Reader Millington
Tenure: AP49-AP65
Designation: Despatcher Of Ridiculously Lengthy Letters And/Or Amusing Articles To Forestall Vacuuming The House Of Champions
I own a PC.
It's a P166 MMX; which officially makes it a huge, ninja, blazing babe-magnet of a machine. It is very fine indeed, does almost everything I ask of it, and will slip into being a risible anachronism at breakneck speed unless I throw upwards of two hundred pounds at it on pretty much a monthly basis.
"That's all very arousing," you are saying, "but what does it have to do with AMIGA POWER and Jonathan Nash's proto-stalker?" Adding, after a moment's thought, "And what's that I just said about a stalker?" Well, in a sense, the things are as intertwined as the copulating snakes meanly separated by Teiresias (to his cost, eh? Eh?) The gifted perseverance, the dogged ingenuity, the obsessive cunning of Jonathan's proto-stalker (oh, ask him, if you're that interested) is what the Amiga was all about. AMIGA POWER used to champion the skilful programming of Amiga games against the 'throw money at it', 'they'll upgrade to play', 'all flash and no substance' approach of the PC world. Until this became deeply tiresome - and therefore solely the prerogative of Amiga Format - and also, with the appearance of some gameplay-heavy PC titles, well, 'bollocks', frankly. Yet, it remains, that the specific type of personality disorder which drives Jonathan's approaching nemesis also fuelled the Amiga phenomenon, AMIGA POWER, and much more besides.
Truly, the Amiga was the Norman Bates computer. A focus for the young (men, let's be honest) who were, not just prepared, but eager to spend all the precious years of their youth shut up in darkened, tissue-strewn bedrooms, in an attempt to make a sprite move a bit more smoothly or a background scroll the tiniest bit faster. Anal, compulsive, disturbed and fixated to the last synapse. And AMIGA POWER was the distilled essence of this spirit. Written by anarchistic, pedantic, iconoclastic, conspiracy-theory formulating cineastes suffering from violent mood swings and a firearms fetish - for themselves alone (full of jokes so 'in' that it was doubtful whether even the person across the desk from the writer got a good deal of them). It was serial killer material at critical mass. In brief, it was the flagship of the stuff which has driven humankind since we had thumbs.
Only AMIGA POWER-style self-absorption, conviction and creepy-kid-who-lives-with-his-Aunt logic can explain how we got here. Fire, for example. Every tried that rotating a pointed stick in a hole surrounded by dry grass, olde worlde Zippo thing? How long before you said "Oh, bugger this"? And you knew it would make fire; imagine the mind of the man who would do it, skin shredding off his palms, for forty-five minutes just to see what, if anything, would happen. That's the founder of civilisation, that is.
Phosphorous is present in the human body in small amounts. Brandt, who discovered this remarkable element in 1667 isolated it by evaporating gallons and gallons of urine over a period of weeks. Now, he wasn't working on any kind hunch that this process would produce phosphorous, you have to understand. He just set a massive caldron of urine simmering in his lab, topping it up when it was in danger of boiling dry, because the idea took his fancy. That is the AMIGA POWER way.
Once you start to think about it, it becomes obvious that all great leaps in science, technology, philosophy, music and other stuff must have been made the AMIGA POWER way. Yet it took AMIGA POWER to highlight this. And provide a name for it. Obviously. The Amiga, AMIGA POWER and the great landmarks of human discovery and achievement - they are all one and the same. Sadly, the Rutger that burns twice as brightly burns half as long. The PC and a different, easy and dilute, philosophy now hold the stage, but in the years to come, the period of AMIGA POWER's ascendancy will come to be looked upon as, in a very real sense, The Mid Nineties.