The combined multi-format charts have made it difficult to always tell the full extent, but there has been a clear move through 1990 and 1991 to more and more players buying games on the Amiga. Despite buying introduced in 1985, it took a long while for Commodore’s more advanced successor to the Commodore 64 to reach a wider audience, but in the early ‘90s it appears to have become the leading force for home computer games. This ties up with my memories of a few years later when I and many friends had them.
The Amiga’s biggest time is also the section of history in which AAA’s selection of games is going to be based on the weakest evidence of any point. There are no more C&VG charts available to look at, and for periods I am having to go for Amiga-specific charts from Amiga magazines and a similar presumption that it was the most successful to that I had with the Spectrum in the earliest days. Worse still, some of the Amiga charts aren’t even the official Gallup ones, but ones from specific shops, with some magazines switching between the Gallup charts and others. It will have to make do.
Fortunately, the era without multi-format charts pretty much just covers 18 months in 1992 and 1993. After that point, the launch of Edge magazine (still going strong today) brings in charts for the increasingly popular PC format and console formats alike, and we will be multiformat all the way through to the present day, just in time for specialised games consoles finally taking off in the UK…
Amiga User International Vol. 9 No.4, April 1995