Amiga CD32
The CD32 represented the last gasp of a dying company, a machine that Commodore hoped would take on the mighty Sega in America and Europe but ended up as a footnote in video game history, the CD32 often takes the blame for bringing down the once mighty Commodore, but like with most companies, they are not brought down by their last product, but by the years of mismanagement that proceed it.
It was not Commodore’s first foray into the console gaming world, having previously released the C64GS and the CDTV, one would have thougt that Commodore might have learnt a lesson about releasing their computer hardware in console form, but sadly for everyone Commodore had a long history of not learning from previous mistakes.
After Jack Tramiel was ousted from the company in 1984 the company ran through a number of CEO’s some like Marshall Smith brought with them new levels of incompetence that should have sunk the company there and then, others such as Thomas Rattigan were able to return the company to profitability, but by the time the 90’s rolled around the man at the top was Mehdi Ali.
In 1989 Ali was bought in from management consulting company Dillon-Read, he would ultimately be the man responsible for destroying the company, his strategy was simple, he gutted Commodore’s R&D, made a number of errors that cost the company millions and increased his own earnings, in 1989 Ali recieved a sallery of 1.38 million in 1990 this rose to $2 million not including bonuses, to put that into perspective, John Akers the much more successful CEO of market leader IBM was paid $713,000 for the same year.
In one of his biggest blunders, Sun Microsystems had approached Commodore with the idea to license a version of Commodore’s A3000UX system to release as a low to mid range alternative to their high end workstations, Ali personally stepped in to sink the deal, not once, but twice, the level of his ineptitude was nothing short of legendary.
With the resurgence of PC Hardware in the early 90s the Amiga range was beginning to look tired, the VGA graphics standard introduced in 1987 allowed for 256 colours in a 320 x 200 resolution, which put it ahead of the Amiga which although capable of running 4096 colours, could only do it in HAM mode which was absolutely rubbish for games, most of which ran in a 320 x 200 resolution displaying 32 colours, the EVGA (XGA) standard had been introduced in 1990 pushing the PCs resolution to 640 x 480 and to make matter worse prices for the machines were coming down, meaning that they were becoming affordable for the home consumer.
To compensate a new range of the Amiga was designed around the AGA chipset, designed to reset the balance, it increased the available memory and allowed for 256 colours, unfortunately it was released a good five years after the VGA standard and two years after EVGA, but placed side by side the Amiga still looked a contender with a better library of software, this changed about a year after the A1200’s launch when in december of 1993 the PC got just the boost it needed with the release of a little shareware game called DOOM, all of a sudden the Amiga looked horribly underpowered.
Rather than trying to compete directly Commodore decided the smart move was to pivot, if you can’t beat IBM then surely the next best thing would be to repackage that existing Amiga hardware in a console box and instead try to fight a completely different enemy in a marketplace that had historically delivered them nothing but failure and so, the CD32 was born.
First demonstrated at the World of Commodore Amiga show in 1993, the CD32 had the exact same chipset as the A1200 based around the same Motorola 68020, the CD32 featured the same Lisa, Alice and Paula chipset as it’s computer sibling although now they were joined by Akiko replacing Budgie and Gayle, it came with 2mb of chip ram, a double speed CD-Rom and an S-Video out, the console also featured an expansion bay for the use of an FMV module, the system was also backward compatible with the majority of titles for failed CDTV console, a bonus for the dozen or so people that still had any.
Commodore were bullish leading up to the UK launch even going as far as hiring the billboard outside Sega’s UK offices for a big splash ad making fun of their competitor, a move that backfired somewhat as negative advertising might have been around for years in America but in the UK it more of a foreign concept which did little to tell consumers anything about the new console beyond a picture of the cosmetically ugly machine.
The biggest problem for commodore with designing console versions of a home computer is simple and one Commodore should have already learnt from the failures of both the C64GS and the CDTV, for developers when designing games for a console with an installed user base of less than 100,000 there really isn’t much profit to be gained, when you have a computer with about a million users the most obvious thing is to simply release the same game on both systems, so the CD32 had a games library that consisted of mostly A1200 games but now on more expensive CDs.
Despite this in the UK for the Christmas period following its launch the CD32 accounted for 38% of all CD-Rom sales, far outstripping sales of Software for the Sega Mega-CD, this was a somewhat minor victory as the Mega-CD had sold poorly in the UK and CD-Rom was yet to gain the mainstream appeal that wouldn’t become widespread until the release of the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation in 1995.
Commodore had intended and indeed announced that the CD32 would be released in America in the first quarter of 1994 it however this was not to be, a company called Cad Trak held a patent for technology that Commodore had used, Commodore missed its deadline for paying a patent royalty and so were ordered to pay the company a $10 million penalty.
To stay afloat the company needed to sell around 300,000 of their new console, they were very much shy of the mark, having sold around 100,000 in Europe and a few thousand more in Canada, Brazil and Australia, sales had stalled, not least because news was beginnig to hit the gaming press of new hardware coming out of Japan, Sega were gearing up to release the Saturn and new player Sony were about to enter the fray with their new console dubbed PlayStation, Commodore’s boast of the CD32 being twice as fast and twice as powerful as any other game system was gone in a Thanos snap.
With little revenue coming in and debts mounting Commodore failed to pay Cad Trak the $10 million they owed and found themselves slapped with an injunction barring them from importing any products into the United States, all the machines that had already been built were stuck in their manufacturing facility in the Philippines and with Commodore unable to settle their debts with the facilities owners, they were forced to file for bankruptcy.
Ali of course was still paid his $2 million salary for the year.
