From The Forum issue 166 - First Amiga Encounters

[NickThorpe]

Your words. Our pages. From The Forum! It's happening again this month, just like it does every month. This month, what I want to know is:

What are your memories of your first encounter with the Amiga?

Some answers will be written on paper, ground into a fine powder, mixed with ink and printed on the very pages you read.

[Sokurah]

How can you ask this - it's been like a million years and can hardly remember what I did last week.

That being said I'm pretty sure it was The Faery Tale Adventure at a friends house.
Coming from the Speccy I was pretty impressed with the size of the world and what options there were - and I played it a lot when I got my own Amiga sometime later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5_4DhXWdwo

[ncf1]

After what seemed like many cruel hours (that was most likely minutes) waiting for a signal to come up, we were finally greeted with the rather lame driver that was Crazy Cars. Back in those days they didn't care what they bundled in with Starter Packs - you were "lucky you got anything for free, mate". Thankfully I had a zen-like inner came though, as I knew it was to be but a red herring and there were many, many entertaining hours to come on this glorious machine. All that Zzap! gloating surely could not misinformed waffle, could it? Alas no, it wasn't. I could rely upon their sage advice once again.

[Carrot007]

Not a game but it has to be 'jesus on e's'.

Saw the demo at a friends and decided to swap my megadrive for one.

First games though, maybe Gods?

[necronom]

I remember this well. It was at the Saltburn Community Hall and the System 2000 Computer Club (of which I was a member, along with a school friend and our Computer Studies teacher) did a demo of it. We were all sat on chairs and the Amiga 1000 was on a small table in front of us, like being on a pedestal. We saw the Boing! demo and were all amazed by it.
At a later club meeting we saw The Pawn and were commenting that the digitised pic in the game looked as good as the same pic on the box, and the next time I got to play Defender of the Crown, which was mind blowing.
I can't see any computer ever having the impact of the Amiga, as it was from the future!

[PostieDoc]

My Amiga came with the 10 Star Pack and the first game I played from it was Ikari Warriors.
While it is quite basic compared to later Amiga games, I had a blast in two player co-op with my brother.

[mr jenzie]

mine was this

NEVER MOVE THE MACHINE WHILE THE DISC IS BEING ACCESSED


so i traded it for my sinclair spectrum and games, to the games shop in renfrew and i always went in and annoyed the poor guy
went home and put it on first time, put the disc in and did what everyone does when discs are accessing ..... I MOVED IT!
yep i am idiot
he was slightly unhappy when i told him, but he's a good guy and got me a replacement!

so after i remembered never to do that again, i decided it didn't have enough memory, so off i went up to SILICA superstore on the fifth floor of DEBANHAMS in glasgow, where they were selling extra memory and other amiga stuff. bought the memory that came in a manly coloured video cassette type box (yep it is PINK coloured) ..... AMITEK RAM BOARD or the amiga 600, 1mb populated NO clock, no soldering required, easy to follow manual and a 2 year warranty!

yep i'm holding as we speak

and yep the invoice is still there too!

so on friday 12th may 1995 i paid £30 for double the memory

however the manual lied to me
i had trouble getting the blasted thing in

so i TOOK my amiga600 up with me and thought it would be a good idea to ASK THE GUY ..... yep i actually did this ..... to install it for me, sadly he kindly declined but said it was easy enough. so BACK i went home and an hour later it was in and running!

typical me really

games wise it was always looking at them in the game mags i got, and since i had one now i did actually BUY a few ..... sensible soccer 1 and euro championships, stunt car racer and arcade pool which i loved ..... as well as the packed ones ..... ooh here's the box



it was a choice between that and the EPIC pack, but i wanted to be a race car

lovely pack with MICROSOFT GRAND PRIX, DELUX PAINT 3, PUTTY and PUSHOUT! the first one i played ad nauseam, tried the paint program a bit but those other two were STUUUUUUUUUUUUUPIDLY hard and never got into them!

it also came with another pack of four games ..... STRIKER, ZOOL, PINBALL DREAMS and TRANSWRITE, in a GIANT box and inside the four NORMAL sized boxes were!



other than that i got them *ahem* at the glasgow barras

got the likes of atr racing, powerdrive, elite frontier, goal, sensible golf, the settlers stardust, super skidmarks, worms .....

the likes of cannon fodder and champ manager (14 seasons as manchester united) but it was SWOS that was the goto game ..... couldn't play it for toffee but simmed the games extensively!

also dabbled in REAL 3D

and of course i ploughed many monies into it's magazine industry

inevitably emulation took over but a couple of years ago i pulled it all out to see if it still worked ..... and guess what ..... yep, i did, even i i shake the power pack and hear something jiggling about inside it

my first proper computer and i thoroughly enjoyed using it
and if i bring it back out i'll probably enjoy it agan

[NorthWay]

I read about the Amiga in the CU pages while on summer vacation in Sweden; it sounded too good to be true.
Years later (1986) I saw it at a local dealer where it was running Mindwalker; and it was true!
After hours their shop window used to have some demo I can't really remember too well with lots of funky scrolltexts showing off stuff that the hw could do that others couldn't.

Some two years (1988) later I bought my 2000 (2x 3.5" and 1084S) at the same place. For 18000 NOK - which was my whole student loan for that semester...

[malczx]

Going into Tandy in 1991 and pondering over whether to purchase an Amiga 500. As soon as the sales assistant booted up the first disk from Bart Simpson vs The Space Mutants with the spaceship animation and Bart jumping down the tree that was me, sold! Goodbye to my ZX Spectrum of 8 years, hello amazing sound and graphics! Great days.

[RichL]

For some reason my parents got me an ST

[thingonaspring]

I had seen a few photos in the shared c64/Amiga magazines, but it was only when I went round to a friends house and saw him playing Batman The Movie, followed by me having a go on New Zealand Story that had me immediately 100% sold on it. I saved up my paper round money for months and months, and it was first computer I bought for myself, Cartoon Classics A500+ pack, with that giant 4 pack mentioned above. Still have the big box for the four of them actually

[The Beans]

My first encounter with the Amiga wasn't that memorable because I already had an Atari ST and that was the machine where I did my initial wow at the massive step up from the 8-bit machines.
I remember the game that made me truly want one though. It was Alien Breed. Playing it every night for weeks round at my friend's place in a darkened room was a great experience and one that eventually made me move to the Amiga.

[sirclive1]

Popped round to a mates , he's telling me all day about the Amiga his dad was getting that day , took one look at Defender of the crown and was rendered speechless .

[paranoid marvin]

Seeing Rocket Ranger (having played it on the ST) and realising how much better the 'miggy version was

[bounty bob]

Seeing it in Neighbours in Paul Robinson's office all the time and thinking I need an Atari ST for games as this is for work.