Commodore Amiga at 30 – the computer that made the UK games industry

It's 30 years since Commodore launched its powerful Amiga 1000 computer, ushering in the era of Worms, Lemmings and myriad other Britsoft classics

In 1985 my family made a terrible mistake - a mistake that would have far-reaching consequences; a mistake that would blight my life for several painful years. I still look back at it with a sense of sadness and, yes, if I'm honest, fury. What happened was this - and if you're a gamer of a certain age, you may want to sit down: my family bought an Atari ST instead of a Commodore Amiga.

With its powerful 16bit processor and vast 256k of memory (expandable to 512k and beyond), the original Amiga 1000 was the epoch-shattering home computer that effectively invented the concept of the all-round multimedia machine. The Atari ST, meanwhile, was pretty good for midi music.