Yes, it was quite different here in the U.S. Most consumer Amiga users in the U.S. didn't really know it was different over in Europe but I did - and I was jealous!
As a regular advertiser I got copies of the larger European Amiga magazines in the late 80s and early 90s which weren't available here in the U.S. outside of a small number of specialized places in major cities. A typical copy of Amiga Format Magazine wasn't just much thicker than U.S. Amiga publications, the look, feel and tone was also dramatically different. Being so consumer and games focused made it incredibly vibrant and energetic. You can feel the difference just comparing online PDFs of early 90s AmigaWorld and Amiga Format magazines. Sadly, I never got to see the UK/Euro scene first-hand back in the day. By the time I began regularly visiting Europe, Commodore was circling the drain and the Amiga scene was winding down.
In the U.S. the most active (and profitable) parts of the Amiga community were focused on the 2000, 3000 and 4000 models and tended to be more "creative professionals", prosumers, serious high-end enthusiasts and even academics using it as a lower-cost workstation alternative to Sun/Apollo/SGI. My Amiga users group had members from CalTech, NASA/JPL, and even a few "can't talk about how we use it" defense contractors like Lockheed.
While the U.S. consumers who used the Amiga purely as a home computer certainly played games enthusiastically, they were often equally interested in digital art, graphics, desktop publishing and/or computer programming. Thanks to products like the Video Toaster, Amigas were used for film and video production, computer graphics and 3D rendering by TV stations and movie studios. Stephen Spielberg's production company even had an Amiga rendering farm producing all the visual effects for a prime-time network TV show starring top celebrities. Today, quite a few of the 'gray beards' around Hollywood visual effects and TV production have Amiga roots because in the late 80s they were the disruptive 'young turks' pushing newfangled desktop production techniques.
As a regular advertiser I got copies of the larger European Amiga magazines in the late 80s and early 90s which weren't available here in the U.S. outside of a small number of specialized places in major cities. A typical copy of Amiga Format Magazine wasn't just much thicker than U.S. Amiga publications, the look, feel and tone was also dramatically different. Being so consumer and games focused made it incredibly vibrant and energetic. You can feel the difference just comparing online PDFs of early 90s AmigaWorld and Amiga Format magazines. Sadly, I never got to see the UK/Euro scene first-hand back in the day. By the time I began regularly visiting Europe, Commodore was circling the drain and the Amiga scene was winding down.
In the U.S. the most active (and profitable) parts of the Amiga community were focused on the 2000, 3000 and 4000 models and tended to be more "creative professionals", prosumers, serious high-end enthusiasts and even academics using it as a lower-cost workstation alternative to Sun/Apollo/SGI. My Amiga users group had members from CalTech, NASA/JPL, and even a few "can't talk about how we use it" defense contractors like Lockheed.
While the U.S. consumers who used the Amiga purely as a home computer certainly played games enthusiastically, they were often equally interested in digital art, graphics, desktop publishing and/or computer programming. Thanks to products like the Video Toaster, Amigas were used for film and video production, computer graphics and 3D rendering by TV stations and movie studios. Stephen Spielberg's production company even had an Amiga rendering farm producing all the visual effects for a prime-time network TV show starring top celebrities. Today, quite a few of the 'gray beards' around Hollywood visual effects and TV production have Amiga roots because in the late 80s they were the disruptive 'young turks' pushing newfangled desktop production techniques.