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 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.
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.