The first time it felt like I was entering a new dimension of gaming…

C64 Days…

In 1988, my parents picked up a Commodore 64, one of the C models that had replaced the much-loved ‘breadbin’ version. Before that, I had only experienced video gaming via Intellivision and Atari 2600, albeit sporadically as they were my parents’ consoles. Oh, and one of the old Tomy Caveman tabletop LCD/VFD games, which I dearly loved and spent many hours playing. It was this event, this first journey into the world of home computers, that led to me owning my first console: their Atari 2600, now handed down to me. It was actually a pretty good time to have one; all the games were dirt cheap.

The C64 was a new beast to us. There was tape loading, keys to press, a myriad of joysticks with clicky microswitches, and music, oh the music! Before that, Pitfall II’s looping tuneage was the most advanced piece of game music I had heard. Games could also be far more complex than anything I’d seen on the venerable Atari.

And yet, this isn’t the generational leap I’m referring to.

Perhaps, I was still too young to really feel the ‘shock of the new.’ It was obvious, even at my tender age, that the graphics were better. The music certainly was; I loved the Ocean Loader tunes and it’s where a nascent love of chiptune music was born. But I don’t remember any kind of jaw-drop moment going from playing Atari games to C64, even when I was deemed old enough to have one of my own sometime in 1991 after the C64GS, the ill-fated consolized version of the C64 that my parents had been foolhardy enough to buy for us the previous Christmas was part-exchanged for it.

Then in late 1992, as the commercial life of C64 was well and truly in its twilight, this happened…

… And Amiga Nights

This is the generational shift I’m referring to: our first Commodore Amiga. I’m a little fuzzy on when exactly my parents picked it up, but I want to say around September-November 1992, given the release date of the A600 and certain games that were released around the time and I confidently remember being some of the first we played.

Amiga.

The name still sends a shiver down my spine – even a year after picking up an A600 again last July and years of emulation through WinUAE. I can still vividly recall walking down the stairs the day it arrived to grab a drink while playing MicroProse’s Gunship (my first ever flight sim!) on the C64 with its comparatively crude bleeps and bloops and whirrs, opening the living room door and being hit by THIS.

I just…holy shizz. As good as C64 SID chip music can be in its own right, to a young teen already with stars in their eyes over the prospect of an Amiga in the house after drooling for years over screenshots of ‘miggy ports of games, this was… this was my first generational shift moment. My parents had picked up Alien Breed Special Edition ‘92 alongside their A600 and it was the first game they put on.

The first year of us being an Amiga family is really a string of generational shifts. We experienced our first proper dungeon crawling and RPGs through Eye of the Beholder and Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny. Our first point-and-click adventures through The Secret of Monkey Island and LOOM. Our first truly deep strategy games through games such as Sid Meier’s Civilization and Utopia: Creation of a Nation. Everything looked bolder and brighter and felt like truly from the future. And loaded far quicker, too! Goodbye, tape games; hello 3.5″ inch floppy disks and games loading in a fraction of the time it took a C64 game to stream off an audio cassette and be turned into data. And this was on a home computer that was already a little long in the tooth by the time 1992 rolled around as DOS PCs embraced VGA graphics and Adlib/Soundblaster as standard.

We experienced our first mouse.

That was certainly a novel experience, as was getting to grips with Workbench 2.04. I’d played a few games on C64 that had cursor control through the joystick, but this was my first encounter with a Graphic User Interface and the concepts of folders and directories and file management. It was also the first time I heard synthesized text-to-speech through Workbench’s Say program.

The Amiga was also when I truly started playing games to complete them and experience a feeling of progression. Unlike with the C64, we had relatively few pick-up-and-play arcade experiences; most of what we owned over the four years we were exclusively an Amiga family were time-hogging strategy games, flight sims, RPGs, and adventure games. Those genres of games and experiences certainly existed on the C64, my experience of playing Gunship on the C64 is a testament to that, but they were ones I largely missed out. So, perhaps that is another reason why I had such a powerful ‘shock of the new’ from the Amiga; I experienced new genres and types of games for the first time and all at once.

Did I mention that before my brother and I had our own Amiga later in 1993, we would sneak downstairs at night to the living room and the ‘Big TV’ to play the A600? We did the same whenever my parents went out grocery shopping, taking turns to provide an out-the-window watch for when they returned. By the time we got our hands on our own Amiga, that same A600 handed down to us as my parents upgraded to an A1200, we’d racked up dozens of clandestine hours playing Mega-Lo-Mania, Sid Meier’s Pirates, and Alien Breed. That’s just how besotted we were with this new generation of computer and the new experiences it offered us.

Ah, all those Amiga nights…