Did it though? - Yesterzine

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[00:00:00]New Zealand, new movie, and new plane, please. It's November 1989, and this is Yestazine.

[00:00:07]>> [music] >> Once there was a magazine called ST Amiga Format, and Future Publishing looked and saw that it was good. Then Trevor in marketing pointed out they'd probably sell more if they split it into two magazines, so they did that instead.

[00:00:20]This occurred in mid-1989, an interesting time. As we saw a few months ago, the ST unquestionably stomped the Amiga in the first half of the [music] 16-bit computer generation.

[00:00:30]On launch in the UK, the Amiga from Commodore, as it was so dubbed, was late and cost as much as three times the price of a workable ST setup to buy.

[00:00:40]Commodore's marketing was faulty, clearly hoping the C64 would still be the home choice, and the company was plagued by internal fighting and former CEO suing them, while Atari, possibly just by random chance, briefly had their stuff together.

[00:00:55]The A500 came along in 1987 and helped, although it was still initially notably more money.

[00:01:01]And despite some dissenting voices in the comments of that mid-1988 video, some of whom might even have watched it, 18 months later, approaching Christmas 1989, Atari [music] still had their nose in front. Some basic evidence can be provided from magazine sales, surely the best indication of how many normal humans are actually using the machines.

[00:01:21]The cruel would point out the unfortunately cropped [music] masthead on my scan of AF promising to be the leading magazine for Britain's only Amiga owner.

[00:01:29]More sensibly though, early in the new year, both ST and Amiga Format would get their first sales figures covering the last 6 months of 1989.

[00:01:38]ST Format was comfortably ahead, 43 to 40,000.

[00:01:43]It's still impressive though. A year previously, the only figure we have, the combined magazine couldn't get much above 30.

[00:01:50]As we rejoin the action, we're in November 1989, and we know the Amiga is about to gain the ascendancy, so we'll investigate. Are there clues for the Amiga's breakthrough? What happened to that gigantic initial price difference?

[00:02:04]Did Commodore finally pull their finger out and hire a marketing department that didn't think the best way to play quick lash was to write kazoo's for every answer?

[00:02:12]And there are games, of course.

[00:02:14]That's rather the point.

[00:02:19]There's no point burying the lead here.

[00:02:21]Amiga Format certainly don't. The inside front cover is an advert for the tying game to the Batman movie.

[00:02:28]Tim Burton's then very recent take on the Dark Knight had popularized the less cartoony version of the world's most lovable billionaire.

[00:02:36]It wasn't quite the highest-grossing movie in the UK, beaten by the final Indiana Jones film, and perhaps more surprisingly, all-time classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

[00:02:45]But it was probably a bigger cultural touchstone than either for the time, and also managed to better week one than both.

[00:02:52]Inevitably, [music] the license has gone to Ocean, whose record in these situations range from the sublime to the ridiculous.

[00:02:59]It's available for all the main machines, including the old eight-bit Amstrad, Commodore, and Spectrum Spectrum.

[00:03:05]More crucially though, it's available for both ST and Amiga, cheekily £5 more on the latter.

[00:03:12]So, how is that good news for the adoption of the Miggy?

[00:03:16]The answer there is a rare case for a magazine picking up the right news story to lead with. Commodore have indeed woken up, and they've created the Amiga's first proper bundle for Christmas 1989.

[00:03:26]Released on the same day as Batman, it includes Batman. The box giving absolutely no doubt Commodore knew what they had.

[00:03:35]Joining Batman in a set being launched at the same £399 the A500 had cost all year on its own, is another Ocean title, a port of Taito's New Zealand Story arcade machine, highly rated in its Amiga Format review just 3 months earlier.

[00:03:51]Electronic Arts complete the bundle with two titles. Flight Simulator Interceptor, better known as F-18 Interceptor, is older, but crucially is an Amiga exclusive, as technically is Deluxe Paint II, with the ST version not being released until 1990.

[00:04:07]Deluxe Paint fulfills the almost traditional pretend we're a lead creative platform slot in the bundle.

[00:04:13]Some form of word processor or paint application, often Deluxe Paint, were in most Amiga packages from this point on.

[00:04:20]Amiga Format, who, as you'll soon see, are as accepting of the machine's initial failure as much as we saw Commodore User being at launch, talked the bundle up, thinking it's certain it'll fly off the shelves and dramatically increase sales of the A500.

[00:04:36]But does it deserve to? There's only one way to find out.

[00:04:40]It It's playing the games.

[00:04:42]The ones [music] in the pack.

[00:04:45]Which we'll do now.

[00:04:49]The headline is, of course, Batman, and it's worth stressing how important this was at the point people still cared about movies and movie-licensed games.

[00:04:57]While these days those two things are mostly entirely disconnected, not least because it apparently now takes a decade to make a game, back then getting your movie game out with the movie could be a huge cash cow. It's a major reason a lot of them are so dreadful. It was getting released on the deadline almost regardless of what shape it was actually in.

[00:05:17]And Batman was bigger than most, making $400 million on a $50 million budget, or if you listen to Warner, a loss of 35 million because they'd rather you pay tax than them.

[00:05:28]In the US, it was the fastest film ever to 100 million at the time. It took well over a decade for another superhero movie to take more money.

[00:05:37]Point is, big deal. And the game was released just a month after the cinema release in the UK, which is probably a month later than Ocean's management would have been entirely happy with.

[00:05:47]It does though give us a chance to clear up a misconception. Most sources of history on this bundle and game will claim the deal gave the Amiga a two-month timed exclusive on the game.

[00:05:58]We'll pick on legendary retro writer Andrew Fisher for this one, because he's normally more reliable than a Swiss watch with an extended warranty being carried in a Volvo.

[00:06:07]Writing for Film Stories, he suggests David Pleasance, Commodore bigwig, insisted against pushback for this exclusive, promising a million quid and an initial order of 10,000 copies.

[00:06:18]There's only one problem with this story.

[00:06:21]It's not true.

[00:06:22]>> It's a total fabrication. Well, the two-month bit isn't. There's good evidence for the others, but there's absolutely no primary source evidence for this. Let me lay out my version.

[00:06:32]This issue of AF went on sale in very early October and contains the announcement of the pack.

[00:06:38]It would have gone to press before it's official unveiling at the Personal Computer Show.

[00:06:43]We know this because they say it's about to take place on the next month page.

[00:06:48]Their slightly jokey show agenda doesn't mention Batman, which suggests that the bundle news came in quite late in production.

[00:06:55]Said show began on the 27th [music] of September that year, and an issue of ACE reveals that is also the on sale date for Batman on the Amiga and PC, neatly nuking the exclusive argument already.

[00:07:09]But it goes further, because the C64 and Spectrum versions had come out over 2 weeks earlier on the 11th.

[00:07:16]The ST version was indeed slightly behind, but again, the difference is 2 weeks.

[00:07:21]Launching on the 14th of October.

[00:07:25]My best guess is those 2 weeks the Miggy had the game and not the ST might, with some muddying in the retelling, have got turned into a 2-month full exclusive.

[00:07:33]Contextual sources tend to support this.

[00:07:36]ST Format reviewed Batman in an issue released 5 weeks after the review in Amiga Format, which is the one after the one we're in.

[00:07:44]Commodore User though covered both the C64 and Amiga versions in an issue released before either.

[00:07:51]The important other information though is that said issue shows Batman entering the C64 charts, albeit only at number three.

[00:07:58]It is not in the Amiga chart.

[00:08:02]It appears in the Amiga chart, again not quite at number one, the next month, by which point it's number one on C64.

[00:08:09]For further proof, December's CVG all-formats chart lists Batman as a new entry on the eight-bits only.

[00:08:17]One month later, it's on both 16-bits.

[00:08:20]I'm pretty comfortable at this point saying the Amiga didn't have 2 months on anyone and was behind the eight-bit versions. [music] As a game, Batman goes a bit route one, at least initially, as we're basically dealing with Ocean Maker platformer here. Although that said, white Batman can't jump.

[00:08:37]To move around, you need a grappling hook affair, which I'm loath to look up on the grounds it'll probably be called the batline or some equally tedious portmanteau.

[00:08:45]It's a good thing there was never a Klingon crossover. You'd need a batbat lift.

[00:08:50]It's difficult. The basic idea is to make it across to the top right where the boss is waiting, but there's quite a lot in your way. The various kinds of henchmen can both shoot and drop bombs through the level. There's a bunch of environmental hazards, and perhaps cruelest of all, Batman takes fall damage.

[00:09:07]That batline is not easy, either. Most of the time you're just using it vertically, which is okay, but slow.

[00:09:14]There's several places though where you'll deploy it diagonally, which is going to make you swing, and by the way, you'll also take damage if you hit a wall.

[00:09:21]This is a lot harder, especially as the first place you're going to encounter this in the game is also where there is acid dripping on you, so it's demanding pixel-perfect positioning, probably under fire from the off.

[00:09:33]MVP of this episode, my plosive filtering.

[00:09:36]Enemies are at least dispatched easily using the bat ninja stars, as I'm sure they're called.

[00:09:42]But while the enemies can shoot through platforms in diagonal directions, you can't.

[00:09:46]These are my initial goes, and I'm missing two important facts. Firstly, that contrary to my initial impressions, you can stop when ascending the bat rope. Not knowing that here means I was frequently committing to some very bad decisions.

[00:09:59]And secondly, you do have a diagonal weapon.

[00:10:03]If you can get an enemy in the clear, you can kill them by sending the bat line in their general direction. This I learned from watching a world of long plays video is the easy way to kill the end boss of this level.

[00:10:13]Even they only get to said boss on about 10% health, which explains why I know a lot of people who think this style of gameplay is the whole game.

[00:10:21]It's because like me playing fairly, this is as far as I've ever got.

[00:10:26]And on that basis, I think you'd be disappointed if the little brother you passed down your C64 to had got his version 2 weeks earlier. Because it's not giving a lot away so far.

[00:10:36]The baby version starts with a near identical level that plays near identically.

[00:10:41]We can accept that's the C64 over performing as much as anything, but you're paying two and a half times as much for this, and Commodore are pinning the entire machine's hopes on it.

[00:10:51]You'd expect more.

[00:10:53]And to be fair, you get it.

[00:10:56]The game does not put a lot of its story into the actual game, but the manual tells me that we've rescued Vicki Vale.

[00:11:02]Off-screen, apparently. You wouldn't know her. She's held prisoner at a different chemical plant.

[00:11:08]Level two is about escaping, and it's taken a hard left turn into being a driving game.

[00:11:13]At first glance, it's similar in gameplay to almost any other arcade driving game on the system. There's some wrinkles, though.

[00:11:19]The Batmobile is even more spongy than the bat himself. Collisions with traffic or decided to track will kill you very quickly. This could normally be worked around, but you've got some bigger problems.

[00:11:31]The first, you've noticed me failing repeatedly. You have to take side streets.

[00:11:36]To do this, you can't just slow down, indicate, and wait for the lights like a normal person. Instead, you shoot the bat grapple out the side, hook a lamp post, and apparently that will work.

[00:11:46]This represents a rare moment of the game being nice to you. You get three attempts to make any given turn before running into a police roadblock that's apparently on the Joker's side rather than yours.

[00:11:57]The turns come quickly, sometimes showing almost as soon as the game starts again. You'll probably have to successfully make 30 of them in your 5 minutes to finish this level. You'll also cover 100 distances. What those distances represent, I'm not sure.

[00:12:12]Still, the cheat code I used to skip to this level also gives me infinite lives.

[00:12:16]Otherwise, once you'd lost three over this and the near impossible previous level, you'd be right back to the beginning of the game.

[00:12:23]Armed with this, I spent some considerable time working down to a point where I'm only losing slightly badly due to other time or car energy.

[00:12:31]Which is the point I realized there's a restart point at 50 distances to go, and that I can just do in a single life.

[00:12:38]Which does give us the chance to admire the graphics. For an Amiga game this early, it looks rather nice, and the frame rate is unimpeachable.

[00:12:45]It's got high on-display in the shop points, and I suspect the Batman pack relied heavily on that at Christmas 1989.

[00:12:53]I'm sure it looks a lot better than the ST version.

[00:12:57]Whether you agree with me probably hinges on whether you noticed me switching to the ST version just before I started talking about the graphics.

[00:13:04]They're virtually identical, with differences I might even be able to pin entirely on their respective FPGA cores.

[00:13:11]For a fair test, I'm running both these on the same Heber Multi System 2 machine.

[00:13:16]Suddenly playing the ST version after the Amiga, I'd forgotten what the latter looked like even before I died the first [clears throat] time.

[00:13:23]The ST one does seem to have a tougher time but frankly that could have just been the beer I had while playing the Amiga one.

[00:13:29]And again, for the existing owners, the ST version is a fiver cheaper.

[00:13:34]This is on looks, of course. The second that AY chip starts up, you know it's the ST version.

[00:13:43]There's one and a half more gameplay styles in these 16-bit versions. After the driving success, you go into a clone of the game Mastermind. The Joker is trying to do a poisoning, and you need to work out which three products have the poison.

[00:13:56]You know, rather than just throwing all eight in the recycling bin like a normal bat.

[00:14:01]Selecting three at a time, you are told how many are right.

[00:14:04]I finish on the second try.

[00:14:06]It does feel like a basic mini-game with a little too much luck for a game that, I remind you, gives you three lives to finish the entire thing.

[00:14:15]Then the 3D engine returns for the Joker's plan to hide his poison gas in balloons. You, in the Batwing, and apparently that's the real name, solve the problem by cutting the ropes holding the balloons, leaving them to fly off and land in New Jersey instead, damaging nothing of value.

[00:14:30]It's slightly weird this is the later level because frankly there's a lot less going on here than with the car. There's no enemies, there's no tricky junctions, and really there's no strain to stay on the road, at least if you're willing to burn one life finishing this.

[00:14:43]You can change speed, and obviously I'm showing that off here.

[00:14:46]But on my first go, I simply didn't and cruised through this section using the mid-level restart just once.

[00:14:52]It's quite easy to cut the rope rather than hit the base or the balloon itself, and it seems much more generous with the mistakes it lets you make than the other driving section or any of the rest of the game.

[00:15:03]I assume they think a vanishing number of people would actually get here, which is why the harder but more glamorous level using the same engine got promoted. This is borne out by the last level being an even more annoying version of the first one, which I quickly lose the will to continue.

[00:15:18]If you're any good, though, this entire game can be completed in 20 minutes, as Ian Longplay proves, possibly with infinite lives and some quiet editing.

[00:15:28]So, what we have here is a qualified success in 2026.

[00:15:32]No question that getting Batman into a bundle on day one was a master stroke for Commodore, possibly the only time you can ever say that. But as a game now, I might create enemies by saying that really it's still an ocean movie license and not one of the absolute best.

[00:15:48]Outside of the context of the bundle, it doesn't do a lot for the Amiga because that ST version is both near identical and a fiver cheaper, something the one for 16-bit games picked up on when they reviewed it.

[00:16:00]Which leaves me, playing it today, thinking I'm doing so more for what it represents than what it is.

[00:16:09]Continuing in the bundle, we move to something that on first glance is a completely different prospect, [music] Taito's The New Zealand Story.

[00:16:17]It's not a film license, it's an arcade port. It's not a multi-genre game, it's solidly a platformer. It's not the dark, possibly over-dark aesthetic of Batman, it's incredibly cartoony.

[00:16:30]The first similarity, though, is that Commodore played a blinder.

[00:16:33]The New Zealand Story wasn't quite simultaneously the bundle on the release, but it was only about 3 months old when it got whanged into this box.

[00:16:42]Amiga Format reviewed it in their first issue and got somewhat overexcited, awarding a full 94%, the third highest score they would ever give. An equal to Cannon Fodder, Civilization, Sensible Soccer and at least two Sensible Soccer.

[00:16:59]Cooler heads at The One took 10% off that, but revealed similarity number two.

[00:17:04]The New Zealand Story cost Amiga owners an extra fiver over their ST friends.

[00:17:10]One difference, though, is you're certainly not mistaking this for the eight-bit versions.

[00:17:14]Whereas C64 Batman stands up very well next to the ST and Amiga, at least in its first level, here's the C64 version of New Zealand Story, a version whose enemies I once cruelly compared to the ghosts of toilets past.

[00:17:28]The Amiga version is a dramatic upgrade and compares pretty well even with the arcade machine.

[00:17:33]This shouldn't be a huge surprise. The arcade machine is based on older hardware than the Amiga.

[00:17:39]One other thing NZS has in common with Batman is the first world is hard.

[00:17:44]From the off, it's bombarding you with enemies, all of which have the ability to shoot various things at you, all of which respawn.

[00:17:51]If you slow down too much, then enemies, especially the flying ones, will continue to turn up.

[00:17:56]It makes sense, of course. This is an arcade machine that's been ported straight. It wants you dead and shoveling in another coin. It does not want you stopping mid-level for coffee and a bun.

[00:18:07]And this is ignoring two other ways it's hurrying you along. Every level has an inbuilt and secret time limit, which eventually results in an invincible enemy hunting you down.

[00:18:17]And should you ever go underwater, Kiwi realizes very quickly that a snorkel doesn't let you breathe.

[00:18:23]This makes him smarter than Dizzy ever was, but does mean you have a Sonic-like inability to ever stop during a water level.

[00:18:31]Alex Kidd never had this trouble.

[00:18:34]This all combines to the fact that I played this for a good hour without getting past the third level of four in the first world. I think this has been true for the entire 35 years I've known this game, too. I know I've not legitimately reached the boss in any version.

[00:18:48]So, in yet another parallel with Batman, we're going to handle our business by cheating.

[00:18:53]Thankfully, for my chance with the YouTube monetization algorithm, this is the later revision, so the cheat is simply to type fluffy kiwis on the title screen.

[00:19:03]I cannot tell you what you type on the first release without you and Tube coming to my house and kicking the bin over.

[00:19:10]It does usefully illustrate, I think, this game crosses a line sometimes.

[00:19:13]For example, this collection of pricks.

[00:19:16]You absolutely need a flying machine at this point to progress. You could have got one down below and got lucky or very, very skillful, but most likely you'll find yourself trying to steal from these guys.

[00:19:28]They shoot upwards. You have to bait them to get them to come high enough you can shoot them, and you will almost certainly get shot trying to steal one of their, let's call them ships afterwards.

[00:19:37]It's largely logistically impossible.

[00:19:40]And the only real solution, especially if you respawn here, is to backtrack in a game that really punishes you for backtracking, and in which, of course, you start with three lives and very few more are possible.

[00:19:52]They exist, either by finding all the letters in extend or at a steep score boundary.

[00:19:57]But you're certainly not getting many of them.

[00:19:59]Which makes it a bit annoying this game sometimes drifts into the Rick Dangerous vibe.

[00:20:04]Immediately after the prick ball we just witnessed, there's a difficult flying section and twice during that enemies will pop out and near immediately fire.

[00:20:13]If you know they're going to do that, you can account for it. But it be a brave player going slow enough to have even the slightest chance on the first go given the restrictive time limits.

[00:20:22]The game is also way too happy [music] to force you into blind drops, climbs and dead ends where in a departure from established tradition, the only winning move is to have played really quite a lot.

[00:20:33]This continues when we finally get to the boss whose attack is a complete red herring. The trick simply being to avoid them until he eats you.

[00:20:41]Then begins a lengthy sequence of avoiding the drips.

[00:20:45]Very lengthy.

[00:20:48]Suspiciously lengthy.

[00:20:50]I end up watching two YouTube playthroughs to figure it out. You do have to avoid the drips, but the sequence will never end.

[00:20:58]What you do is you shoot with no feedback. I still don't know if there's a specific spot to shoot, but about 30 seconds of firing more randomly than a teenager meeting your mom causes the boss to quite literally crack.

[00:21:11]This is pretty much how we continue.

[00:21:13]Maybe it's because I have infinite lives and haven't spent an hour bashing my head against it, but a lot of world two almost feels easy than the first one.

[00:21:21]It still falls into the same issues though with plenty of stuff you'd have to learn rather than ever be able to beat purely on skill.

[00:21:28]It's not a mechanism I'm a particular fan of, but since the danger of me ever getting this far legit is absolutely zero, then maybe it doesn't matter.

[00:21:35]It's worth pointing out that the actual mechanics of the game were and are entirely spot-on. My problems are largely in level design.

[00:21:43]So this is still a good game and a brilliant arcade game conversion like this would be a huge asset to the Amiga in its recovery from a crash and I'm sure it looks a lot better than the ST version.

[00:21:54]No, I haven't switched them Amiga this time, but the only reason you'd notice if I did is that the ST locates its score display on the side rather than underneath for what I assume are deeply important technical reasons I couldn't care less about.

[00:22:07]Otherwise again they're the same game and it's not a big surprise because it's such a close relationship the title screen even names both formats.

[00:22:14]Again of course the ST's AY chip is there to audibly crap itself in public and give the Atari machine a win by immediately, but beyond that you're playing the same game.

[00:22:25]The Amiga is also lucky the two other home versions didn't yet exist. The Mega Drive one should theoretically be perfect, but Taito doing the conversion themselves a few months after the home computer ones made the really confusing decision to base the Sega 16 port on a prototype version of the arcade game.

[00:22:43]This leaves it with barely half the stages of any other version and those that remain are very different.

[00:22:49]Astonishingly somehow much harder than the other versions.

[00:22:53]The real gem though didn't come along for another three years.

[00:22:57]Tecmo Magic were a short-lived and fantastically variable developer.

[00:23:02]But this one on the baby Sega they nailed.

[00:23:05]It misses only the extend extra life mechanic making up for it by handing out a couple of continues for progression.

[00:23:12]Minus a little master system flicker it could have been quite the spoiler to the Amiga party if it was released in 1989 rather than 1992.

[00:23:22]But it wasn't.

[00:23:24]And the ST version didn't matter much either because the ST version wasn't there in a bundle with the big movie craze of the year.

[00:23:31]Something else was needed to really complete the bundle though. Ideally something that showed the power of the Amiga.

[00:23:37]The answer came from Electronic Arts.

[00:23:41]So what did the 16-bit generation make very noticeably better and what do computers do much much better than consoles?

[00:23:48]A flight sim. Ideally an exciting military one is the answer.

[00:23:52]Something with a bit of depth so a three-button control pad isn't going to cut it, but not so absurdly complex you'd need a 300-page manual and degree in aeronautics to get off the ground.

[00:24:04]Not this one of course. This is footage of Gunship on the ST I've reused to cover these two paragraphs without revealing the game in question. Gunship isn't quite it either. A helicopter game simply isn't quick enough. We need something with a nice fast and preferably recent plane.

[00:24:19]We need F/A-18 Interceptor.

[00:24:23]This isn't quite as new as the other games in this pack, but it's still only a year old. It's also crucially an Amiga exclusive utterly ruining my rule of three Commodore ST version reveal plan.

[00:24:35]This episode is scientifically 5% less amusing than it should be and it's all EA's fault.

[00:24:42]F/A-18 got an enthusiastic reception on release in the middle of 1988 though as high as 96% from Amiga Computing. But also 91% from the old ST Amiga format and nine out of 10 from Commodore User.

[00:24:56]Even its 1991 budget re-release saw eights and nines from everyone.

[00:25:01]And even the generally sim-phobic Amiga Power put it well into their first top 100.

[00:25:06]Its legacy lasted long enough Amiga Format and CU Amiga printed tips for it in 1997 and 1998.

[00:25:16]To give you an idea where we're pitching this, Gunship's manual is a small for MicroProse 87 pages.

[00:25:22]This is 28. The entire second half of which is a spec sheet for the F/A-18 Hornet that you'll fly for the vast majority of the game.

[00:25:32]Side note by the way, a couple of commentators on the previous ST-based video tried to tell me I was wrong and the Amiga was never released with less than 512 kilobytes of usable RAM.

[00:25:42]If this was true, then it's interesting that three years after that this game feels the need to make clear you need at least 512 kilobytes to run, isn't it?

[00:25:52]The demo you've been watching is pretty compelling and there's a comprehensive tutorial showing you a bunch of moves you can do in your lovely plane.

[00:25:58]The screen does not tell you how to do them, but the manual does.

[00:26:02]I spend a perfectly lovely time in the simulator doing a bunch of them correctly, a bunch of them badly.

[00:26:07]Which is which? Who knows? The game doesn't appear to roll forward at any point. Or it thinks I've got none of them right which would mean it's being brutally fussy about say an inside loop.

[00:26:18]Which is literally just pull the stick back.

[00:26:22]Never mind though. Let's see what an actual mission brings us. That's the best way to learn. Except we can't because you have to qualify for the real missions by successfully performing a landing on an aircraft carrier.

[00:26:33]Easy. I'll just do one of the most difficult and dangerous moves in all combat flying using a digital controller and with no actual training whatsoever.

[00:26:42]Still I'm game for a laugh. We take off.

[00:26:45]Do a couple of loops of the area.

[00:26:47]Lose where the carrier is.

[00:26:48]Find it again.

[00:26:50]Accidentally land on the sea.

[00:26:52]Take off again. Fly around. Lose the carrier. Find the carrier. Attempt to land on it sideways.

[00:27:00]Well, at least I was technically first in the lunch queue of the now destroyed officer's mess.

[00:27:05]Which to be fair now much more accurately named.

[00:27:09]The second attempt is frustrating. I very nearly have it. In fact, I absolutely do have it.

[00:27:15]Or I would have if I'd remember to put the landing gear down and it turns out that F/A-18s are not luge compatible. A big oversight by McDonnell Douglas there.

[00:27:25]On the third attempt I also do well, but throttle back too much. Then too little and eventually try to use the wing as a landing gear. The game yells at me probably because they're a little cranky having not been able to eat their lunch for some reason.

[00:27:39]This is an artificial game over. I could literally just select the qualification mission again. But for the purposes of this video it'll do us. This is the missing link of the bundle.

[00:27:49]It's a proper a fairly deep piece of flight sim that absolutely complements the two heavily arcade offerings elsewhere in the pack.

[00:27:55]It was never going to be the glamour game of the three and it isn't. But it's a thing consoles were still struggling to do.

[00:28:02]Even much later credible Mega Drive attempts from MicroProse and EA themselves would just be hamstrung trying to cram this game's 10 throttle keys, nine view keys and 18 control keys onto just three buttons.

[00:28:16]And of course it's a genuine win over the ST whose most obvious point of comparison is MicroProse's F-15 Strike Eagle which on ST looks like this.

[00:28:26]The sequel to F-15 of course looks very similar on both Amiga and ST, but since that wouldn't come along for two years it's rather a moot point.

[00:28:33]If people had somehow overlooked the allure of new superhero game and recent arcade game looking entirely on point, this would have brought a large portion of them on board.

[00:28:46]So we've seen the bundle, but how well did it work?

[00:28:50]Sales figures for the Amiga are surprisingly difficult to find. The best I've done for overall yearly figures is this graph.

[00:28:58]It was put together by Ahoy and explained in a video I am absolutely not going to rip off the research for here.

[00:29:04]It's linked in the description. Go watch.

[00:29:07]And then watch his other video about how the Amiga flatlined.

[00:29:11]It certainly shows a marked upturn in the Amiga's fortunes with the Amiga 500 coming on mainstream during 1988 and then a golden age from 1990 to 1992.

[00:29:22]It also solidifies how badly the initial consumer level launch went.

[00:29:26]The only machine specific figures he can find are Germany, one of the Amiga's best markets.

[00:29:31]The CD32, considered one of the biggest disasters of all time, sold 25,000 in its year on sale.

[00:29:40]The A1000 was the only Amiga for twice as long and sold with a a area of the same number of units, albeit at a much higher average price.

[00:29:51]Even in this issue, Amiga format except the A1000 caused a stir, but that disturbance faded to a ripple.

[00:29:58]And that its thunder was stolen by the Atari ST. But what do we know about the bundle?

[00:30:04]Well, despite the bravado in Amiga format and from Commodore themselves, we have pretty good evidence they only committed to 10,000 units initially. A figure that would have been useful, but barely moved the on a machine just about hitting a million worldwide sales at this point.

[00:30:21]Commodore clearly weren't betting the farm, either. It was notable at the launch of the Amiga at nearly £1,500, they still considered the C64 to be the machine the normal person should buy.

[00:30:33]And while the minimum entry price is now a quarter of that, doing no small part the Amiga not needing to be sold with a monitor, two years after the A500 launch, Commodore haven't quite let go.

[00:30:45]The Batman pack was launched alongside a major push for the 64.

[00:30:50]The light fantastic pack gave you the second generation C64C, a light gun, 3D glasses, and a big pile of games and applications.

[00:31:00]This notably includes the shoot 'em up construction kit, a typing tutor, a best of Ocean compilation, and cheekily, Batman: The Caped Crusader, which isn't the game we've been talking about all episode, but Commodore were probably hoping you might think it is.

[00:31:16]The whole thing cost £149, well less than half that suddenly almost parsimonious Amiga collection. I'll take words I've not managed to use in Yester years in before for £500, Ken.

[00:31:29]It's also worth noting, if we believe all the available sales figures, the Amiga didn't outsell the C64 in a single year until 1992.

[00:31:40]The bundle, of course, was a success. It was available for a year, and in the end the best estimate is that about 185,000 examples of it were shifted. But that's not really the important part. The Amiga was now a cultural icon in a way the ST never quite managed in the mainstream.

[00:31:57]The Batman pack revolutionized how machines were sold for a long time.

[00:32:02]It is, as far as I can tell, the first proper branded pack of this nature.

[00:32:06]Certainly the first to make an impact.

[00:32:08]Immediately preceding it is the Amiga pack I have, which is just called the Have a TV modulator, I guess, pack.

[00:32:16]Some other retailers have bundled games, of course, most notably the 10-star pack of Silicas that was available for a few others, as well.

[00:32:24]But there's no concerted marketing push for this. There's no branded box.

[00:32:28]There's no giant cult classic sensation of the moment banner in Dixons.

[00:32:33]For the next generation, it became the way to sell machines.

[00:32:37]It was followed by a bunch of focused bundles promoting a small number of headline and generally pretty recent games.

[00:32:44]Cartoon Classics being the other famous Amiga one. That took the same approach of leading with a huge media license, Simpsons, and pairing it with something arcade and something thinky in Captain Planet and Lemmings.

[00:32:58]The approach was copied elsewhere. Even Sinclair got in on the act the next year with a light gun-based Spectrum package based around James Bond.

[00:33:07]Nintendo went with the Turtles. Sega, who had always bundled a game with the Master System, stepped up a gear, but kept it in house, making much of bundling Sonic when it was still a relatively new game.

[00:33:20]Atari too saw the value in bundles. In fact, they'd beaten Commodore to the punch with the Atari Summer, Super, and Power packs across '88 and '89.

[00:33:30]These, though, were more official iterations on the 10-star principle.

[00:33:34]Power contained a massive 20 games for the same total hardware price as the then naked A500.

[00:33:41]None of them were individual system sellers by late 1989, but titles like R-Type, Gauntlet II, and a selection of Sega's finest meant that if you got an ST for Christmas, it'd probably be mid-March before you noticed.

[00:33:55]At this point, they chose to compete more on price. The follow-up Discovery pack for the STFM was £100 cheaper, but cut the games down to just four.

[00:34:05]Space Harrier, Out Run, Bomb Jack, and Carrier Command.

[00:34:11]The first three had previously been featured in the Power pack.

[00:34:15]They also launched the STE, a more capable model that could very nearly go toe-to-toe with the 500.

[00:34:21]Unfortunately, after a four-year period in which they could do little wrong, they reverted to old Atari and failed to bring any of them to its own launch event, which unfortunately coincided in both timing and location with the Batman pack launch.

[00:34:37]The torch had been passed. I mentioned that in the last months of 1989, Amiga format had been outsold 43,000 to 40,000 by its ST sister.

[00:34:47]Six months later, Amiga format had risen 41% to 57,000 copies a month.

[00:34:54]ST format, just 17% to 50,000.

[00:34:58]The second half of that year, AF was now leading 81,000 to 55,000.

[00:35:05]Amiga format peaks in the first half of 1992 at 161,000 copies a month.

[00:35:13]By then, it's nearly 100,000 copies clear of STF.

[00:35:19]The Amiga had shot into a lead so comprehensive, it's rewritten history for many to pretend the ST didn't have those four years in the sun.

[00:35:28]From then on, it had no meaningful computer-based competition in its price point.

[00:35:33]The problem is, of course, the competition at its price point would very soon not be the computers.

[00:35:39]While the PC knocked off the high-priced Amigas and their lovely, lovely profit margins, it was the consoles that came for the 500 and 1200.

[00:35:48]The Mega Drive got a lot of the Amiga games and generally did them better.

[00:35:53]The now dirt-cheap 8-bit consoles, and indeed to a degree even the 8-bit computers, hung on in there.

[00:35:59]And the PlayStation would absolutely have finished the deal if Commodore had come close to living to see it.

[00:36:06]The Amiga was UK computing for a while there, but it was only the king from 1990 to 1992.

[00:36:13]If the candle that burns twice as bright only burns half as long, the Amiga was a forest fire.

[00:36:18]A one that, thanks to Commodore mismanagement, became a tire fire that still smolders away.

[00:36:24]It's a credit to it, though, that in three years at the top, it made a lasting cultural impact.

[00:36:29]Almost anyone that's played a video game knows of it.

[00:36:33]Almost anyone in their 40s and above had fond period memories of it.

[00:36:37]And there's only so many machines, or indeed fashions of any kind, that can say that.

[00:36:43]On what is almost exactly the real 40th UK anniversary of the machine as you watch this, Amiga, we salute you.

[00:36:49]But maybe ask some of your fans to let it go, yeah?

[00:36:57]On the back page, the 8-bit consoles are indeed holding on. For 40 years and counting, in fact. To prove this point, an unofficial sequel homage to California Games in the form of Street Games, essentially what would happen if the original had been Europe Games.

[00:37:12]Included in this new and fine pack are marbles, street soccer, slingshot, soapbox car, and the nightmare of every kid, fetching the ball from the neighbor while escaping the dogs.

[00:37:25]Who needs a half-pipe?

[00:37:27]And it's got to be better than California Games II, right?

[00:37:31]I'll level with you. I wrote this copy in mid-April, so I don't know if it's out yet, but check the description for details, and maybe check out Team Minero's other work in Operation Amazon, originally presented as a demo in this year's SMS development competition, but developing very nicely into a game.

[00:37:46]And while you're in the description, join our Discord, where you could already be talking to Mr. Minero about this game, and see a bunch of behind the scenes from me and multiple of your other favorite, too small for a Discord on their own, gaming channels.

[00:38:00]Then like, subscribe, and remember to return here at the end of next month for a machine I've neglected too long making a triumphant reappearance.

[00:38:08]Later, shrooms.

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