Edge: The making of Syndicate

[coldfish]

http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/the-making-of-syndicate

One of my all time favourite games on the Amiga, I spent days working through the levels and the final Oceanic base was a real brain buster.

" Syndicate was Bullfrog’s first game to lead on PC, an announcement that led to cries of anguish from Amiga users (later mollified by Mike Diskette’s excellent port). “I think the decision to switch was based purely on the fact that the PC allowed us to do all of the cool city stuff that we wanted to,” explains Trowers. “The Amiga, bless its cottons, just wasn’t powerful enough. Early versions of the fully isometric 3D, full-screen engine never used to get above 12fps with any more than a handful of guys running around. Even on the PCs in those days, we had to do some pretty nifty graphics stuff to get the whole thing to work at a reasonable speed. I think all of it made us think that the Amiga had pretty much run its course and that the PC would take over as the main platform. And we were intrigued by all this wonderful network stuff. The Bullfrog philosophy on making games was to try the whole thing out multiplayer and then make an AI to emulate the human players. "

Very interesting read, I remember comparing Syndicate on my A500 to it running on a friends PC and seeing the writing on the wall for Amiga.

[coldfish]

The greatest thing about the A500 was also its Achilles heel.

Fixed hardware with minimal expandability, like a console.  

This was great in that it meant the hardware spec was a fixed target for software developers, and it made their life easier in the A500 hey day.  They knew that any piece of software would run on most if not all the A500's out there.

Later on this became a curse, consumers had nowhere to go beyond 512k memory upgrades.  When real upgrade options did finally become available they were either too expensive to the majority of users or lacked the kind of jaw-dropping performance improvements that would inspire users to upgrade en masse, the market eroded and the developers either closed shop or moved on to other platforms following the consumer.

[coldfish]

Here in Aus, everyone I knew who had an Amiga, had the A500.  I didn't see my first (other) Amiga until I went to Uni and saw A2000 and A3000's being used for animation.

Just about everything was targetted at the A500 512k - 1Mb spec and the A2000 etc only got a mention on flight sims and gfx apps in the software shop I used to buy from.

As the A500 got longer in the tooth and other platforms advanced (which took at least 5 years!) software on the PC and Mac started looking more and more impressive.  I stuck with my trusty A500 to the bitter end, I looked for upgrades (GVP HD etc) but they usually cost more than a whole new PC computer (back in early 90's) and offered only incremental improvement.  AGA was still a while off.  

Also, Amiga software support was fading...

...and everyone was using PCs, my favourite games devs (like Bullfrog) were building games on Wintel and back porting to Amiga, many were ignoring Amiga all together.

Eventually I bit the bullet and bought a PC primarily for word processing:
Early on, I hated the PC's hit-and-miss gaming compatability, crappy sound support, hardware/ driver conflicts and some aspects of Win 3.1. But I loved the massive speed, storage and resolution improvements.  Eventually I got used to the new environment and the rest is history.