A Look at Game Development During the Amiga Years

If I could choose to relive an era of gaming, it might just be the mid-to-late 80’s. At that time, I was very young, but that’s part of what I believe made video gaming so much fun, and caused the immersion levels to be so high. Even at that time, there were numerous games to play, across a variety of platforms. Personally, I stuck mostly with consoles, such as the NES and Mega Drive. But at around the same time was the Amiga computer, by Commodore.

This PC wasn’t exactly marketed as being a gamer’s PC, but rather for things like business and productivity. But thanks to the robust hardware, including a feature-rich graphics processor, game developers seemed to flock to the platform in droves. Ars Technica takes a look at the typical development cycle for the Amiga, and after reading, I have to say I have a renewed appreciation for classic gaming. In these days of early gaming, developers worked hard, were creative, and gave gamers reason to pick up their titles at the store.

Speaking of stores, though. Back in these days, game stores weren’t all too popular, which is in stark contrast to today where most gamers will either hit up the Internet, or go to a Walmart or GameStop. Rather, there weren’t many chains back in those days, so each video game store had their own flavor and appeal, and probably reflected just how passionate about gaming the owner of the store actually was.

With today’s fast PC’s, game developers don’t have to stress over super-small details in an attempt to make sure that the game has to work on a wide-range of PC’s, because that’s why options exist to increase and decrease game details. But with the Amiga, developers had to make sure that they developed a great-looking title that happened to run well. Since all Amiga’s were not a far stretch from one another, the freedom to push the envelope was there, but it required a lot of hard work, and creative programming.

Even if you didn’t own an Amiga, this is a recommended article. It helps give you a good look into what game development and related things were like back in those days. Sadly, much of the charm of those days has been lost, but despite that, seeing how things began can help give an even greater appreciation for how things are today.

Still, to really understand the power of the Amiga’s chipset, there was only one reference guide that really mattered: Commodore’s own Amiga Hardware Reference Manual. This was the Bible for Amiga game developers. It let dedicated explorers discover how the Blitter chip blasted graphics directly from memory to the screen, how the Copper let the programmer jump in and change the way the display worked even in the middle of scanning a line on the screen, how the audio chip offloaded sound processing, and how the CPU synchronized all these activities together.