Step83: Countries of sceners
Introduction
I was part of french Amiga demoscene. I was aware that the nordic (europeen) countries were more productives. Today I’m wondering what was the implication of each countries in the Amiga scene.
Commodore Business Machines Ltd (CBM) was an American company. The C64 in 1982 have been a real commercial sucess in Europe and espacially in Germany. (Here is an intersting article giving the number of total sold C64 : 12M).In a logical way, the commodore Amiga was also very popular in Germany.
About Amiga, this article give some stats about the countries. 4.8M were sold.
We can see that America is not the first country for Amiga products. UK and Germany were the countries with the most Amiga computer sold. Then Italy, Autralia and France.
The United Kingdom is still a reference in the video game industry for European countries. Lot of great Amiga games have been produced there. This is the same for demos.
Amiga Music Preservation Stats
But creating demo is also cultural. The number of unit sold could be not representative of sceners. With the help of the people of AMP (Amiga Music Preservation), here is the trop 10 countries of the music composers registered on their database.
Top 10 :
Germany is the most represented country. UK is only at 4th position. Sweden and Finland are in 2nd and 3rd position. Although the number of machine are less in these countries, the number of sceners is much higher than in UK.
There were not much demo scene activity in the United States. The Amiga company was american and first Amiga models have been released in north america first. That’s surely why we can find some (5.8%) music composers in that country (or maybe some european people moved to us and registered in AMP as living in USA).
Italy is also a surprise. Only 1.8% of Amiga musician are from that county although the total number of Amiga sold in that country is the 4th highest.
Before 1990 few people in east europe (Poland) had an Amiga. After 1990, the price went down and more people were able to afford an Amiga. As far as I remember, I’ve always been impressed by the high level of technic in polish demos.
Altough the C64 was not popular in France, the Amiga had much more sucess. People were also using Atari ST.
Here are the full stats: (AMP Composers. Country, number of composers, percent)
As reference, here are the stats of C64 demosceners:
The top 10 is quite the same as Amiga except for France. As I said the C64 was sadly not much known in France at that time (the most selling computer was Amstrad 464 / 6128 ).
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