We know from our interviews with various people such as our person in Iraq about Amiga’s role there. But in Norway Amiga had its total momentum in 1993. Not because of the awesome games for it but because of the Norwegian SCALA Multimedia dominance. Thanks to the Amiga became a Multimedia icon at a time when PCs and Macs couldn’t match Amiga at price.
Biggest cinema in Oslo used Amiga’s to show ads
At the end of 1992, several cinemas in Norway used Amiga’s with SCALA MM200 to show ads, news from NTB, weather, and other important information. They were all made by Sverdrup Dahl.
The Amiga’s were all used by the biggest cinemas such as Kinosenteret in Trondheim, Klingenberg in Oslo, and also Colosseum in Oslo (which is one of world’s biggest cinemas even today!). They used several Amiga 4000’s that produced multimedia content which people could see before entering the hall.
Commodore Computers Norge had a fantastic way of connecting SCALA and Amiga together. They were way ahead of the main Commodore company in the USA. In fact, they were on pair with Commodore UK.
Microsoft campaigns were made in SCALA and Amiga
Not only cinemas in Norway used SCALA by Amiga machines in 1992-1993. Also, many Microsoft advert campaigns were used with Amiga and SCALA MM200. Publicis FCB was one such company in Denmark that used Amigas for creating Microsoft campaigns.
The Shell petrol stations in Scandinavia used at that time over 100.000.000 NOK for advertising their products. These were produced by using Amigas too which Publicis FCB from Denmark was also responsible for.
A cleaning bureau in France named as GFF bought one Amiga 4000 with SCALA MM200 which sent information to all of their 59 parts of their company. The Amiga was used for teaching the employees which was a huge success at that time.
Nuts Bank in Den Haag, Netherlands also used SCALA MM2000 running on Amiga 4000. They had two SCALA systems installed. One of them was used to show the bank’s offer and saving services they had at that time while the other one was used as a service for customers. People could come to the bank and see on an interactive screen where they could see how much loan they could get etc.
Commodore and SCALA were two companies that had similarities to someone having a good relationship. When Commodore had to close down it was like a huge shock. It was like starting from scratch for SCALA. It’s like losing a wife that you loved so much and suddenly she is gone. SCALA tried to become huge on the PC. They sort of did some success with that at the start but they missed Amiga too much and sailed away. Together with Electronic Arts, I must say that SCALA was one of the successes that Amiga users should know about. They played a huge role in the world together and this relationship between these two companies is a rarity today at the same level as they were.
Thanks to both of you for all the publicity that Amiga got at that time.
Hi , yes at those time Amiga was a wonderfull multimedia machine. Scala was a very nice tool, but we have created another tools. I was the creator of TV softwares ‘concurrent’ of Scala in 90′.
The name was Forum9R and used in more than 50 TV channel in Europe and in other places. See on my website and if you like I can send you screen copies and scan of advertise off those technology. It was use to manage all the flux off a local TV channel from the creation, channel planning, upload by phone lines (no internet at those time) , view process on cable channel with UMatic/VHS recorder drive, meteosat download for weather channel, TV guide, etc… It was programmed in AMOS language on Amiga with more that 100000 lines of codes. Technicaly we used Amiga2000/3000 and 4000 with lot of RAM and HHD, graphic card, etc.. Best Regards
Stephane D.