Launched in 1987, the Amiga 500 was the first of Commodores low-end 16/32-bit Amigas, which was designed to compete directly against the Atari 520ST, which was released before the Amiga 500 in 1986.
The 500 is represented to many, as the spiritual successor to the C64 in many ways and was a way for Commodore to return to it’s roots by selling the Amiga 500 through the same large retail outlets as the C64.
We can also compare the C64 to the Amiga in regards to having custom hardware for graphics and sound available at an affordable price to households. Like the C64 of the 8-bit era, the Amiga was also popular for games due to it’s custom hardware and we possibly saw some of the best 16-bit games of the era on the Amiga 500.