Book List

This is a book that pairs extremely well with the Brian Bagnall Commodore books. It fills in a lot of the details around the development of many of Commodore's 8-bit machines with some real behind-the-scenes stories.

DOOM was for sure the application that got me to move away from the Amiga for gaming. There was nothing like it. I still remember turning off the lights in my dad's office, putting on headphones, and trying to survive yet another salvo of imp fireballs with almost no life left.

This covers the early SoftDisk days where John Romero and John Carmack worked together, and goes all the way to Daikatana and Quake 3 Arena. It was a bit light on the tech details, but if you want the tech, go read the source for all those games, as it's all out there. One of these days I'll do another raycaster implementation in something, just for the heck of it.

Half business book, half Nintendo history book. It's also short if you don't want a long read. Between this book and Undertale I finally decided to give Earthbound a long-overdue shot.

Give your Amiga 1200 a hug and read this final book in the Commodore series. This book covers the descent of Commodore into bankruptcy, despite putting out machines that Hollywood used to revolutionize video production and all that stuff Commodore and Amiga fans are still a little salty about.

Now here we go. A book that goes into excruciating detail about the creation, production, and marketing of the computer that influenced me the most. Just like A Company on the Edge, this book has a bunch of interviews and goes into all the gory details about the Amiga computer. It ends right around the time the Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000, the two computers that got me through middle and high school, were created.

I grew up with Commodore computers and knew very little about the history of the company, besides that they made C64s and Amigas and has a place in Pennsylvania. After reading this book, plus the following books in Brian Bagnall's series, I know an immense amount about the company that changed home computing in the 80s. This book has a ton of interviews with those still alive from the 70s and 80s who worked with and around Commodore.

You thought Game Over had a lot of personal interaction stuff in it? This book has it beat. It was a fun read, and did go into a good bit of technical stuff alongside a lot of the marketing stuff that happened during the days of SNES vs. Genesis/32X/Sega CD (vs. eventually PlayStation). There's some great outside stuff around Sony and Psygnosis in the book as well, which of course interested an Amiga fan like myself. Definitely read this right after Game Over to continue the Nintendo story.

A very thorough history of Nintendo up to just at the edge of the SNES era. Includes a lot of personal stuff from all of the big Nintendo players. I got this right as I was starting the blog posts for The Industrious Rabbit and wanted to learn more about the entity behind all the technical decisions I was trying to unravel.

As this book was written in the mid-90s, enjoy the afterword and the list of "next big thing" products that ended up as mere emulators on my MiSTer, known only to a handful of gamers nowadays.

I bought this book early on in the pandemic because I'd always been interested in Amiga stuff (obviously) and I wanted something different to read. The book covers a lot of the basics about the platform, the history of Amiga at Commdore, and about its eventual fate. Unlike some of the other Amiga books I read, this one goes into the world created around the Amiga -- the demo scene, gaming, and the Video Toaster -- a bit more than the more Commodore Business Machines-focused books I read later on.