Although I now spend more time watching movies than I do playing games, they were my first love when it comes to entertainment. My father was always interested in the latest developments and as a little boy I was therefore lucky to be able to enjoy that. It all started with a Pong machine from Tandy and I must have spent hours playing tennis on a small black and white TV. The next machine was an Atari 2600 and I used it for years, even liked playing E.T. (which is generally seen as one of the worst games ever made). After that we went through a lot of machines in a very short time (like MSX, MSX2 and Commodore 64), which meant I kept playing the latest games. I still have fond memories of those machines, but it was the Amiga 500 which really left a huge impression.
This was a machine on which the games looked like they did in the arcade and which even could do 3d. I don’t know how much time I spent on the games. I flew hours on flight simulator F/A-18 Interceptor, in which you could take off from a carrier, fly underneath bridge and close to buildings (and yes, it was also possible to fly some missions). I also played Indianapolis 500 a lot, where I tried to win races by driving the wrong way and taking out all the other cars (as I didn’t think oval racing was very exciting to do). I was also fan of Celica GT Rally because the car had a working windscreen wiper and it also gave you the feeling of understeer going through corners. And I could go on naming other games I played a lot.
It was a machine which gave me loads of pleasure and which also regularly showed impressive technical feats in the form of demo’s present in front of cracked games, which was a huge scene at the time. The Red Sector demomaker was awesome, as it allowed you, without programming knowledge to make something impressive. I used it to make a video with morphing letters which I used during a presentation I did at school (which was probably better than the presentation itself). After the Amiga I started buying consoles, but the Amgia has a special place in my heart. And as this documentary shows, I’m not the only one.
Although I loved this computer I didn’t know anything about its history and The Amiga Years offers a very comprehensive overview. It doesn’t only show how it was developed, but also the era in which it was done and how it compared to other machines, making a huge impression. Through interviews with people from the hardware team you get a very interesting look into the culture at the company, but also what made the Amgia so special. It was a team which never gave up and which, when attending the CES (a make or break moment), were still developing the code for the now iconic bouncing ball. The various anecdotes are fun to hear, like the moment the Amiga was going to be presented to a huge audience. During the presentation Andy Warhol would be demoing its drawing application. He was instructed not to use one of the functions as it was known to crash the machine. When he used it as one of the first things everyone was holding their breath.
This documentary not only focusses on the development of the Amiga, but also the impact it had on game developers, the demo scene and of course the games. It shows a lot of footage from them which felt like a trip down memory lane. With a length of 152 minutes it takes its time to describe each subject in a very detailed way. That makes it a film which managed to make my heart start beating just a little faster and brought me back to my youth. It is a must-see if you grew up with this machine.
From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years is available throughVimeo
