Editorial

Every so often there is a nexus in the universe, the occasional voices that are often heard, seemingly at random intervals and with unfocused purpose all coming together as though one, producing a potential turning point in history.

The month of March introduced me to what I think may have been such a nexus. Edge magazine had an issue celebrating 25 years of computer gaming, to be followed up with an issue bemoaning the sameness of many recent games. The BBC ran an online interview with Peter Molyneaux, one of the founders of computer gaming who was complaining that there was little innovation anymore. At the CTIA show in New Orleans, attended by an Amiga representative, AmigaDE content was praised for both its high quality and its attention to game play. An newspaper interview with the actor Elliot Gould saw him denouncing the rubbish that has come out of Hollywood over the past ten years and fondly remembering the 1970's, the heyday of US cinema when, as Gould put it 'the inmates were in charge of the Asylum'. Finally an interview on ZDNET by David Coursey was complaining about the commercialization of Instant Messaging in it he remembered back to when computing stopped being fun, with him pointing to a Spring Comdex in 1992 when, for the first time, the suits outnumbered the geeks.

Perhaps it was something, perhaps it was nothing but it reinforced one of my niggling feelings over the past year or so, namely that with computer content now being part of the big bucks machine, there is too much fear of losing money, which means keeping to a tried and trusted formula and trying to distinguish oneself by simple window dressing. This is particularly true in gaming, where audio and graphics artists now seem to outnumber the coders and game designers by a factor of ten to one.

The problem has been compounded by the fact that most applications are sold via channels, which require big names and big presence, with marketing budgets often outspending those for development and research. This represents a very high entry point for anyone who wants to write an application that might be sold commercially. In short, the business of applications has fallen to the application of business.

As depressing as this is, it also offers a possible golden future for the Amiga community.

On the AmigaDE side, Amiga offers a full development and publishing service coupled with a total content solution that allows developers to ignore the business side of life and just get on with development. Given that the initial targets of AmigaDE are PDAs, cell phones and soon to be released 'gameboy killers' whose hardware specifications are far beyond the A500, A600 and A1200s of our youth then Amiga Developers are well poised to bring both their creative flair and their gaming innovation together for the benefit of those who want more than just another Quake clone. The platform is perfectly poised for hobbyist, bedroom coders and small single figure companies to establish themselves in the same way that the C64, Spectrum and Amigas saw the birth of the current generation of companies such as Westwood, LucasArts, Sierra, Team 17 and Sensible Software.

Anyone who walked into a software company today and talked about a game where you had to shoot giant mutant camels would be politely escorted to the exit by burly security guards but Jeff Minter created just such a classic over twenty years ago. Ant Attack, Manic Miner, Dig Dug, Chuckie Egg, games that seem to owe their genius more to chemical recreation than anything else are now sadly lacking from the gaming firmament and yet the need for them is stronger than ever.

One of the purposes of the AmigaDE model is to encourage such innovation again by taking the pressure of business away from developers, allowing them to create whatever their imaginations wish to create. There can be innovation and it can make money they don't have to be mutually exclusive and in the coming months and years, we hope to prove that once more.

On the AmigaOS side, great things are also possible. AmigaOS4.0 will run many of the Amiga Generation 1 applications via emulation but what the market wants is new applications, games, graphics suites and audio studios that give them the full power of their new hardware and operating system. With a hungry market and a new platform, the opportunity is there once more for the single developers and small development teams to produce product without having to worry about conforming to the standards of those around them in other words, a perfect setting for new and innovative applications which in themselves make the platform more exciting and compelling.

Revolution is a unique word, almost Taoist in its koanic ambiguity. It suggests at great change but also implies something moving in circles, to repeat itself in cycles once more. Whether the nexus I describe above is real or imagined, more wishful thinking than clear, I believe that Amiga is very well positioned to take advantage of the frustration and friction that is rising in the content world. Coders of the world, unite around the Amiga. Start your compilers and may your imagination take you and our platform into the future.

Fleecy Moss
CTO
Amiga Inc