Blitz BASIC (Amiga)

Blitz BASIC is the compiled, game-oriented BASIC that New Zealand programmer Mark Sibly wrote for the Commodore Amiga. It came in two generations. The original Blitz BASIC was launched in Sydney in 1990 by the distributor Memory and Storage Technology. Blitz Basic 2 was a much larger rewrite, published from 1992 by Acid Software in Auckland. Both started from the same idea: a BASIC that compiles to standalone machine code and gives the programmer direct access to the Amiga’s custom graphics chips, so a hobbyist could write action games without learning C or 68000 assembly.

The idea worked well enough to leave a mark. Blitz Basic 2 went out free on the cover of Amiga Format, ran its own quarterly magazine, and was the language Andy Davidson used to write the game that became Worms. Sibly later carried the concept to Windows as BlitzBasic, Blitz3D and BlitzPlus. On the Amiga itself, Blitz Basic 2 became the free AmiBlitz and is still maintained in 2026.

This entry covers the Amiga products. The Windows compiler Blitz Research released in 2000 is a separate product with its own page, BlitzBasic.

History and Origins

Blitz BASIC (1990)

The first Blitz was launched at the Sydney offices of Memory and Storage Technology (M.A.S.T.) in the second half of 1990. The Australian Commodore and Amiga Review (ACAR) reported on the launch in its September 1990 issue. The report describes Sibly as a 22-year-old New Zealander with about ten years of programming behind him, working his way from a TRS-80 through an Apple II, a VIC-20 and a Commodore 64 to the Amiga. It also records the demo that won the room over: a version of Defender, written in Blitz, that “played fairly much like the arcade original” but added a two-player split screen. ACAR’s advertisements from that year sell the product under the Black Box Software label, “distributed by M.A.S.T.”, and by November list a recommended retail price of $149.

The reviewers were enthusiastic but clear about the gaps. ACAR called Blitz “a faster, tighter language” than AMOS but noted there was “no support for relative files, no easy way to create screen gadgets and no structured programming commands”. The June 1991 issue of the German magazine Kickstart reviewed it at length and reached the same verdict. It found the editor, compiler and linker combined in a program of about 83,000 bytes that ran on a 512 KB Amiga, and counted about 80 commands and 50 functions, which it compared with a command set more than three times as large in AMOS. There were no Intuition commands at all, so no menus, gadgets, requesters or windows. Subroutines meant GOSUB, and multitasking was switched off while a program ran. Kickstart still gave it a grade of 2+ because it did what it set out to do: games and demos written in it were quick to produce and quick to run. (Kickstart called Sibly an “Australian programmer”, probably because the product came through a Sydney distributor. The Australian coverage correctly says he was from New Zealand.)

The launch advertising promised a “lightning fast compiler” and code that could “run faster than C”. No benchmark came with those claims, and none should be read into them.

Blitz Basic 2 (1992)

Blitz Basic 2 moved to Acid Software in Auckland, part of Armstrong Communications. Its user guide starts with an unusually frank note to owners of the first version:

To all of those that supported the first Blitz BASIC we say a very big HELLO! Although not a huge marketing success it gave us the confidence we needed to develop Blitz 2, which as you will find is a completely new ball game regarding power, scale, and overall expandability. However the speed remains!

The same guide shows the editor’s start-up screen as Blitz Basic 2 Version 1.26, Copyright 1992 Acid Software. The Amiga Magazine Rack indexes a review in Amiga Joker’s December 1992 issue. Wikipedia and this site’s master list both date Blitz Basic 2 to “around 1993”, but it was on sale in 1992. The 1993 date probably comes from the wave of UK reviews that year, such as Paul Overaa’s in the July 1993 issue of Amiga Computing. The credits name Sibly as author of the compiler, libraries and documentation, and Simon Armstrong for editing the documentation and writing the 2D routines.

Acid’s own promotional text, reproduced in Amiga Report, lists what came in the box: a 320-page A4 reference manual covering more than 300 commands and functions, a separate user guide, the compiler and its editor Ted, disks of examples, and a free issue of Blitz User Magazine. The magazine was a quarterly disk and print publication that delivered new commands and fixes; according to the same text, issue 3 revamped Ted and added a runtime debugger, and issue 4 added AGA screens.

Coverdisks, competitions and Worms

Blitz Basic 2 reached its largest audience in November 1993. Amiga Format issue 52 put a “fully working version of Blitz Basic 2” on its coverdisk, pitched as “even more powerful than AMOS!”, and Acid Software used the same issue to launch a programming competition. The results were printed in issue 61 (July 1994). The two winners, Nick Slaven’s Derring Do and Graham Mackarel’s Circus, were later released on Amiga Power coverdisks.

The best-known entry did not place. Andy Davidson had been working on an artillery game, and according to Wikipedia’s account the competition prompted him to rename it Total Wormage. CU Amiga told the rest in 1995: Davidson “originally programmed the game for a Blitz competition in one of our rival Amiga magazines”, the magazine ignored it, and Team17’s Martyn Brown signed it within ten minutes of seeing it at the European Computer Trade Show in September 1994. Team17 released Worms on the Amiga on 17 November 1995.

Design Philosophy

Take over the machine, or share it

The defining idea of Blitz is that a program can run in one of two worlds and switch between them:

• Amiga mode is an ordinary, well-behaved AmigaOS program with screens, windows, menus and gadgets. From Blitz Basic 2 onward these are all built-in Blitz objects.
• Blitz mode, entered with the BLITZ statement, suspends the operating system and gives the program the hardware. The program works with slices (display regions with their own resolution and palette), copper lists, smooth scrolling, dual playfield and the blitter directly.

The manual is careful about the cost. Before going into Blitz mode the program must make sure no disk activity is happening, and on Kickstart 1.3 and earlier the system can take up to two seconds to flush its buffers after a file is closed. AMIGA returns the program to the normal display, and QAMIGA gives it access to the OS again without disturbing the Blitz-mode display. This split is how one language could serve as both a game engine and an application tool.

A BASIC that borrows from C and Pascal

Acid’s promotional text calls Blitz Basic 2 “a next generation BASIC with features borrowed from PASCAL, C and others”, and the user guide describes NewTypes as “structures we have stolen from C and installed in BASIC where they seem quite at home”. Blitz 1 had only GOSUB. Blitz 2 added real procedures, called Statements when they return nothing and Functions when they do, with local variables, recursion and parameters in curly braces:

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; Blitz Basic 2 — adapted from the examples in the user guide
NEWTYPE .Person
  name$
  age.b
  height.q
End NEWTYPE

Function fact{n}
  a=1
  For k=2 To n
    a=a*k
  Next
  Function Return a
End Function

p.Person\name="Harry",20,2.1
NPrint p\name
NPrint p\age
For k=1 To 5
  NPrint fact{k}
Next
MouseWait

Fields of a NewType are reached with a backslash (p\name), and a type is given by a suffix the first time a variable is used. After that the suffix may be left off, except on strings.

Speed first, then everything else

Every design decision in both versions puts speed first. Compiled programs are standalone machine code with no runtime library to install. The default numeric type is the fixed-point quick (.q), which the manual describes as “less accurate than floating point but faster”. The compiler contains an inline 68000 assembler that can be mixed with BASIC inside procedures, with GetReg and PutReg for passing values between them.

Key Features

Evolution

The AmiBlitz3 documentation adds a detail that explains how slowly the modernisation went. The Blitz Basic 2 “source” released to the community “was just a disassembled machine code, therefore changes are hard to realize”. According to the same history, Acid Software gave up its rights to the product when it left the Amiga market but kept the name, which is why the community version is called AmiBlitz.

Current Relevance

The commercial product has been dead for decades. Acid Software is generally said to have wound down around 2001 (we have not found a dated source for its closure), and Sibly went on to Blitz Research and the Windows Blitz line in 2000. The code has not died with it:

• AmiBlitz3 is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence and was still receiving releases in 2026. It targets 68k AmigaOS. Its README says the IDE needs a 68020 and Workbench 2.04 or later, and that these requirements apply to the IDE only, not to compiled programs.
• Aminet still gets new AmiBlitz uploads, including code examples, a cheat sheet and game templates as recently as 2025.
• Retrospectives continue. Zzap! Amiga issue 21 (March–April 2025) ran a Blitz Basic tribute, according to the Amiga Magazine Rack contents listing, and Amiga Addict reportedly published a developer’s account of starting out in Blitz in late 2025.

Running original Blitz Basic 2 today means using real Amiga hardware or an emulator such as WinUAE or FS-UAE, together with a Kickstart ROM and the original disks. There is no Docker image, and one would not help much: the language’s main feature is direct access to hardware that no container emulates.

Why It Matters

Blitz BASIC showed that BASIC on a home computer was not limited by the language. It was limited by being interpreted and by having no access to the hardware. On the Amiga, AMOS answered with ease of use and a huge command set. Blitz answered by compiling to machine code and opening up the custom chips. Contemporary reviewers made the same comparison: AMOS for breadth, Blitz for speed. In 1995 CU Amiga told a reader that Blitz was “better for pure games (it’s faster)”.

The language’s importance also shows in what came after it. Worms began as a Blitz competition entry. Acid Software shipped commercial games alongside the compiler. When the Amiga market collapsed, Sibly took the same idea to Windows, where BlitzBasic, Blitz3D and BlitzPlus introduced a new generation to game programming. The Amiga compiler outlived its platform’s commercial life and its original publisher, and as AmiBlitz3 it has now outlived its author too.