes,

with sweeping brushes and things like that,

that you couldn't do
with Graphicraft or Aegis Images.

You could do arcs and circles
and all kinds of interesting things.

You could tint, all kinds of effects
that you couldn't do before.

So that really speeded things up
during the development

and made things a lot easier.

One of the great things
about Deluxe Paint was,

it was one of the first-ever packages
that had built-in animation.

You could set on just a few frames,

make this little character animate,

pick it up as a brush and then just
play the animation and play the brush.

So that it just put down
reams of these sprites.

And then, cos I was bored, I drew a gun
at the other end shooting them.

And that's where you start going,
"Well, that's funny, there's a game in that."

They give you DPaint,
you can export files,

you can incorporate those
into programs you're coding.

And it accelerates the rate
of development and productivity

of people who want to get into the machine
to use it for something.

It allowed me,
who couldn't draw to save his life,

allowed me to do things on the screen,

and do them immediately,
and see the results immediately.

What Deluxe Paint allowed

was non-experts, non-computer-experts,

people whose primary focus
was art and not technology,

to enter the domain of video games creation.

It was a huge jump

moving from graphics on the Commodore 64
to graphics on the Amiga.

It was like we'd missed out one generation
and jumped to the next generation.

And it was fantastic.

It was a very powerful piece of software,

and a lot of the effects you see in
modern-day software, Photoshop and so on,

some of those effects
appeared first on Deluxe Paint.

So that just became
the ubiquitous piece of software

that we all used for creating our sprites.

I loved the graphics of the Amiga

for the games, for everything,
for the graphical tools,

but I got very caught up in the sound.
I absolutely loved the sound.

(Deeply resonating soundtrack)

(Beeping)

(Chahi speaks French)
You had tools to manipulate sounds,

to import and export sounds,

to assemble them, code them,
add reverb, things like that.

The Amiga was kind of like a studio.

At the most basic level,
you had sampling.

Before that, it had all been synthesis,
albeit quite good synthesis,

on, say, the Commodore 64.

So, the Amiga was sampling.

And the Amiga had four sampling voices,
with 8-bit resolution,

and a lot more memory, obviously.

So it opened up a new whole way
of creative freedom.

The only other alternative
to audio engineer on the Amiga

would be something like
the Akai S900 or S950 samplers,

or, of course, you had the Fairlight.

Both of them cost thousands of pounds
at the time.

So, to buy an Amiga,
you were not only saving a lot of money,

it was enabling you to do things
you couldn't otherwise even dream of.

It was really bringing professional sampling
technology into the hands of everyday users.

Whenever I bought a new CD, I would
always sample it from beginning to end.

Whenever there was
one instrument exposed...

"The snare drum right there is exposed.
Oh, shit, let's sample it."

So I would use AudioMaster to sample it,
and then I would put it in Soundtracker.

And I would be able to use that snare drum.

Just like DJs use samplers
and all this kind of stuff.

We would put drums
in one of the channels,

the bass in another channel,
the melody in the third channel,

and even then, you'd have a fourth channel
for sprinkles to enrich your arrangements.

You could not only sample drum sounds

and, essentially,
any instrument that you can think of,

but you could also sample chords.

So you could enhance the four channels
into more, because you would just...

Major chord, minor chord,
and then play that over different keys,

and you already have something
with one voice that sounds a lot bigger.

The Amiga sound chip
was solely sample-based.

However, you can also sample
small waveforms.

So, for instance, composers like
David Whittaker would do this a lot.

They would sample a series of square
waveforms with different widths to them

and then sequence them together.

And they could create quite rich
synthesised sounds like that.

What it facilitated was
not just people like Rob Hubbard,

who was a musician first
and a programmer second,

and not just people like me,

who is a programmer first
and a musician second.

But it allowed people
who weren't programmers at all,

had no programming ability,

to use an application like a tracker
to create amazing original works.

(Lynne) Soundtracker and ProTracker
and NoiseTracker,

that series of programs, came out.

It enabled people who weren't
really educated musicians,

they couldn't read notes,
couldn't read sheet music,

enabled them to write music.

Because all they had to do
was put the notes in patterns,

which they could understand
so much easier than sheet music.

So it lowered the threshold for
new people to come in and create music.

(Gustafsson) The Soundtracker program
from Karsten Obarski

was a revolutionary program for me.

You could actually control
the sound channels proper.

And do some tricks and hacks just to
make it sound bigger than it actually was.

Because you had
frame-by-frame control of the sounds,

which was pretty cool in those days.

With Rocket Ranger, the fist fight
against the Nazi guard was not a lot of fun.

But we had a sound guy,
and he stayed up late one night

and recorded sounds
from an old John Wayne movie,

digitised them
and put them into the game.

And all of a sudden,
you'd hit that Nazi guard

and you would hear something
that sounded like a John Wayne movie.

And it felt like you were in the movie.

The sound effect made that
whole sequence so much more fun to play.

(Punching sound effect)

I think this was probably
one of the key moments

when the music started to really lean in
as a part of the valuable content.

Now, music in previous games,
I'm not, by any means, saying wasn't good.

I used to love a lot of Commodore 64 music.

But what I'm saying is, on the hardware level,
it just became a point where,

"Wow, we've got to really put a lot
of attention on the music as well."

I remember Starglider. ♪ Starglider! ♪
Yeah, we're singing now, aren't we?

♪ Starglider...

I remember Starglider having that sample,

which actually used a huge amount
of memory, but just for that one thing.

But it was very cool,
very impactful at the time.

♪ By Rainbird...

Here's just another example of the extra
memory and the faster processing power

just allows you to make quite a leap up
in the quality of what you're doing.

(Lynne) It was amazing.
To us, it sounded full, powerful, varied.

You could do all sorts of sounds.

From the techno music,
blippity-blop stuff,

to full arrangements,
sampled guitars, everything.

It was amazing.

And so, it was an introduction
into the world of sampling.

And I think that's really something
that Amiga can take a lot of credit for.

The sampling phenomenon really,
for me at least, started with the Amiga.

For me, it was the dream
of realising my music

in the way I had it in my head.

That was possible finally
with the Commodore Amiga.

One of the interesting developments
from launching the Amiga

and all the marketing activities that we did
was the growth in the pirate market.

Well, piracy, of course,
was a major problem,

and it's what drove me out
of the Commodore 64 market

and into the Amiga initially.

And then it became very widespread
on the Amiga.

In Germany, software piracy,
was rampant, absolutely rampant.

And I don't know why,
but it's quite the phenomenon

that Germans and, I believe, Scandinavians
tend to not want to buy software.

And I never understood why.

So that means I got into pirated games
pretty big time.

The people who were a bit more clever,
not only pirated games,

but they also programmed
delicious graphical and sound intros.

The cracktros, originally,
were this rebellious way of proving

how good you were at programming

and how good you were
at making cool effects.

Which you then put right in front
of your newest pirated game.

So, that's how pretty much
everybody in Europe started out.

(Computer voice) 'This is going
to be a very, very big hit.'

I think they did it mostly
just because they could,

as a challenge to themselves
and to the other hackers that,

"Who can do this first?
And who can do it right?"

They used the Amiga a lot more

and much more interestingly
than the games that then followed

after you clicked the left mouse button
and the actual game loaded.

And eventually it developed into this
competitive, creative demo scene,

where people were actually
just saying "Screw the games.

"We just want to make
cool effects and cool visuals."

(♪ A-HA: "Take Me On")

♪ Talking away

♪ I don't know what I'm to say

♪ I'll say it anyway

♪ Today's another day to find you

♪ Shying away

♪ I'll be coming for your love, OK?

♪ Take on me

♪ Take on me

♪ Take me on

♪ Take on me

♪ I'll be gone

♪ In a day or two ♪

They just did amazing things
with the technology.

Some of the demos,

where you'd have spinning 3D objects
and incredible artwork in them,

is just an excellent creation
that these programmers were making.

The roots of the demo scene was
in hundreds of thousands of bedrooms

and the guys sitting
on their computers, making stuff.

And it was a wonderful thing
unlike the later video games consoles

that you could program them
yourself at home.

So it really encouraged creativity.

Now, whether you were inspired

to try and make a demo that was
a bit like another demo you'd seen,

or make a game that was
a bit like a game you'd seen,

it didn't really make a lot of difference.

It was the fact that it was possible
for you to do it yourself

and you had this source
of inspiration all around.

These guys out in Finland and Norway
and these guys in Scandinavia

were doing these insane demos that I think
were really, really pushing the envelope

of what the Amiga was capable of.

I quite often saw the Fred Fish disks.

They weren't so much demos, they were
more utilities and tools and all the rest of it,

which he used to build things
and they were great.

They were fantastic for learning more
about the Amiga and coding

and other things that you could do

and other aspects
to the actual computer itself.

Whereas, I think in Europe there was more
of a clamour for the demos and the graphics

and the audio, really,
and the entertainment side of it.

We had public domain software.

That was just distributed by disk.

We didn't have the World Wide Web.
We didn't have any of that sort of thing.

So, it was literally people just buying it
via mail order and getting them home.

The first time you ever see a picture
that you've done and submitted it,

and seeing it in a gallery, in a magazine,

that was just my proudest day.

So I just kept on doing it.
I couldn't get it out there enough.

I guess that just got noticed
and started getting people asking

if I could do pictures for their whatever.

And, in all frankness, I didn't even know
what the demo scene was back then.

The demo scene was a place
to be creative.

There was just that.

Creativity, that's what it was all about.

There's was no,
"But we have to finish this game"'

or, "This music has to fit
this scene in a movie"'

or, "It has to fit that scene in a TV show"'

or, "It has to fit this scene in a game."

It was whatever we wanted it to be.

The first demo, I was very much
just proving myself as a programmer

and trying to make a first demo
that was really well constructed.

I suppose one way to look at it is it's
much like graffiti art, quality graffiti art.

That, to me, is what it is
for the games industry.

That is like the graffiti artists,
but they're using demos.

It was absolutely stunning.

It was breathtaking, some of the stuff
they would come out with.

And yet, a lot of them weren't that bothered
about being commercially successful.

They wouldn't want to turn it into a game.

They just wanted to be known by
a funny name with an avatar or something

and be famous for doing that demo.

We called ourselves IFF,

which was supposed to be short
for International Fart Federation.

We dropped that name
after maybe half a year

and decided to call us Crusaders instead,
after a bit of a vote.

One of the big things about
the demo scene versus games is that

creating a demo certainly didn't have
the complexities and difficulties

of actually building a game that had to
stand there and not crash and anything else.

Most demos don't have Al,

they don't have considerations
about frameworks for the player

and everything else.

So, it's a completely different thing that
you're building when you're building a demo

and you're building a game.

And you have the luxury of irresponsibility.

They were all great sales pieces
for the Amiga.

If you had friends come over,
they wanted to see your Amiga,

you'd often not show them the games,

or not as much as you would
show them the demos.

Because they are of course completely
unencumbered by having to build

any kind of game or gameplay,

they could just go crazy with ray tracing
graphics and raster-based graphics

they were able to create.

I remember the famous scrolling messages
that were constant shout-outs

to various other cracking crews
around Scandinavia and Europe.

It was, "Hey, we send our regards

"to these guys, these crews,
or these groups that we like."

Because we exchange stuff with them
or get demos with them.

And we sent hate to these guys,
which made no sense at the time, really,

or now, when you look at it.

People would poke fun at each other,
but it was never anything serious.

It was all done in the spirit
of the demo scene, is how I like to put it.

The first demo I remember,
no surprise, is the Sodan demo,

which kind of showed a lot
of Amiga features like dual-playfield

and everything that was going on in
that demo and drawing lines, 3D graphics,

and it kind of blew me away
that they could do it,

because I hadn't got that far at that point,

and it just got me even more interested
and wanted to learn more

about the Amiga chipset,
so I could do those things as well.

Kefrens and the Rebels made
some demos that inspired me.

Later on it would be Scoopex
and it would be Red Sector

and also, especially,
Phenomena from Sweden.

They had some amazing programmers
and especially musicians.

The guys from Crionics,
working with The Silents, Denmark,

on Hardwired, which was also
one of those demos that once it got put up

kind of moved the bar
to a whole different level

for what people now expected
a demo to be.

The Budbrain Megademos, they were great
because they were very funny.

And there was a little bit
of a story to it as well.

Yo, check this out!

(Mimics breakbeats)

You know, my favourite demo of all time
is Mental Hangover by Scoopex.

You know, it was talking all about
drinking and being hungover,

and it had so much attitude, you know?

We were kids,
and we expressed what we felt.

And that's what we were feeling
at the time.

We weren't feeling,
"Let's go make some money."

It was more about party
or trying to out-program each other.

The demos gave me freedom to actually
explore any side of myself, in composing.

Because you didn't have
any strict guidelines to hold onto.

It was actually a great time to learn,
you know, and explore yourself.

I was really excited about doing music that
somebody wanted to use for something.

One this is to make
a cool-sounding music track,

but then to have that music track
put to some visual effects,

it makes the music sound
a lot cooler as well.

And it makes the visual effects look better
when you add some cool music to go with it.

So it's like they enrich each other.

You could say that there is a music style

that kind of is a demo-scene music style.

I have not really explored that scene much.

I was more interested in trying to see
how far I could push music

and mood,
and to what extremes I could push it.

And I think that's what I take out
and take with me to this day,

it's that sense of wanting to always

try to create something you haven't
necessarily heard or try to innovate.

And do it as best I can.

'Take four red capsules.

'In 10 minutes, take two more.'

The next step for me was
something called the demo party.

It was also called the copy party,

because people went there to share
demos and share stuff that they had,

and also, let's be honest,
they went to copy games.

You basically rented a classroom
or two in schools,

and it evolved from there, really,
it got bigger and bigger, obviously.

But at that time, that was it, and it was
just Commodore Amigas everywhere.

The smell, the pungent smell,
almost like a mist in there.

It was like sweat and agony, and
it's just rows of computers everywhere.

We'd bring our sleeping bags and stay over
maybe something like Saturday to Sunday.

There would be hundreds of people there.

All swapping disks,
copying each other's stuff.

This was a way for people
that had been sending disks

and stuff like that
to actually meet in person.

And hang out, create stuff together.

I remember the very first demo party
that we went to.

We called it a copy party at the time.

There were, I don't know,
300, 400, 500 youths in a school.

And the police showed up
and there was total panic,

there were people jumping out windows.

Throwing disks out windows.

Crushing floppy disks with their feet.

Trying to destroy evidence
of copying and stuff.

We were at one of my parties.
Suddenly the cops... Two cops show up.

And they say, "We hear you guys
have cracked games here and stuff."

And you know, the latest games
and stuff like that.

We're like, "It might be possible."

They said, "So if I give you five disks,

"can you put some of the latest games
on there for me?"

I go, "I don't know, sure."

So the cop hands me a pack of disks
and says, "I'll be back in two hours.

"I'd be grateful if you had some of
the latest games for my son on them."

Police still came and closed down
a lot of these parties.

What can you do, you know?

But that was the nature of it,
there was something a little bit...

crazy about it,
and we weren't supposed to do it,

and we were often told that
these things could be shut down

by the police, and you know, don't worry,
just if it happens, it happens.

Somebody took a dump
in some other guy's sleeping bag.

He got scrubbed down. Oh, my God.

(Liljegren) There was definitely a big
competitive aspect to the demo scene.

I mean, the demo parties always had
a demo competition at the very end of it,

where people showed off
the latest stuff

that they'd been working on
for months.

Being number one, being most revered
was very much sought after.

(Hellewell) Every group
wanted to be number one.

People would fill in a voting form,
send it to an address,

all of the information was collated,

and the results were published
in the form of a demo

every month or two months, and
this was called the Crusaders Eurochart.

This was the spirit of the demo scene.

Always trying to outdo each other,
always trying to innovate.

Always trying to push things forward.

The technical achievements
these guys could accomplish

were like, "How do they do that?"

Because we're developers, and how do
we incorporate those effects into a game?

Can we use those effects in a game?

So I think there was an element
of experimentation

that these guys did to push the hardware

to show other people what you could do.

I think the games industry was improved
by the demo scene

for the simple reason that
you did see a lot of effects,

and you see a lot of techniques

that you probably wouldn't
have come up with,

unless you got inspired
from someone else doing it.

It's an interesting point to go back
and think about that era

in gaming history, that Amiga era,

in that it did feel very, very provincial.

And there was a very big difference
between what was happening in the UK

and in Europe, and what was
happening over in the USA.

And by the time we had
transitioned onto the Amiga,

America had really become
much more interested

in the Super Nintendo
and the Sega Mega Drive.

Talk to an American and ask them,

"What do you remember
about the 16-bit era?"

And they will say,
"I remember the Sega Genesis"'

"I remember the Super Nintendo."

If you ask a Brit what they remember
of the 16-bit era,

they will talk to you about
the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST.

So we had these two completely
different versions of the 16-bit era

on either side of the Atlantic.

And that's part of why, I think, so many of us,
especially in Europe and in the UK,

romanticise the Amiga generation.

It's because it was the last time
that the games and the community

felt unique to us,

and before the global explosion
of gaming popularity

kind of brought everyone into the mix.

When the Amiga 1000 came out...

Let me put it this way,

that's about the biggest surprise
I have ever had in my entire career

in one single system.

It changed so many things all at once.

I mean, you ask somebody else,
they give you the same answer,

and give you five other different examples.

(Speaks French)
The Amiga was...

From my perspective,
I thought that the Amiga

represented a real step forward.

It was more revolutionary
than it was evolutionary.

I think it's quite simple why people
remember the Amiga so fondly even today.

It's because it was revolutionary.

When it came out, there was nothing like it.

It wasn't a small step
for the computer generation,

it was a massive step.

This was the last machine

which had complicated hardware,
but it was understandable.

And it was documented to a level
where you could get down

to the individual bits of hardware.

You could know everything
about that machine.

And it trained
a whole generation of people.

I don't think the entire computer
industry would have evolved

in quite the way, because people
who grew up with that

went on to do all the stuff
that is being done now.

The Amiga was the last time

that you could just really
experiment and play around.

There were no real barriers.

And also the hardware itself,
as I've already spoken quite lovingly of,

was so flexible that
it allowed real experimentation.

And experimentation, actually,
that I'm not even sure

the designers of the machine
had planned.

So you have the feeling
of empowerment.

To be able to do great things
with just that computer in front of you.

The first platform that allowed people
that were creative

to get out into the masses,
and I just enjoyed being a part of that.

The first time I saw Jim Sachs' work,

I understood, immediately,
what the leap was.

The Amiga enabled that entire revolution.

Not just graphically, but in the way
you could effectively tell a story,

and change the gaming experience

from one of just arcade quality
to something a little more substantial.

Some of those early games,

and some of the immersive storytelling
that we were able to do

in some of those early games,
I think the repercussions of that,

the echoes of that are still
being heard and felt today

in games that are coming out now.

When people ask me
why I am still working in games...

It's that collaborative development
environment that you get

where you're working with artists,
coders, musicians, designers.

All in the same kind of framework,
and you're creating something together

that none of you as individuals could create.

And it's probably the Amiga that was the first
moment that happened in my experience.

But once you got to the Amiga,

you could start to sell a game on,
"Look at these graphics."

And actually, the games industry
has spent the last 20 plus years

selling games in the same sort of way.

The Amiga opened doors...

...for professionals...

...and professions in a way that
I don't think any other machine

has been able to emulate.

First it allowed the progression from
assembly language to C programming.

So programmers could afford
to be more high level,

and therefore, not nearly so skilled
on low level assembler.

The second thing it facilitated
was the entry of artists,

whose primary focus was art
and not the creation of pixels.

And the third stream of people it brought in
was musicians and composers.

People who could now
create music on a machine

that would more faithfully than not
allow them to realise their efforts.

And we moved from a hobbyist industry

to very much an industry
capable of professionalism.

I think that everybody of my generation
who was from Europe

and who is in the games industry nowadays,

I would bet that they came in via the Amiga.

Maybe initially, shortly, briefly,
the C64 and the Atari ST,

but all of us moved
on to the Amiga very quickly,

and that's where everybody flourished.

So it's absolutely crucial,
and you can ask all around the world.

In Japan, people would have come
via the consoles,

a little bit also here in the US,

and the PC of course got strong
very quickly in the US.

But all of Europe,
the game industry veterans of today

have to thank the Amiga tremendously.

I think it was a fundamental building block
for the modern games industry.

I think it was a point at which
everybody realised games could be

the massive business that they are now,
worth countless billions.

And I think it was wonderful
to be involved at the very early stages.

We had no clue whatsoever that
the industry would get as big as it is now.

It was more than a games machine.

It was more than a computer,
it was many things for many people.

That's what made it special, I think.
You know?

So, it was special for us because
we could really show off our talents.

And, like I said, it was special for people

because they could do
amazing things with it, you know,

in terms of music, visuals,
video editing, you know.

That's the main reason, I reckon.

It touched many different people
from many walks of lives.

We knew it was
a great graphics machine,

but we never saw the entire
desktop video revolution coming.

We didn't realise that the Amiga
was going to be the device

that was powerful enough
to create this new industry.

These days, no one thinks twice about
editing video on their home computer,

but it was radical then,

it was the first machine
that allowed that kind of capability.

And the Amiga was designed
so they put out very good video quality

compared to all the other computers
that were in the market

in terms of the NTSC television signal
that came out of the Amiga

was very close
to being right on the spec.

So it allowed you
to then record that onto videotape

or to put it out over the air,
whatever you wanted to do with it.

And that was right out of the Amiga
without any special equipment.

A lot of people use that
even without Video Toaster.

They used their Amigas
for creating video and creating audio.

'As we speak,

'a paradigm shift of equal magnitude
has grabbed the world of video.

'A paradigm shift.

'And the force behind the shift,

'we at NewTek call the Video Toaster.

'Hey, that's a hot name.'

We discovered that by using
the Amiga's video,

we could take advantage of all
of the Amiga's graphic scope processing.

The Copper and the blitter.

All these things,
we weren't making pictures with them,

we were making
these bizarre little barcodes

that would then control
the Video Toaster card.

And then there was a huge phenomenon
with 3D animation.

Because LightWave 3D was just one of
what we call croutons in the Video Toaster,

these little squares you click on.

It's a toast analogy.
Croutons, little pieces of bread.

It's just my "rye" sense of humour.

One of the croutons was LightWave.

So you click on that,
and the screen opens up

into front, top, and side view,
and now you can make models,

you can light them
and you can do 3D animation.

And a lot of people started to buy
the Video Toaster just for that reason.

And so Babylon 5,

seaQuest DSV, a Spielberg show...

Examples of people taking LightWave,
building a big crew of animators,

and doing CGI on television, which,
up to that point, was absolutely unthinkable.

The market moved up.

And around the time that
the Amiga 500 was really, really flying

was also the beginning of the PC market.

PCs, they were business machines
and they were very expensive.

So, actually, for most people,
they couldn't even aspire to buying one.

You're talking about £1,000 plus.

Cos you know they're expensive and
well made because they had metal cases.

Whereas, of course, the home PCs,
they were made of plastic.

- So they weren't very serious things.
- And on occasions woodgrain plastic as well.

- Yes.
- Which was wonderful.

- I never quite understood that.
- The Atari VCS - beautiful.

Give the consumer confidence,
give them a plastic computer,

high-tech, but make sure it looks
like your grandad's gramophone.

And they weren't as popular
because, let's be honest about it,

the PCs could not deliver
what the Amiga could deliver

in terms of graphics and sound,

and all those wonderful things
that we already know.

The PC was way behind
in technology terms.

(Kingsley) I think it was difficult
to make games in the early days for PC,

because the colour palettes
were just so incredibly awful.

There weren't really colours, they were
designed for spreadsheet annotation.

Basically, the graphics cards
weren't graphics cards.

They were designed to make spreadsheets
and word processes easier to read.

You could have yellow letters or you could
have blue letters or green letters.

That was what it was for.

And we were trying to hack that
to make monsters,

and warriors,
and all that kind of stuff.

It was really about the PC era of games,

which coincides a lot
with the rise of Amiga.

And I think it was more getting out
of these specialised little machines,

like the Atari 800
and the Commodore 64,

where things were moving
into actual real computers.

And the Amiga was a real computer,

and the PC was a real computer,

and these things were making their way
into people's homes

for reasons other than gaming.

So, it's like we were getting
into people's homes in this stealth way.

They would buy their PC,
they would buy their Amiga

for some "serious" reason.

But they'd spend all their time
playing games on it.

So I do think it was actually a very,
very influential time just because of that.

Because a lot of these things were
moving into normal people's homes

for other reasons,
and they were being exposed to gaming.

(Haynie) Henry Rubin, who is
the vice-president of engineering,

really wanted Amigas to be able
to do some kind of PC emulation.

That's why we had that PC emulation
program when the Amiga launched,

even though it was really, really slow
and not very useful.

The emulator

which turns your Amiga computer
into an IBM personal computer.

(Laughter and applause)

(Haynie) They wanted to be able to sell
Amigas into businesses,

and there was this checkmark that said,

"Is it PC compatible to be able
to sell something in businesses?"

So, if I said I wanted Amiga on my desk,

somebody's gonna come along and say,

"You know, company requires you
to do all your documentation

"in Microsoft Word,
so you can't have that Amiga."

It was interesting because, obviously,
people were aware that there was a market,

this machine was a market,
but an alternate way of it working...

There was that PC emulation card,
wasn't there?

The KCS Power Board, I think it was.
Yeah, and that was for the Amiga.

There was an interesting sort of hybrid.
You've got yourself an Amiga.

You actually want a PC.

So here's a board to plug in
to get yourself a PC.

(Haynie) PC emulator plugs
into the A500's RAM expansion.

Then, all of a sudden,
I have my Microsoft Word.

Here was a solution that allowed you
to get that Amiga into that business.

Which seems a bit counter-intuitive now,
but it led to great things.

And was the beginning of one machine
needing to work on another and vice versa.

So it's the beginning
of blurring of the edges

of PC technology, Amiga technology,
and that kind of thing.

It's very hard to get across

the extent of the impact
the Amiga had on my life.

I think, had it not been for the Amiga,
I wouldn't be in the industry today.

I think, had it not been for the Amiga,

I would not have started
to learn high-level languages.

I would not have started to get into
graphics and audio the way that I did.

I think, in a lot of ways,
because of the excitement,

because of that profound step change
in what a machine could do,

it opened up life in a way
I couldn't possibly imagine before.

It made me an optimist.

It made me realise that human beings
were capable of astounding leaps.

And it's very hard to get that across
without sounding ridiculous.

But it really was...
People wait for jetpacks, right?

People talk about flying cars.
The Amiga was that to me.

There are so many people just
starting to work on the Amiga again,

that there are lots of games,
new games, coming out right now,

and the quality's so amazing,

it's even more amazing
than commercial games in the '80s.

The games industry on mobile phones
is so destroyed.

I actually think that you can make
more money with an Amiga game right now

than you can do with an iPhone game.

It was an incredible culture at Amiga.

These guys were firing on all cylinders,
you know.

They were all friends.

The hardware guys worked
with the software guys.

It was kind of a small, tightly knit team.

And you could just tell that
there was magic happening.

It was the thing that I loved the most
about the Amiga,

it was this wild, galloping horse
the entire time.

And the best you could do
was ride that baby bareback

and hang on to the mane and hope that
we're all heading in the right direction together.

It was insane,
it was passion and love

and belief in things
that couldn't possibly come true,

and yet they were coming true,
month after month.

Things were working
the way that we hoped.

It was this crazy, crazy dream

that a bunch of us had and that
we actually managed to turn into reality.

For me, it was the opportunity to create,

not just multi-tasking,
but also the architecture of the Amiga

with dynamically loadable libraries

and device drivers
and the interrupt handlers,

and all of that architecture
that I created during that time

went on to be used
by so many other people.

It was like the basis of design
from then on.

It sort of established a platform
or a way of developing

all of the systems that came in the future.

So it was one of the first
microcomputer systems

to really have that kind of architecture.

All the stuff that people have done

with the audio and the graphics
and the video,

I just really feel that I'm lucky

to have been at the right place and time
to be a part of that.

So that's very big.

And the friends I've made,

and I'm still in contact
with a lot of the people

that I worked with during that time.

And that's been amazing, too.

(Luck) I look back on my contribution
to the Amiga in several ways, I think.

The graphics, the bouncing ball,

the multi-tasking layer library.

But also, to a certain degree,

trying to instil in other developers and
other users the magic that could be done

if you're on a mission from God
with the right family.

And it was incredible working
with the people that I knew there.

All of them are still close friends of mine.

My Amiga family is gonna be
my family for life.

There have been questions
about what we believed

at the time when
we were doing the machine.

Did we think it was gonna come true?

Did we feel a force
to push ourselves forward?

And the answer to that
is overpoweringly yes.

David Morse, president of the company,
was an amazing man.

Jay Miner, architect of the basic system,
an amazing man.

Dave Morse, our fearless leader,

he led us through all
the trials and tribulations.

He kept that flame alive.

There was some amazing power
behind those two guys

that pushed us forward

through no sleep, no money,
no time, no parts,

competition that would show up
from time to time...

all sorts of things that would get
in our way, parts that would break.

And we pushed forward
because we felt in our insides

how amazing this whole machine
was going to be.

And whatever spirit Dave and Jay
had inside of them fed us,

and pushed us forward,
it was amazing.

An Amiga serial number 1 still works.

It still runs.

Magic.

You don't get an opportunity very often
to be at the very threshold,

the very beginning,
of a billion-dollar-plus product line.

So I can look back and say,
"Hey, I was there.

"I was there when...
I walked in the door

"and we had two chairs, a card table,
and a coffeepot, and a dog."

Jay Miner had a dog.

Jay's dog was named Mitchy.

And Mitchy was the mascot of the office.

And in the beginning days of the Amiga,
they designed the initial hardware

using pencils and erasers and paper.

They would draw gates on the paper
and erase those gates and draw new ones

and connect the lines together.

And this was state-of-the-art of that day,

that you would design hardware
on paper with pencils.

And I would sit and watch Jay Miner
designing hardware.

And people say that it wasn't really Jay
that was the father of the Amiga,

that it was actually Mitchy his dog,
and I'm here to tell you it's a true story.

I would watch. Jay would sit there,
and he'd draw a gate on a sheet of paper.

And he'd look over at Mitchy
and Mitchy'd go...

And so he'd erase that and he'd draw it
upside down and with different lines,

and Mitchy'd go...

And so it was, "OK!"

Amiga computer, designed by dog!

'Where am I?'

(Man) It is the best machine
that is around anywhere in the world.

(Woman) The professional machine
of the future.

- How would I describe it?
- I think it's fantastic.

- Awesome.
- It's gonna skyrocket.

Only Amiga makes it possible.

♪ Only Amiga

♪ Makes it possible

♪ Only Amiga

♪ Makes it happen

- ♪ Only Amiga
- ♪ Ooh, ooh!

- ♪ Makes it possible
- ♪ Ooh, ooh!

♪ Only Amiga

♪ Makes it happen...

Amiga's got the guts to do things
that you can't do on other hardware.

- And it does all the work for you.
- Wow!

State-of-the-art technology at a price
that everybody can afford.

The Amiga is the best graphics machine
available in the world today.

♪ Only Amiga...

Only Amiga.

♪ Only Amiga

♪ Only Amiga...

Only Amiga.

♪ Only Amiga...

Only Amiga.

- ♪ Only Amiga...
- Makes it possible.

- ♪ Only Amiga...
- Only Amiga makes it possible.

♪ Oh! Only Amiga...

Ha-ha! Outrageous.

- ♪ Makes it possible
- Fabulous.

♪ Only Amiga

♪ Makes it possible... ♪

Only Amiga...

- This is it.
-...makes it possible!

(Cheering and applause)

Well, it was in 1982,

a friend of mine that I used to work with
at Atari came to me and said,

"Hey, Jay, let's start a new company.
I'm tired of this one."

And, er... I said, "Well, fine."
I said, "I'll do the chips for it.

"And I'll be the vice-president
if I can do the chips my way."

My original vision of the machine
was as a low-cost entry

into the computer field
via the video game area.

Video games, at that time,
were really hot,

and all our investors wanted
was a video game.

But I wanted something that could
be expanded into a real computer.

♪ What would you do if you weren't afraid
of anyone or anything?

♪ Cos I just crossed that line

♪ What would you do if you weren't afraid
of anyone or anything?

♪ Cos I know I'll get mine... ♪