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Amiga Classic Games (Games) Games

Rare Amiga Bought on eBay For $2,500 (eurogamer.net) 56

Posted by EditorDavid from the blast-from-the-past dept.
Long-time Slashdot reader Mike Bouma shared Eurogamer's report about a rare Amiga 3000 auctioned on eBay: Mike Clarke, who worked at legendary UK game company Psygnosis from 1992 to 1999 doing audio work, rescued this particular Amiga 3000 from destruction after it had been placed down in a corridor, ready to be thrown out. Over 20 years later, Clarke is selling it on eBay... According to Clarke, this Amiga 3000 was first used by artist Jeff Bramfitt, who scratched his initials in the top of the case in pen "just in case someone took it off his desk".

Bramfitt used the machine to work on the title screens for Carthage, Infestation, Shadow of the Beast 2 and more classic Amiga games, but its headline claim to fame is it was used to create the original Amiga Lemmings intro and logo. Lemmings, which came out for the Amiga in 1991, was developed by DMA Design (now Rockstar North) and published by Psygnosis before the latter was bought by Sony. Later, it was used for Microcosm (3DO, Mega-CD), Scavenger IV (aka Novastorm, Mega-CD, FM Towns), and unreleased games such as No Escape, a tie-in with the Ray Liotta film, aka Penal Colony for Mega-CD.

Files for all of these games and more remain on this Amiga 3000's hard drive. "I think the above games were all in 1993, which was a very busy year because we got bought by Sony and alongside working on games by third-party developers, Sony pushed all of these film licenses onto us and gave us almost no time to make them," Clarke said. This Amiga 3000 is not without its problems, however. The floppy drive doesn't work anymore and the hard drive is "temperamental", which means you might have issues booting the thing up.
After 16 bids, the Amiga sold for £1,850 -- about $2,300 USD -- plus another £170 ($215 USD) for shipping.

"So much early gaming history has been lost mostly because, much like the BBC erasing Doctor Who tapes, nobody valued it when it was happening," Clarke tells Eurogamer. "I was the only person who saw the historical value in rescuing these machines and I also rescued over 800 development disks that were going to be binned at the time."
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Rare Amiga Bought on eBay For $2,500 More

Rare Amiga Bought on eBay For $2,500

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  • Peripherals too. I've still got a dot matrix printer and a wyse orange screen terminal. They're not worth much monetarily and they're not too rare (yet), but to me that have value due to their historical technical perspective.

  • Less than it cost new (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Saturday December 22, 2018 @04:08PM (#57846690)
    Amusingly, $2300 is less than the MSRP of $4498 in 1991 [old-computers.com], even if you don't adjust for inflation. (Accounting for inflation, it works out to $8400 in 2018 dollars.)

  • Not quite walking off with a pen... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Destined for the garbage bin, and actually in the garbage bin, are two entirely different things, legally speaking. Getting official permission to take obsolete assets from most companies is nearly impossible, but soft permission is usually granted when this kind of rescue occures. It is an interesting story, and I applaud our hero, and believe he deserves the auction proceeds, but even if the company no longer exists, I think technically saving that Amiga is larceny and then sale of stolen items, and I hop

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      I got an old bible that some guy was going to throw out. Hand bound with wood covers. But the guy tossing it said it was worthless. Because the original owner, some guy named Martin Luther, had scribbled a bunch of notes in the margins.

  • Amigas hardware won't run for much longer (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All of the proprietary Amiga ASICs and even the Motorolla 68k series processors used single-ended, open collector logic. As those circuit boards age the capacitence of signal traces will degrade to the point that timing will be changed, and Amigas are already running pretty close to the edge as far as timing goes. Another 10 - 20 years and original Amiga hardware that still boots will likely be as rare as rooster teeth.

    • I repaired some ag equipment just this past week that was manufactured in 1974. No problem at all. It was cleaner than some of the gear I have worked on (this was a John Deere planter monitor) but in general circuit boards are just stable. I deal with plenty of stuff with old 68HC11 processors and LCD displays from the 80s that spent most of it's life mounted on equipment out in barns... still good, at least as far as the pc boards are concerned. Electrolytic capacitors is another matter, but those should

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      All of the proprietary Amiga ASICs and even the Motorolla 68k series processors used single-ended, open collector logic. As those circuit boards age the capacitence of signal traces will degrade to the point that timing will be changed, and Amigas are already running pretty close to the edge as far as timing goes. Another 10 - 20 years and original Amiga hardware that still boots will likely be as rare as rooster teeth.

      Unlikely - none of this equipment is running close to speeds where the circuit board matt

  • an Amiga solved the traveling salesman problem?

  • For historians this specific machine is important. And is why it sold for a lot. It could have sold for more if the auction was open for a few more months for others to be made aware of its existence. It has experienced so many important points in history. For example, as we all know Grand Theft Auto, the game, was developed by Rockstar North. And Rockstar North use to be known as DMA Design. And DMA Design was a game developer that started on the revolutionary Amiga computer (which was the most power

    • I thought the developer of GTA (on Playstation 1) was some other company and Rockstar acquired it. Later versions and even later disks of GTA1 are labeled Rockstar, the first releases are not.

    • It has experienced so many important points in history. For example, as we all know Grand Theft Auto, the game, was developed by Rockstar North. And Rockstar North use to be known as DMA Design. And DMA Design was a game developer that started on the revolutionary Amiga computer (which was the most powerful system by far -- well ahead of Macs and PCs) who's critical hits included Lemmings and Walker. This Amiga 3000 was used to develop those two games. And it was those hits that saved Rockstar, allowing them to grow and to soon after begin work on the Grand Theft Auto series. And the rest is history.

      The development of Grand Theft Auto started on the amiga:

      "The game was originally intended to be named Race'n'Chase and to be developed for the Commodore Amiga, starting in 1996.["
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • Never knew, but apparently Amiga was eventually bought by HP, then subsequently sold to a company called Amino, who renamed themselves Amiga. Their plan was to then resurrect the core Amiga OS and release it as the Amiga DE (Digital Environment) on PowerPC, x86, Arm, SH4 and SH5 Procs. No idea what ever happened with that as I'm too lazy to look it up, but guessing not much since I've never heard of anything since regarding that attempt.
    • Correction, they were bought out by Gateway (the cow computer company!), NOT HP. Ugh, I need to proofread more. :)

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