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DIGITISER AT 25: PART 2 - By Mr Biffo

14/12/2017

31 Comments

 
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The first year of Digitiser was bewildering in a lot of ways. We'd been isolated in our blissful little bubble for months, and been lulled into thinking that it would continue thus forever.

Teletext launched on January 1st 1993, and from the off it was clear that what we did and wrote on Digi could have ramifications on a national scale. Upsetting Amiga owners was the first indication of that reach.

Though we'd never explicitly stated that we wouldn't be covering the Amiga, we had - from day one - made it clear that our focus would be consoles, arcade games, and the PC.

Partly, this was because it was pretty apparent to anybody with a third of a brain that consoles were the future of gaming. Emap's Computer & Video Games had spun off into Mean Machines, and the latter magazine felt more exciting, due to its exclusive focus on console gaming. While we were demoing Digi, in the months leading up to Teletext's launch, Mean Machines itself had split into two - Mean Machines Sega and the officially-endorsed Nintendo Magazine System. A month later, Sega released Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and the media coverage had been unprecedented for a console game.

The Amiga had been around, one way or another, since 1985. The Amiga 500+ and Amiga 600 had been released in early 1992, and the Amiga 1200 towards the end of that year, but in terms of home computing, its rival the Atari ST was all but dead, and the PC was fast becoming the home computer of choice. Sales of the Amiga were declining, and there were fewer games being released for it.

The only people who still believed it had a future were Amiga owners - even if there was a sense that they were fooling themselves, like half-drowned passengers of the Titanic thinking that flapping their arms around and blowing a whistle would somehow prevent them from freezing to death.

To everyone else, the Amiga felt like the past, and - while teletext might not have been the most current medium - we at least wanted to try and capture the zeitgeist.

More pertinently, there was a bigger reason why we never reviewed Amiga games...
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NOMIGA
In short: we didn't have an Amiga.

Everything we reviewed on Digitiser in the early days was on hardware that I owned already. I had a Game Boy, a Super NES and a Mega Drive; we didn't need to blag machines. We managed to get a Game Gear off of Video Games Ltd. - the company which provided our review software for the first year or so - which Tim took home, but in terms of set-up costs, there were none.

We could've asked our bosses to get us an Amiga, but what with them launching a new national teletext service, it felt like they had better things to do, and we already felt like the least-important section on the service (originally, they'd wanted to bundle us with the chess pages, under the name "Mind Games", until I argued that this was a terrible idea). Plus, Amigas weren't cheap. 

Basically, the Amiga didn't feel like a priority. We barely gave it a second thought. Which, clearly, we should've done, given that our predecessor - Oracle's FX page - had covered the computer. 

Every Teletext employee was required to be in work on January 1st. The higher-ups had correctly guessed that we would all be fielding calls from confused viewers, who wanted to know why their beloved chess pages had moved. 

I spent much of that morning speaking to confused, elderly people, but - gradually - more and more calls were put through to our desk demanding to know why we weren't going to be covering the Amiga. Some of these calls were civil... several of them less so.

​It was clear, however, that Amiga owners were angry - and that would only get more apparent in the days, weeks and months that followed.
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NUISANCE CALLS
Our second day in the office meant more angry phone calls. Our third day brought with it the first Digitiser postbag - which would later become the highlight of our day. That first physical postbag was a big one - this being an era where most people, and certainly not Amiga owners, had access to email (Digitiser didn't even have an email address anyway for a couple of years) - and the majority of those letters were from furious Amiga owners.

In all honesty, as was usually the case when Tim and I were confronted with virtriol, we found it funny. We started publishing the letters, and our responses would double-down on our insistence that the Amiga was "a dead format", and that the PC and consoles were the future of gaming.

Suffice to say, this only invited more anger, and that anger made us dig our heels in. In fact, the level of rage from Amiga owners was such that we responded by making fun of them, or calling them "idiots". 

​In many respects, if it hadn't been for Amiga owners, Digitiser wouldn't have been what it was; we had our backs to the wall, and Digi's dismissive, disrespectful, tone was born from that. For everyone who read Digi, who wasn't an Amiga owner, this was doubtlessly hugely entertaining - and no doubt helped to drive up our viewing figures. It was a precursor to the spectator sport that Internet drama has become.

Our reputation for being controversial started literally on day one, and - to be honest - we rather liked it. Better that than having a reputation for being safe. From a personal point of view, I'd never really considered myself cool before, and suddenly I felt like a bit of a rebel.

The letters and phone calls didn't stop. When they didn't get what they wanted from us, they wrote to our bosses. Several of them demanded that we be fired. One, memorably, stated that - as a "publicly-funded" service - we had an obligation to cover the Amiga. Clearly, they had missed all the ads for premium rate phone lines and holidays on Digitiser, which made it quite apparent that Teletext was anything but publicly-funded.
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CAVE IN
At some point in that first year, we caved. Even we had a limits to how many times we wanted our employer to be told to fire us, and we wanted to open up our postbag to other topics. The only way to do that was to shut up the Amiga irritants.

We'd introduced The Man With A Long Chin to the letters page, who promised to reward outstanding letters with prizes from his "secret pocket", and wrote occasional letters ourselves as "Danny Boyd (Luton Area)" as a way to stoke up debate (incidentally, the CBBC show I write, 4 O'Clock Club, is about to introduce a character called Danny Boyd  - if I get a chance, I'll mention that he's from "Luton Area").

However, the Amiga letters kept coming, fuelled by Commodore's announcement that it would be introducing an Amiga console - the ill-fated CD32 - to compete in a rapidly-shifting market. Ironically, this of course merely underlined Digi's original statement that the Amiga was the past and consoles were the future, but this seemed to be lost on most of our Amiga-loving correspondents.

Here's where things get a little fuzzy. I remember taking a brand new Amiga 1200 home from work, unboxing it, and playing on it... but I don't know where it had come from - whether our bosses had bought it for us - or even what happened to it. Adam "Mr Cheese" Keeble had joined the Digitiser team at some point in 1993, and we certainly farmed out the Amiga reviews to him, as he'd been an Amiga owner of some considerable long-standing. I've a vague memory of me handing it over to him, but can't be entirely certain.

Regardless, the Amiga came to be featured on Digi's pages... Well, for all of five minutes before games firms stopped making games for it, and Commodore went bankrupt, just over a year after Digitiser launched...

It's fair to say we felt pretty good about that, and having been proved right in such a conclusive fashion made us utterly insufferable.

​Nay, invincible. That wouldn't last...

DIGITISER AT 25: PART 1
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31 Comments
Jim Leighton (Future World Darts Champion) x
14/12/2017 09:14:35 am

That Amiga CD joypad looks like an inverted PS1 joypad.

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Waynan The Barbarian
14/12/2017 09:23:26 am

I love reading these, Mr B. Keep up the good work!

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Waynan The Barbarian
14/12/2017 09:42:01 am

Just had a song stuck in my head that I know was from a level of an old game. After sat thinking for a while letting it play through my head I realised this little earworm is from Super Mario Land on the Gameboy. I don't think I've played it since I was around 10 years old. I'm now 35.

This happens quite regularly with various music from games and films. Am I some kind of geeky music rain man?

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Reversible Sedgewick
14/12/2017 11:31:12 am

You may have a superpower but this probably isn't it I'm afraid. It's hardly obscure, it was a hit single reaching number 8 in the UK singles charts!

http://www.retrogarden.co.uk/features/top-5-videogame-based-uk-chart-singles/

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Waynan The Barbarian
14/12/2017 02:51:03 pm

So it was! Still doesn't change the fact that i haven't heard it since i was at least 10. That's gotta count for something, right? A place at Prof. X's Manor? An invite to Hogwarts? TELL ME I'M SPECIAL!

Professor Charles Xavier, DPhil (Oxon.)
14/12/2017 07:05:38 pm

Dear Waynan,

We are pleased to offer you a place at Xavier's School For Gifted Youngsters for the academic year 2018/2019. We do not curently have an X-Person with the ability to hear backwards through time, and therefore believe that you would be a valuable addition to the student body.

Please be advised that fees start from $25,000 a term, which does not include additional costs such as meals, black leather uniforms, or school outings (students last year took part in a French exchange, as well as several trips to the sovereign island of Genosha in order to battle the evil Magnet-O).

Yours,
Professor Charles Xavier

Waynan The Barbarian
15/12/2017 11:06:36 am

Callooh callay!

Anton Rodgers
14/12/2017 09:48:53 am

"off of"

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MENTAL1ST
14/12/2017 10:18:59 am

Your like one of those grammer pedants off of the internet.

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RG
14/12/2017 10:26:41 am

You "off of"!

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MENTALIST
14/12/2017 10:17:26 am

I have a friend who was an Amiga fan. To this day he occasionally posts rants about the imminent death of the Microsoft and Intel Hegemony on social media.

As a PC gamer (amongst other stuff, I'm not some mastur race type) since Christmas 1992, I feel warmed by his pain, and nourished by his tears. Especially the ones he experiences, when trying to do real work on his iPad.

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Briggeds
14/12/2017 11:00:10 am

My memories of Amiga are playing Back to the Future and Treasure Island Dizzy at my friend's house, and being jealous everything looked way better than my C64. I didn;t know they were seen as kind of also-rans

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MENTALIST
14/12/2017 11:09:51 am

Sounds like those memories are from about 1990, when the Amiga was not yet an also-ran.

Biscuits
14/12/2017 11:55:28 am

Spot on!

Biccers
14/12/2017 10:53:32 am

Somewhat off-topic, but roughly how long did people's Digi shirts take to arrive?

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Nick
14/12/2017 11:00:28 am

Not arrived yet. They said 4 working days and we're at 5 now. They have a little disclaimer about delivery times on the email and I guess it is December.

I just wish I hadn't thrown out all my other clothes upon ordering. It's chilly.

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Biscuits
14/12/2017 11:57:14 am

Yeah, I also don't have any trousers now. I'm hoping an upside down Wozniak t-shirt forms an acceptable pair of shorts

Neptunium
14/12/2017 11:15:06 am

I did love the Amiga drama llamas, I admit. I remember one letter rambling on about preemptive multitasking, which must have been a first and only mention of that on a Teletext service in the world.

The really sad thing is that the Amiga was ace, so I could understand the rabid fanboyism. It had brilliant technology, some of the coolest "peeps" working on software and an obsessive fanbase, let down by the hardware being maintained by a succession of companies run by bumbling buffoons. Everyone wanted an A1200 for Xxxmas before Commodore went bankrupt and also the year after it went bankrupt, but you could not buy them for love and/or money - my parents desperately tried to get me one for what seemed like 43 years. If you wanted something like an A1200 you had to buy the outrageously priced, but available, CD32 and then pay more outrageous monies to add a disk drive and keyboard - but by the time you'd have totted all of that up, you could have probably bought a cheap and cheerful PC from Gateway or Time which were springing up all over the highstreet...

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Paul Morris
14/12/2017 01:02:33 pm

All of this brings a rather colourful memory of Dec 31st 1992 where I as an inexperienced drinker got hopelessly drunk at a new years partyand threw up over some poor womans £200 Gucci shoes

That and the monster hangover and retching through January 1st 1993 's Digitiser feeling exceedingly angry as an amiga owner at the time.

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Biscs
14/12/2017 01:58:19 pm

Hahaha it's a good story though

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Paul
14/12/2017 01:41:30 pm

The place where I did my art foundation course was full of Amigas. They were the “go to” machines for graphics on my course. We did animations on them in some hinky bitmap editing software. The funniest thing about them was HAM mode - just because it was basically the word “ham”.

On my return the next year, this time starting my degree, they had a load of Macs for us to use instead. The model makers carried on with the Amigas simply because they processed video, and that course was heavily FX industry based. Babylon 5 was the continued excuse there.

Mind you, the Macs we had were shit too. Kept on crashing, running out if memory (in that era, 8MB was a lot). I wondered how anything was made in the print world with a system so fragile.

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Omniro
14/12/2017 02:16:28 pm

Yeah Amigas were the go to machine for video and ST's were the go to for music. Two points of reference that were often loaded into the "rhetoric cannons" of the great Amiga/ST war of the early 90s.

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jawa
14/12/2017 02:08:17 pm

Commodore only died so that Digi could live... Amiga fans helped drive the popularity of Digitiser!

And, in true punk style, Mr Biffo showed his love by spitting on the hoards of Amigonians ;-).

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Omniro
14/12/2017 02:09:52 pm

I remember this!

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Geoffrey Biggins
14/12/2017 02:45:36 pm

This is a TOTALLY DISINGENUOUS take on what happened: Digitiser's INCREDIBLE WORLD-WIDE INFLUENCE from the very day it launched, which you WILFULLY ABUSED, meant that your position on the Amiga was the make-or-break factor for Commodore. The Amiga would still be the WORLD LEADER in games platforms to THIS VERY DAY if you had only DONE YOUR JOB.

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PS1Snake
14/12/2017 05:57:11 pm

I enjoyed reading both parts, Biffo. It would be great if you could,some day, expand the bit about writing (touched upon in Part 1) into an article where you could perhaps further describe how you developed your writing style over time, the difficulties encountered trying to find your own voice, and your writing influences, etc.

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Chris Dyson
14/12/2017 05:59:37 pm

If you're going to alienate a community you might as well do a bunch of delusional sillies like Amiga owners x

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Col. Asdasd
15/12/2017 09:42:12 am

In other words, you invented internet trolling?

I'm not entirely sure whether to applaud..

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DD
15/12/2017 11:29:28 am

God I miss the old Digi days!

These things just can’t be recreated, I pity todays gamers who missed out on this.

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Dr. Budd Buttocks, MD
15/12/2017 11:55:18 pm

It can be hard to see what other people see from the outside when you're a fanboy. Especially back then when there was no internet, and it was difficult to know everything that was going on outside your little sphere. Mind you, now that we do have the ability to know everything that's going on, people still retreat to their echo chambers in denial. You see it with the PC "master race", Nintendo ultra fanboys etc. So lack of information probably wasn't the issue.

As an evangelical Amiga owner at the time, there really was a genuine sense of injustice that it was being ridiculed and overlooked. I couldn't fathom it at all. It wasn't really until about 1995 that PCs could seriously compete on price and capability. I never really saw the SNES and Megadrive as the Amiga's competitors. But then, I wasn't solely interested in games.

A sort of siege mentality set in with a few people. I imagine it's the same feelings a lot of Nintendo fans had, desperately trying to convince themselves the Wii U wasn't a flop, etc. I actually think it says a lot when a platform can inspire such devotion. I just don't really get the love for most modern systems, made up of boring commodity hardware and software produced by hundreds of faceless and nameless engineers. There's none of the soul and magic you used to feel. Apple still know how to do this by having frontmen and mascots like Jony Ive, although their bullshit doesn't work on me.

Anyhoo, I do feel the Amiga's decline was somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I still occasionally contemplate the what could have beens. I'm sure I wrote a few letters to Digi myself, but despite that mild resentment, I still read it religiously, mainly for the humour.

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Miles Cheverton
21/12/2017 02:08:26 am

I had an Amiga. An a500 then an a1200, then a 1200 with a 500Mb HD and a (wait for it) 50Mhz accelerator.

Still read Digi every day

Cheaper than a pc, taught me how to use a real computer and now I get to be a consultant on piles of cash. All thanks to the Amiga (and I get my sarcasm from Digi)

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