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[MVG] Doom didn't kill the Amiga...Wolfenstein 3D did

stopmrdomino

stopmrdomino

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Jun 25, 2023
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Doom didn't kill the Amiga...Wolfenstein 3D did

Wolfenstein 3D released by id Software in 1992 brought in a change to video games. 2D games were no longer cool and texture mapped 3d rendered games were tak...
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Love these deep dive videos into classic PC gaming development. Even if I understand like 1/5th of what he says on a good day.
 
Man God

Man God

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Oct 25, 2017
38,417
Moore's law and the inability of Commodore to ever really move on from the C64 killed them. They didn't keep up with the speed that ibm clones did.

Apple also has it's worst years in the early and mid 90s. The fantastic combination of overpriced and under performance with the worst OS imaginable.
 
Reflecting Sky

Reflecting Sky

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Mar 17, 2024
345
The PC became a great games machine in the early '90s, with proper sound, more colorful graphics, and cheaper memory. Combine that with Commodore's mismanagement of the Amiga and the popularity of the Super NES and Mega Drive (especially in 1992 - when Wolfenstein 3D was released) and you can see why the Amiga's popularity declined.

Great video.
 
Gr8one

Gr8one

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Oct 25, 2017
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I remember going out with my father computer shopping to upgrade of old IBM XT and Apple IIE in the early 90s and Wolf3d was the game all the shops were showing off.

It was mindblowing as a kid playing NES and early SNES games. Made me a PC gamer for life. It also didn't hurt it was a golden age of PC games from Microprose with Civ, X-com, MOO, MOM, all the great Maxis games, STUNTS, then DOOM oh my gawd what a time to be alive!
 
Man God

Man God

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Oct 25, 2017
38,417
Gr8one said:
I remember going out with my father computer shopping to upgrade of old IBM XT and Apple IIE in the early 90s and Wolf3d was the game all the shops were showing off.

It was mindblowing as a kid playing NES and early SNES games. Made me a PC gamer for life. It also didn't hurt it was a golden age of PC games from Microprose with Civ, X-com, MOO, MOM, all the great Maxis games, STUNTS, then DOOM oh my gawd what a time to be alive!
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Add TIE Fighter and MechWarrior 2. Still the best years of the PC.
 
Reflecting Sky

Reflecting Sky

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Mar 17, 2024
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AmFreak said:
Yup, you also could argue compared to PC and consoles it never really lived, because it never pulled anywhere close to their numbers, only finding real success in a handful of countries/regions.
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The Amiga was a bright flash for a brief moment with the Amiga 500, in Europe. It never took the US by storm unfortunately, despite being incredibly forward-thinking in the mid-1980s.
Ahoy did a very good video on the fall and brief rise of the Amiga.
 
Lord Error

Lord Error

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Oct 27, 2017
4,418
Man God said:
Moore's law and the inability of Commodore to ever really move on from the C64 killed them. They didn't keep up with the speed that ibm clones did.
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They released C128 the same year they released first Amiga which was such nonsense. Amiga wasn't really a Commodore proper machine in my opinion. Its entire brain trust and design logic came from the outside, and there was probably some resistance in the company because of that.
But in any case, that was not a good time long term to have a platform with in house built specialized custom chips - that was at the same time expected to be cheap. With those expectations, they simply couldn't iterate fast enough, so it was unsustainable.

But man, while it lasted, it was an incredible piece of hardware and software.
 
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DECK’ARD

DECK’ARD

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Nov 26, 2017
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Shard Shinjuku said:
Going all in on the CD32 seemed like a good idea at the time.
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The CD32 was the right idea for the Amiga (which was originally envisioned as a console), but too late to the market. It should have launched alongside the 1200/4000, and those were planned to hit the market 2 years earlier than they did.

Commodore was so mismanaged, they are the ones ultimately to blame for the Amiga's demise. They never capitalised on what they had in the beginning.

It's testament to how good the Amiga was though that there is still an active community around it even now.

Lord Error said:
They released C128 the same year they released first Amiga which was such nonsense. Amiga wasn't really a Commodore proper machine in my opinion. It's entire brain trust and design logic came from the outside, and there was probably some resistance in the company because of that.
But in any case, that was not a good time long term to have a platform with in house built specialized custom chips - that was at the same time expected to be cheap. With those expectations, they simply couldn't iterate fast enough, so it was unsustainable.

But man, while it lasted, it was an incredible piece of hardware and software.
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If Commodore hadn't stepped in the creators of the Amiga would have been royally screwed over by Atari, who gave them a loan they knew they couldn't pay back with Atari getting all the rights to the design as a result.

Though Commodore went on to screw themselves over with many bad decisions and very questionable business practices.
 
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ArcticWolf

ArcticWolf

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Nov 29, 2022
746
Reflecting Sky said:
The PC became a great games machine in the early '90s, with proper sound, more colorful graphics, and cheaper memory. Combine that with Commodore's mismanagement of the Amiga and the popularity of the Super NES and Mega Drive (especially in 1992 - when Wolfenstein 3D was released) and you can see why the Amiga's popularity declined.

Great video.
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The jump from 1990 to 1992 for PC games was like going from the Gameboy Color to the PS1.
 
AmFreak

AmFreak

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Oct 26, 2017
2,546
Reflecting Sky said:
The Amiga was a bright flash for a brief moment with the Amiga 500, in Europe. It never took the US by storm unfortunately, despite being incredibly forward-thinking in the mid-1980s.
Ahoy did a very good video on the fall and brief rise of the Amiga.
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Yeah and even saying Europe is already overshooting it. More than every second Amiga ww was sold in the UK or Germany. ~7 out of 10 in those countries and Italy.
 
ghibli99

ghibli99

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Oct 27, 2017
18,054
shadowman16 said:
Bingo. I aint watched the vid yet but no one PC game finished the Amiga off, it was sheer corporate incompetence that finished them off.
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It was the one-two punch of Wolf3D and Doom... plus the uppercut of everything shifting to 3D shortly thereafter. Carmack also made a statement saying that the Amiga just wasn't up to snuff. Caused a lot of uproar among Amiga enthusiasts, but as MVG says, he wasn't wrong.
 
shadowman16

shadowman16

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Oct 25, 2017
32,618
ghibli99 said:
It was the one-two punch of Wolf3D and Doom... plus the uppercut of everything shifting to 3D shortly thereafter. Carmack also made a statement saying that the Amiga just wasn't up to snuff. Caused a lot of uproar among Amiga enthusiasts, but as MVG says, he wasn't wrong.
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I mean, even if either of those games could have ran on the Amiga, that doesnt change the fact that as a business Amiga was doomed (sorry) anyway due to Commodore just not knowing what to do with it. Its documented in many an Amiga history vid, book etc.
 
DECK’ARD

DECK’ARD

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Nov 26, 2017
5,063
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ghibli99 said:
It was the one-two punch of Wolf3D and Doom... plus the uppercut of everything shifting to 3D shortly thereafter. Carmack also made a statement saying that the Amiga just wasn't up to snuff. Caused a lot of uproar among Amiga enthusiasts, but as MVG says, he wasn't wrong.
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The annoying thing is the Amiga's engineers had anticipated the jump to 3D, and the AAA chipset had chunky pixel modes which would have allowed it to do 3D just fine. Along with a host of other improvements.

Commodore never gave them the resources to get it out the door though.

That we never got our hands on true next-gen Amigas is still the most depressing thing to happen in the industry for me.
 
eso76

eso76

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Dec 8, 2017
8,217
I don't really agree with the premise.
Amiga 500 lived its life and died of old age.
8 years meant being *ancient* at the time.
Its successor was a feeble fart; small upgrade, too late, archaic design that required some serious coding wizardry to compete with 16-bit consoles and no 3D capabilities.
Then the CD32 was just insulting.

Sure you can blame the most popular PC game at the time, but it would really just be a symbol of the way the market was changing and how incompetent Commodore had become keeping up with the industry.
 
Stike

Stike

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Oct 27, 2017
2,080
Commodore killed the Amiga, along with rampant piracy back then.

When Factor 5 said that even friggin' TURRICAN only sold like 50,000 units when there was 1 million Amigas in Germany alone and pretty much EVERYONE had that game... yeah... no wonder they focused on consoles instead.
 
Fatagnus

Fatagnus

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Dec 24, 2017
219
Check out the history of the Amiga series of articles on Ars Technica if you really want to know what killed the Amiga. Probably the best written account of how horrible commodore upper management was.
 
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