Amiga Story Part 2 (The 90s) | Nostalgia Nerd

I conclude the Commodore Amiga Documentary with the second part of it's story. This episode is based heavily in the 1990s. We start out with the Amiga 500 and the UK Batman Pack, before moving on through the further developments, staff changes, The Commodore CDTV, Amiga 500+, Amiga 600, Amiga CD32, Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000, Amiga 3000 and the later models and revisions. We go through the peak of Commodore and the Amiga and it's downfall and the various factors which influenced its fall from grace.

Thank you to my fellow Youtubers for lending their superlative voices;

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★Equipment★
Lumix G6 with Vario 14-42mm Lens
Nikon D3200 with 40mm Macro
Corel Video Studio Ultimate X9
Corel Paint Shop Pro X6
Blue Snowball Microphone

♜Resources♜
Many thanks for all of those who helped with resources for this video. Please do let me know if I've missed anything.

Many websites were used for research.... Please check back soon for these updated resources and music listings.

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[NoobixCube]

Your long-form documentary content is seriously better than most of the documentaries on Netflix.

[LGR]

Thanks for having me play a small part in this video! Just _excellent_ work you're doing, sir :)

[jonathancook]

The effort required to put this 2-part series totalling 1 hour & 50minuites together must have been immense. Massive thumbs up!

[lurkerrekrul]

As an American Amiga owner, it was depressing to watch such an advanced machine be so mismanaged. There was a brief period here where the Amiga was considered the top of the line for games, but it didn't last long before IBM clones and VGA started to take over.

I knew the writing was on the wall the day I saw a printed ad for Wing Commander. The graphics looked amazing and it wasn't available for the Amiga (then). Next came the golf game Links. For months I looked at the full-page ad on the back of magazines and waited for the promised Amiga version to show up. When it was finally released, I thought "At least now the Amiga will be listed in the ad and IBM owners can see that the Amiga can handle such games!" Literally the very next issue that came out, the ad for Links had been replaced by an ad for Links 386 Pro, which was IBM only. :(

By restricting the Amiga only to authorized dealers (of which, there was only one anywhere near here) and having virtually no advertising for it, most people had no idea it even existed. Mention Mac or even Atari to people and they had at least heard of those machines, but say "Amiga" and they had no idea what you were referring to. Combine that with Commodore U.S.'s apparent hatred of games and you have a perfect recipe for failure.

[jean_mollycutpurse_winchester]

I used an A500 to make the video animation graphics for the film, Murder by Moonlight (TV Movie 1989 with Brigitte Nielsen) Great machine.

[psychoklown]

Can't believe I just watched a 2 hour video about Amiga!!! Awesome work, probably took you over 200 hours to edit and create!

[derealized]

I have a huge box of game magazines that start in the late 80s and go all through the 90s. Also I came across some old radio shack catalogs from the early 90s, I couldn't get myself to throw them away. They just remind me too much of what things were like back in those days. The memories all come back just flipping through the pages.
Great time time to be alive, there was a lot to look for.

[gazac]

I worked for Commodore Australia, We sold the A1200 & the A4000, so Commodore Australia was still running long after what you said, Amiga's sold good in Australia, not as good as the UK but sometimes better then the US, Commodore US mismanaged was it down fall, we copied the UK with game bundles as well.

Commodore Australia was also big in selling 386-486 PC at the same time, it was a great time & a great job, I got paid to play with Amigas.

[general]

I think I've watched this series half a dozen times now. I'm not sure why I love it so much.

[davenghiem]

I'm a startup tech co-founder, and a long time embedded hardware developer. I've been a PC guy since I was a kid, though my Aunt and Uncle used to work in the Commodore computer factory in PA, assembling C64's (good work for Viet refugees). So I have an intimate interest in what happened to the Commodore Amiga. Something that fascinates me about the machine, is all the mis management errors that contributed to the demise of the Amiga. Your videos, besides being historically informative, are some of the best tech business management autopsy videos I have ever, EVER seen! I spent two hours watching your videos, thinking to myself, "yup, that's not what I'd do, I'd do this. Or that's what I'd do, not that."

I know hindsight is always 20/20, but holy crap, some of those decisions make me think, Good God, WTF were they thinking, given the data that they had?! More than anything, the Commodore Amiga's demise is instructional on how NOT to run a tech company!

Thank you for this video series!

[SteveBenway]

this is the Amiga video I've been waiting for. It's the era of the Amiga I got into, but also the era that's most ignored by retrospective videos. Great work!

[sgtunix]

I've now watched part 1 and part 2 of this documentary. It was an enlightening experience. I'm also particularly impressed with how you got hold of all that old footage from the 80s & 90s.

[miks]

Your documentaries are of incredible quality, the amount of work and research thats gone into this is staggering. This is the 3rd time Ive watched this now over several years

[mmarkotan]

Never had an Amiga, I was a Commodore 64 owner, but used to go to my friend’s place to play on Amiga 500. That was my dream computer in early 90´s. But great work you´ve done on this one, much appreciated. Thank you from Slovakia.

[RETROCENGO]

This should be a Netflix documentary, I love it. Thumbs up

[hpbifta]

Well done Nerd, possibly the most defining documentary on the history of the Amiga. I know this was a lot of work for you and am very impressed.

[OldManTheseDays]

Fantastic video. I worked at a company called Play, Inc. in the mid 90s that was founded by Paul Montgomery and Mike Moore (of Video Toaster fame). In fact the gal in that Toaster video, Kiki Stockhammer- was sort of the spokesperson for Trinity, one of the products we made. Paul used to say that coming from the Amiga market was like coming from the future. How true indeed.

[TomAtkinson]

AMOS basic on the A1200 was stunning! At age 17 I wrote a basic program to do music interval ear training high school. It would play a random interval using a sampled piano sound, then a robot synth voice would read out what the interval was, eg perfect 4th, minor 7th etc. I would take the audio output and listen to it driving my 1977 Toyota Corolla (with cassette player) and listen to Portishead at high volume!! I still have not used an operating system with such fine grained time-slicing except perhaps a BeOS machine. I also worked at an animation company which would get 15 seconds of 320x240 grayscale playback direct from the RAM of an Amiga2000 fully kitted out (Toonz Animation NZ).

[slipknotboy]

I love your documentaries, Peter, they're great. And I loved all the voice appearances, including Kim, Clint, Dan, etc. - that was a nice (and fitting) touch.

[Lordborak]

Great Vid, one interesting point to me. You say the plus came out in January 1992. I got my Amiga 500plus in November 1991 from John Lewis as I got it for my birthday. Apparently Amiga had run out of A500's and retailers were given the 500plus with out being told before it's offical launch. I still have the machine and the receipt. It still works and is still awesome.