Introduction

Welcome to our Kickstarter campaign to produce From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years! A 90 minute feature documentary that will explore the influence of the Commodore Amiga and how it took video game development, music and publishing to a whole new level and changed the video games industry forever!
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In addition The Amiga Years! represents the era of the 16-bit and higher powered computers so we do intend to reference other important computers as the Atari ST, Acorn Archimedes and others, but it is the Commodore Amiga and the era it represents which will be the key focus and the reason we have titled the film The Amiga Years!

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The Story

We will start with the origins, design and release of the Commodore Amiga and the impact it had when first released. From then we will look at where the worldwide games industry was just prior to the Amiga’s release in 1985 and then how, once released, the challenges developers faced creating for a 16-bit machine while still in many ways dealing with a thriving market for 8-bit machines. We will look at elements such as what happened as 8-bit was surpassed? How did the development teams grow and why? Who were the key developers and what were the key game releases? How did the business itself change for developers and publishers and did the issue of piracy truly harm this era?

The Commodore Amiga reset the previous boundaries, the very exploration of what was possible in itself led to an incredibly important and pioneering era where skilled developers were able to strive for new innovations, set free by this incredible technology. We intend to explore what these innovations were and the people behind them.

By the late 1980’s and early 1990’s many countries around the world saw a new wave of developers entering the video games industry, joining many of those original pioneers to work to push video game creation even further. Games from across the world were now readily available everywhere and the UK was suddenly becoming a real global player emerging truly out of its original cottage industry roots of the 8 bit era.

The demo scene was bigger and more influential than ever, having honed their skills in the limited 8-bit days, new machines such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST combined with a rapidly expanding and emerging ‘internet’ saw ‘sceners’ thanks to demos among other things playing a major, crucial part in helping to grow the overall interest of programming and video games.

Musicians really began to flourish, significantly boosted by the flexibility and power of machines such as the Commodore Amiga and we will hear how some of the most iconic soundtracks were produced still in the days before CD music was truly available in home video games.

The Magazine Industry for the video games industry saw a whole new breed of Journalist come through, though technically still in its infancy the video games industry did now have a few years under its belt with established genres of game now recognised and understood. These Journalists were fully fledged fans and consumers themselves who had grown up through those early years, seeing firsthand as those early game styles became established. This understanding made them hungrier than anyone to see and report about innovation as they saw it and The Amiga Years! era saw some truly incredible innovations.

Making the original ‘From Bedrooms to Billions’ allowed us to establish links right through the video games industry both past and present. We always treated our interviewees with respect to ensure we covered as much of their career as possible and The Amiga Years! will allow us to go out and add so many new names to our interview list in our quest to create films that are as thorough, entertaining, nostalgic, but importantly as balanced as they can possibly be!

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Hi everyone,

this update has happened a little sooner than intended because (like you) we saw how close we came to the next stretch goals with probably the most important one (other than the floppy beer-mats...which considering the hype had better be the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel!) being so close to the next stretch goal that triggers a lot more content.

In addition we have had a lot of mail post campaign from people who seemed to find out too late, and for those we simply put up a pre-order option on our website of www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga

However many of you have very kindly offered to chip in further to bring the budget up to the production of a second disc / extra content and that is very kind of you, especially as we, like you want to make as much content as possible.

Therefore what we propose is this, we would like to wait 2 weeks mainly because that is how long it takes for Kickstarter to collect all the pledges and deduct the pledges that don't go through (a percentage of pledges fail to go through for many different reasons) but in 2 weeks we'll find out that final total and with that (combined with any pre-orders that come in from the website in the meantime) we will know the true final figure and better decide what to do and then let all of you know.

We have also received some messages from people who didn't quite understand the postcard/poster special offer we launched quite late on so that like with everything else we will address that also.

Ultimately we must be fair to you all, we ran our last film production in the same way by being transparent and open as we believe we actually all want the same thing and we are really touched that many of you have offered to contribute more. Therefore let's start by seeing where we are in two weeks, in the meantime we're going to start production because we know we can at least make the film.

We would like to once again thank you all for getting the film so high up through the stretch goals, those last 72 hours were incredible and we felt you were with us every step of the way!

Best wishes,

Ant & Nic

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LaserHawk said:

Somehow I missed this until after it got fully funded. But I'm glad it did. Just watching the pitch video brought back so many childhood memories.

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mrklaw said:

Bit of a bump - the documentary is coming out on May 19th, but it seems to be exclusively via Vimeo video on demand. That says it allows downloads but it looks like you need an app to play it? That would be really disappointing if true, as the previous documentary by the same team was a DRM free download which I much preferred as I can add it to plex for viewing on anything.

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Turrican3 said:

Backers should be able to download everything free of charge.

I don't know if people buying the doc now (ie non-backers) would get the DRM-free option though, haven't bought anything on vimeo before IIRC.

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