All language subtitles for From Bedrooms to Billions, The Amiga Years! (2016)

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Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 have 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 have 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.

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.

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.

You know, 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.

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 the Nolan 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, you know, "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, he wanted to continue the
work he'd done on the Atari 800.

So, it was clear that 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, 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.

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 going to 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,

and 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.

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 would 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 going to 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, they
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 had 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 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 call 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.

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,

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 this 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.

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 pulling 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.

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, Mitchie, 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,

you know, 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, is,

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

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, you know, that kind of deal,
Bob, was a Henny Youngman deal.

What does that mean?

Well, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It really was fun.

I mean, 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 is
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.

He 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...

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 know, you watched
it progress,

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

You know, 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,

and 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 would come home and play
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.

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.

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 wasn'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.

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.

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 C128 had.

It was... 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 A1000 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. I mean,
the A1000 case was very expensive.

The lack of integration,
a lot of those...

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, you know, 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 that was... 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 that...

Everyone knew that's
what our strength was.

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.

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 have 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, was
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.

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

It really was...

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 left 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 AI 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 around.

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.

I 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 have 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.

It pushed game development,

it give it a rocket booster,

it give a nitro booster, and
pushed game development.

It accelerated ideas, people
wanting to get 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 a head test.

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

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."

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's 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.

And 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.

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.
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.

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.

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.

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,

"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.

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 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.

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."

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

are 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 AI,

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 know, 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 would 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

that 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 said hey 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 is, at
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, that 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.

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 on to.

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

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 to...

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 have 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 police showed up and
there was total panic,

there were people
jumping out windows.

Throwing disks out windows.

Crashing 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 would 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.

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.

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 on to 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.

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 every had in my entire career

in one single system.

It changed so many
things all at once.

I mean, and you ask somebody else,
they give you the same answer,

and give you five other
different examples.

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 mean, 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...

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.

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 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 the,

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...

They couldn't 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 is 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.

I think it was difficult to make
games in the early days for PC.

- Yeah.
- Because the colour palettes

were just so incredibly awful.

There weren't really
colours, were there?

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.
- Yeah.

I mean, that was
what it was for.

And then we were trying to, sort
of, 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.

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.

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.

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 that 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 is so amazing,

it's even more amazing than
commercial games in the '80s.

The games industry on the
mobile phones is so destroyed,

that 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... They 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 was,

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.

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.

And most... 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!" You know...

Amiga computer,
designed by a dog.

Where am I?

It is the best machine that is
around anywhere in the world.

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.

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.

Makes it possible.

Only Amiga makes it possible.

Outrageous.

Fabulous.

Only Amiga...

- This is it.
- ...makes it possible!

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 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.

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