About Us

Tony Aksnes AKA The AmigaGuru’s Timeline: A Journey Through Gaming & Development

This is my life in games, lots of details to be added whenever I find time, but I am sure many of you guys know where to find credits if you ever want that 🙂

Early Years & Gaming Beginnings (1980s)

• Born in England, 1975 model (Living in Norway now), been graced with games since the late 70s.
• I fell in love with the magic of games in arcade halls before ever experiencing home consoles or computers.
• Discovered gaming and quickly became highly skilled, particularly in Olympic-style games.
• Quickly grew a passion for SID/CHIP music.
• Been collecting games since the mid 80s, over 2600+ boxed Amiga games and even more from most of the PlayStation eras games.
• At age 13, I co-created SOMMER MINI-OL 88, sold through gaming magazines.
• Entered the demoscene, starting with swapping, moving into graphics, and later experimenting with coding.

Demoscene & Game Development (1990s – Early 2000s)

• Actively involved in the Amiga demoscene, forming lasting industry connections.
• Transitioned to game testing & QA for notable Amiga studios:
  • Vulcan, Blittersoft, Clickboom, Crystal Interactive, Sadness, Hyperion, and many others.
• Worked on the ambitious Wild Flying (2002-2004) project, though it remained unfinished due to a lack of dedicated graphical resources.
• First major demoscene project: New Lemmings Demo by RoboTeam (1990).
• Final major demoscene project: MENTAL by Push-Entertainment (2004).

AmigaOS 4 & Game Porting Era (Mid-2000s – 2010s)

• Invested in AmigaOS4 during its alpha phase, helping retain user interest.
• Ported approximately 300 games from Linux, Mac, and other platforms over to AmigaOS4, several of them fully commercial titles.
• Ceased large-scale porting after a hard drive failure caused the loss of an important software project.

Quality Assurance & Industry Collaboration (2000s – 2010s)

• Assisted developers with QA, testing, and promotional efforts.
• Worked on Crossfire 2 (OS4), Quake 2 and 3, Shogo, Sin, Heretic 2, and Descent: Freespace and tested numerous other Hyperion titles among other AAA productions.
• Contributed to both public domain (PD) and commercial games as well as productive tools and programs like Ibrowse, Image FX, Pagestream ++ releases.

The Amiga Retro Boom (2015 – Present)

• With the Amiga community revival, shifted focus back to Classic Amiga gaming.
• Contributed to over 40 Amiga games, though some remain unreleased, top titles like Wiz, and Inviyya, Turbo Sprint, Turbo Tomato, Boss Machine have been very popular saleswise and got brilliant reviews worldwide.
• Continued game design, QA, and testing, ensuring quality standards.
• Maintained a role within the OS4 team, though involvement declined due to project stagnation.

 

PlayStation Era & Console Development (2010s – Present)

• Created PSP themes, leading to dynamic PS3 theme development deals, and worked on a few PSP game engines of Amiga classic ports to the PSP.
• Briefly considered PS4/PS5 themes, but API changes required a significant time investment.
• Explored PSVR/PSVR2 development (2021-Present), securing a license and contributing QA work to multiple projects.
• The AmigaGuru Blog is mentioned in several games as well as on the actual PlayStation Store in all regions which means the world to us here at the blog.

TheAmigaGuru Gamer Blog (2008 – Present)

• 2008: Launched a small website focused on game collection & preservation.
• 2012: Started TheAmigaGuru Gamer Blog, initially as an experimental platform.
• 2012 (Nov): Officially relaunched with a dedicated domain & improved interface.
• 2014: Surpassed 500,000 views, prompting further improvements.
• 2015-Present: Blog continues to thrive (Over 4 million views and counting), covering Amiga gaming, industry insights, and retro preservation.

Legacy & Present-Day Focus

• Scaled back Amiga game development, with Dungeonette marking the last major project.
• Continues engaging in Classic Amiga development, testing, and blogging.
• Still active in game preservation, QA, and retro gaming discussions.
• The AmigaGuru brand remains a key hub for Amiga and retro gaming enthusiasts worldwide.

 

Want to get in touch with us at the blog?  Contact us via email at rocknroll@amigaguru.com, we also answer on X and Facebook if you contact us there 🙂

And now, over to my co-editor and good friend who has helped:

 

 

Gianluca Girelli / g0blin

Hello, I am Gianluca Girelli, and, like Tony, I am one of those people who were there when everything in the gaming industry started. Actually, being already 49, I am older than Tony and I was there before he did. Nonetheless, we share a similar experience.

Unlike Tony though, life didn’t make a collector out of me, at least not until the PS3 era came along. Yet, I do have a certain number of old games on my shelves and, most of all, I do have a significant number of retro hardware in my basement. Now, on the verge of 50, this hardware is about to be used again, but let’s do things in the right order.

When I was a kid computers were not actually present in everyday life, but you could see them every day on TV or in movies. The first significant memory I have of them is the big mainframe in “Space 1999” TV show, a British/Italian co-production that made me decide two things: 1, I wanted to be a pilot (an astronaut was daring too much); 2, I wanted to learn how to code. At that time I was only 6 years old so you may expect those decisions to fade once I grew up, but they didn’t. Today I am a pilot and I
am a coder, and computers are a big part of my life.

I was there when asteroids came out in arcades, and I was there when black-and-white turned into colors with Donkey Kong. I was there when my friends got their Commodore Vic20s, their Sinclair Spectrums, or their first 8088-based PCs. My parents were struggling too much to make ends meet (we were a family of six, working in the shoe business, and, in the early 80ies, that industry was crumbling into pieces), so they could never afford to buy me a computer.

I dreamt of a computer every night, crying because I could not have one. It was not a matter of not having something my friends had: it was because they only used their computers to play, while I literally wanted to hack those systems, even before knowing what “hacking” meant.

Back in the day, bookstores and magazine shops were full of products that taught you how to code together with insights into the Operating System of your choice: definitely a Stargate to a new Universe to me.

At a certain point, after a long summer spent working 9 hours a day, I bought my first computer. I was 16 years old.

The first-ever Amiga was already out, but it was still too expensive to get close to it, so I reverted to a Commodore 128, a machine that I coded every single day for the next 3 years. I was attending a computer science school, so my “desire number 2” was quickly becoming a reality.

At the same time, my friends did basically abandon their computers, moving on to consoles like the Super Nintendo. With its 16bits motherboard and endless choice of colors (for the time), it boosted my imagination even more. Yet, I didn’t want to play. Rather, I wanted to code games.

At the end of high school my “desire number 1” was still present and since it definitely was “#1”, I enrolled in the Air Force Academy. It was a great period but, like all the Academies of those times, it severed every contact with the outer world: no more playing, coding, or reading books, besides the ones you needed to study to pass the required courses. I bought my Amiga 2000 during my last year at the Academy since it was necessary to work on the final Thesis and stuff. Then, I was sent abroad (to the US) for pilot training.

The US was the land of the Amiga, but at the beginning of 1993, it was already over. Europe was still strong on Amiga computing, but everything overseas was already PCs and Macs.

Due to a million different reasons, I didn’t have almost anything to do with computing and/or gaming until the end of ’97, when I got my first console: the magnificent Grey Goddess, the PlayStation 1.
Everything started to come back again, although very slowly. I got back to computing, which obviously had moved on a lot, so I struggled to fill the gaps and get back on track. Eventually, I did, posing also the basis for something I always wanted to do: game coding.

Little by little I took my first steps into such a stimulating world, touching the sky when Sony started to sell the PS2 Linux Kit, which allowed for a whole bunch of experiments. I wrote an article about it a while back, have a look.

Yet, the Amiga (and the opportunity that I missed during the Academy years), had left a vacuum in my heart that needed to be filled, so I started to look out for it, learning that you can’t kill a legend: the community, despite the lack of hardware, was alive and kicking. I started to localize new software for the Amiga (both games and utility software) and joined the staff at Bitplane, the only Italian-printed magazine for Amigas and alternative OSs. One day, on a thread that did go way off-topic, I met Tony. I did have spotted him before (he was the AmigaGuru, after all) and I don’t know if it was the same on his part (I was indeed a very small fish) but when I modded a PacMan port (made with Hollywood)
turning PacMan into Dr. Who and the ghosts into Daleks, the puzzle was finally complete.

That was the start of a solid friendship that last ever since, and has brought me on
this blog as a simple reader at first, and as a full-time co-editor later on. Six more years have passed since that day and, over 200 articles later, I am more present than ever.
Nowadays my hobbies are: playing games, blogging about them, coding stuff, building and collecting plastic models, reading comics, attending comics fairs, drawing and retrocomputing. These are all things that you can see in my articles, true love for Japan included (yes, I also traveled to Japan and I’m self-teaching Japanese).

Also, in 2015, I published my first professional game.

It is indeed a casual game that didn’t get the attention it probably deserved, mostly due to my lack of experience: it’s not an easy task to write from scratch a complex adventure all by yourself, even though in the end I did make it.

If you have a chance, please play that game.

Not for me nor for the money: do it because its creator passed away a few days ago at the age of 45.

Farewell Stefano. We’ll See You In Heaven

He was a true artist (and a true friend), and he deserved to see
his creation in the hands of people who can understand that money and glory don’t mean anything.

What really matters is loving what you do, and striving to give your best every day you have
the luck to live.

Last Edited 27.02.2023 – Updates

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