Many current genres originate, or at least were pioneered, on the Amiga. You say icon-driven RPGs, we say Dungeon Master. Point-and-click adventures? Secret of Monkey Island. Realtime combat? Dune, or for a different angle, Syndicate. Racing hover cars a la Wipeout 2097? EA's Powerdrome. Turn-based strategy? Laser Squad. Settlers-type game? Er... The Settlers.

It would be remiss of us not to mention the advent of proper link-up games with the release of Geoff Crammond's seminal Stunt Car Racer or indeed the innovative RPG, Lure of the Temptress from Revolution, (oh, and we'd better just name-check David Braben for Virus and Frontiers, the Bitmap Brothers for Chaos Engine and Archer Maclean for Jimmy White's Snooker, lest they feel left out).

In light of all this innovation and frenetic development, the Amiga is easily the most important games platform ever and the reason is simple. Anybody could develop for it. Steve Turner of Graftgold (who produced the hit platformer coin-op conversion Rainbow Islands) put it best when he said, "the Amiga is a platform where new ideas can be developed relatively cheaply, and marketed without the strictures of licence-controlled formats".

In other words you didn't need a wad of cash to pay for development machines and kickbacks to the manufacturer (such as with the consoles), and the Amiga was pretty simple to program (unlike the PC was and still is).

So if the Amiga was so well loved by gamers and developers alike, how come Commodore went bust and the platform has spent the best part of three years effectively in limbo? It seems the reasons are nothing more than plain, old-fashioned incompetence.

Although the Amiga was phenomenally successful (the best-selling home computer since Commodore's previous star, the C64) Commodore was also in the business of making and selling PCs - a market on which it spent a fortune trying to be a big player.

Amiga development was marginalised while the directors wondered what software to bundle with their PCs. They missed a big opportunity - the Amiga of the time was more suited and better positioned to become the home computer of choice.