• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

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

RAIDEN1

Member
Great video by MVG, seems like all things Commodore have risen to the surface these past few weeks, what with the recent anniversary of the death of Commodore back in 1994.....I personally think it was Doom, and on top of that - Street fighter 2 that killed the Amiga line completely... even the Super Nintendo (albeit with the SuperFX chip) managed to get a somewhat competent port of ID's software's sequel to Wolfenstein...but the Amiga did not...

 

amigastar

Member
I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D on a PC at a friends house. I only had an Amiga and i wanted Wolfenstein 3D on it, so badly. I don't know did it came out on the Amiga?
 
Last edited:

RoboFu

One of the green rats
Nah that's a dumb way of looking at it.

Pc clones is what killed the Amiga and everything else. More companies could build and sell a pc with little to no licensing. Only commodore made amiga.
 
Last edited:

Sophist

Member
Was video gaming that important back then? i would say it was the lack of killer applications that killed Amiga. You know, things like Microsoft Words or Excel.
 

RAIDEN1

Member
Was video gaming that important back then? i would say it was the lack of killer applications that killed Amiga. You know, things like Microsoft Words or Excel.
Yeah but this is about looking at it purely from a gaming perspective, these 2 games Wolfenstein and Doom sent shockwaves through the gaming world at the time...(certainly Doom did anyway)
 

Ozzie666

Member
Not sure I totally agree this one game did it.
I remember Wing Commander being a hot topic and it took 2 years to finally release it in Amiga.

Commodore and Atari both killed their respective machines and 68k machines became very underpowered by 1992. Follow up machines still couldn’t compare.

USA developers pulled out of both by that time too.
 

Holammer

Member
Commodore's lack of forward thinking leadership killed the Amiga and nobody else. When Wolfenstein came out in 1992, the Amiga architecture was already seven years old. The Amiga 1200 released the same year was a minor upgrade.
Nobody really thought in generations yet and figured they could sell the same old crap for years to come. Atari on the other hand? They REALLY tried and the Falcon was a beast, but it failed right out of the gate.

Just look at this? It came out the same year as the Amiga 1200!


Atari ST version of Wolfenstein running on a Falcon (clearly running too fast).
 

RAIDEN1

Member
Commodore's lack of forward thinking leadership killed the Amiga and nobody else. When Wolfenstein came out in 1992, the Amiga architecture was already seven years old. The Amiga 1200 released the same year was a minor upgrade.
Nobody really thought in generations yet and figured they could sell the same old crap for years to come. Atari on the other hand? They REALLY tried and the Falcon was a beast, but it failed right out of the gate.

Just look at this? It came out the same year as the Amiga 1200!


Atari ST version of Wolfenstein running on a Falcon (clearly running too fast).

I have to admit, seeing that video makes me realise the Falcon was no (meek Jaguar) but had the wings to fly!
 

RaySoft

Member
Not sure I totally agree this one game did it.
I remember Wing Commander being a hot topic and it took 2 years to finally release it in Amiga.

Commodore and Atari both killed their respective machines and 68k machines became very underpowered by 1992. Follow up machines still couldn’t compare.

USA developers pulled out of both by that time too.
Well.. his point was that Wolfenstein flipped the paradigm. It was the first "3D" game, and introduced the shift that the Amiga hardware wasn't designed to do. "Chunky" is much easier to use when you add a 3rd space. Much easier to maintain a single byte in memory (pixel) than all the bitplanes on the Amiga. Pandora was already out of the box at that point.
 

RAIDEN1

Member
Well.. his point was that Wolfenstein flipped the paradigm. It was the first "3D" game, and introduced the shift that the Amiga hardware wasn't designed to do. "Chunky" is much easier to use when you add a 3rd space. Much easier to maintain a single byte in memory (pixel) than all the bitplanes on the Amiga. Pandora was already out of the box at that point.
Even Alien Breed 3d was no match for Doom/Wolfenstein it had to have a glorified display box/GUI/ so as to keep the frame-rate at a reasonable level...
 

Darak

Member
The Amiga was technologically outdated when Wolfenstein and Doom came out because Commodore had failed to update the platform for years. The A1200 was an extremely disappointing and late update (audio, for example, was still unchanged from the original design, almost a decade old). The original project to produce a next generation Amiga (with chunky mode and many other improvements) was in development hell for four years or more and was eventually canned. Commodore was poorly managed and, by 1992, it was close to bankruptcy after sleeping on extremely good products for years.

The problem of the Amiga was always Commodore, not hardware or software technicalities. Management at Commodore didn't understand their own product and didn't know what to do with it. All the perceived inadequacies of the platform (by 1992) were not that big of an issue. Sure, the platform had ton of custom hardware which made backwards compatibility (or introducing new features) hard in new designs, but consoles had the same problem and they worked around it (you add it, at an increased cost for the user, or just ignore it and invest in having great new software on launch). The Motorola CPUs were getting expensive and had difficulty competing with Intel, but Apple had the same problem and again, found a way around it. The OS was not designed for memory protection and it was not feasible to patch it in, but Microsoft had the same problem (well, they had it much worse) and found a way around it. And so on.

If Amiga had been managed by a competent company, by 1992 you would have a next generation computer (perhaps not compatible with the older Amigas, or with reduced compatibility) that would have no problem running things like Doom.
 
Top Bottom