From the Editor’s Desk: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back ⭐

I wasn't just an Amiga fan, I was an Amiga snob. I derided everything about Microsoft during that era, and while I respected the Mac's graphical user interface, the platform was technically unimpressive and would remain so for 20 years. But things changed. As they do.

Our ability to embrace that change, or at least accept it, will vary by person. In this case, Microsoft and the PC became inevitable with the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990. And so I began exploring this strangely compelling alternative, though my wife's PC, an 80286-based IBM PS/1 with a monochrome display, was incapable of running Windows at anything but a molasses-slow speed. When I decided to return to college to study software development, I knew I'd have to buy or build my own PC. And then Commodore declared bankruptcy, casting doubt on the future of the Amiga.

These and other events were all pushes, some big, some small, that forced me to change. Or at least made changing acceptable. But life is strange sometimes. Where I might be expected to have gone kicking and screaming into this new Windows PC era, that's not what happened. And the reasons for that are perhaps instructive, given the industry shifts we're experiencing now.

Windows 3.0 was immediately interesting in ways that its predecessors were not. There were other GUIs, of course, including some from third parties that sought to drag the PC into the (not quite) 21st century, but I felt then, as now, that platform-level innovations need to come from the platform's makers and not others. And there was a universal sense that Microsoft, finally and unexpectedly, had gotten its GUI right with Windows 3.0. So I set out to learn how to write software applications for Windows years before I even had a PC of my own that could run  Windows.

The Amiga is most fondly remembered for two things. Its incredible multitasking capabilities that were a decade or more ahead of the rest of the industry. And, paradoxically, its game-playing prowess, which makes sense when you understand that the Amiga's designers had originally set out to create a game console, only to be thwarted by the videogame crash of 1983. For a several-year period in the mid-to-late 1980s, there was nothing like the Amiga, and on many levels. But again, things change.

Microsoft catching up with Windows in whatever ways was perhaps inevitable, perhaps not. But what I didn't see coming, what no one saw coming, was the rapid rise of PC gaming. The PC was the bastard child of a thousand compromises, one being its lack of decent graphics modes. This changed in time, thanks to evolutions like EGA, VGA, and SVGA. But the PC lacked the special hardware and software that made Amiga gaming so unique. Until that didn't matter in the slightest.

In the early 1990s, John Carmack created a PC game engine that somehow allowed this woeful platform to host the types of fast-moving, sideways-scrolling game titles that were the Amiga's core strength. His company...