A500 Mini Amiga console interview – ‘that’s our passion for Commodore’

metro.co.uk:

GameCentral talks to the co-creator of the new Amiga 500 mini-console, about the return of everything from Andrew Braybrook to GoldenEye 007.

We’ve played and enjoyed a lot of mini-consoles over the last few years but one of our favourites is based on a home computer, not a console. The Amiga 500 was hugely popular in the UK in the late 80s and early 90s – at least as much as the Mega Drive and SNES – but because it was only really successful in Europe its legacy, and all its many exclusive games (including those on rival format, the Atari ST) have been all but forgotten.

Thanks to TheA500 Mini though that is no longer the case and we recently got to talk to co-creator Darren Melbourne about the process of getting the mini-console made and trying to get the licences to include the best games the format has to offer.

We spoke to Melbourne before we received the mini-console, so we hadn’t played it at the time we had this discussion, but you can read our review of the final product here. TheA500 Mini will be released today, April 8, and costs £119.99. But as you’ll see from our interview the games it includes may eventually expand beyond the 25 that already come pre-installed…

GC: So I’m going to guess that you’re not a teenager and that you played these games the first time around too.

DM: Absolutely, absolutely. My path was the ZX81, the Spectrum, C64, and Amiga.

GC: I’ve often said, when this subject comes up, how frustrating it is to have to celebrate other people’s nostalgia. American and Japanese consoles and games get re-released all the time but the Spectrum, C64, and Amiga – which were far more ubiquitous in the UK than the NES or even SNES – are consistently ignored. The only time I can think of them being