In the early 1990s, I eschewed the PC and Mac for the more powerful and innovative Amiga platform, leaving only after Commodore went belly-up in 1994. Since then, I’ve looked back on the Amiga days nostalgically. And now everyone can find out why, courtesy of a collection of 10,000 Amiga games at the Internet Archive.
The genesis of this web-based collection of Amiga games is unclear. Wired says that the Internet Archive began uploading titles “at the start of August,” though it’s unclear how the titles grew to over 10,000 so quickly. Engadget, meanwhile, says it’s “uncertain” when the library appeared.
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No matter. It’s here now.
Naturally, I was most curious to see whether some of my most-treasured Amiga games were among the list, including some obscure titles like Agony, Leander, and Wings that I remember quite fondly. But there are major Amiga games like Defender of the Crown, Shadow of the Beast, and of course Lemmings that everyone should experience too.
None of these games are in the list. (Though some Lemmings holiday sequels are available.) So I decided to browse around a bit and see whether any triggered any memories.
And sure enough, there are some familiar titles. Turrican, the demo only, but a favorite. Pinball Fantasies (again limited, in this case to the first level). King’s Quest II: Romancing the Throne. Space Ace. Arkanoid: Revenge of Doh, an absolute classic. Zany Golf, which I spent tons of time playing. And applications, too, like Deluxe Paint II, another great time suck from the past.
So as you can see, many of the games aren’t complete. The navigation is tedious, and many titles don’t seem to work properly. But it’s worth slogging through for some gems, especially for Amiga fans.
That you can play Amiga games in a browser is both amazing and depressing. During its heyday, the Amiga offered features like multitasking, video overlays, parallax scrolling, and more that was either impossible or next to impossible on the Macs and PCs of the time. Now the whole thing is just emulated in a browser.
Time marches on, I guess.
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