Commodore Amiga
By the early 80s Jay Miner, was already something of an industry legend having designed the TIA for the Atari 2600, along with the follow up chips ANTIC and CTIA which would form the basis of Atari’s 8-bit home computer line-up, whilst at Atari Miner had wanted to experiment building new hardware around the Motorola 68000 processor, but Atari had balked, preferring instead to continue with their exploitation of the humble and far cheaper MOS Technlogy 6502 processors that had formed the backbone of it’s 8-bit hardware.
Miner disenfranchised with the way Atari was being run in the Warner Communications era decided to leave the company in 1980, where he quickly found a job designing pacemakers (for wich he recieved two patents), it was a couple of years later when he was contacted by another Atari Alumni by the name of Larry Kaplan, one of the original founders of Activision.
Kaplan had put together a team of other ex-Atari employees and was looking for financing to start a new company, Miner was able to hook him up with a handful of friends who worked in the dental industry and were happy to invest, it wasn’t long before Kaplan asked him to join his new company,
The Company named Hi-Toro was initially split into two, one side would focus their energy on producing peripherals for the existing range of 8-bit consoles whilst the other led by Miner along with RJ Mical and Dale Luck would begin experimenting with the 68000 processor in the hope of creating a 16-bit games machine that would be head and shoulders over what was currently available.
The machine was nicknamed the Lorraine after the wife of one of chief executive of the company, and was designed from the ground up to be as open for development as possible, to remove the strain from the CPU it was decided the machine would use custom designed chips that although would make the machine more expensive would afford it higher quality than its rivals, when Kaplan left the company in 1982, Miner was promoted to head engineer whilst the company was rebranded to Amiga Corporation
Then in 1983 the industry was sent into a tailspin by the infamous North American video game crash, Hi-Toro was smart enough to rethink and reorganise to weather to storm, it completely abolished it’s peripheral division, after all if nobody was buying the older 8-bit machines what would be the point of creating peripherals for them?
The Lorraine was completely redesigned, no longer a dedicated games machine, it would now have a keyboard and mouse as standard, a full operating system called ‘Intuition’ would be used, and the machine would be renamed to ‘Amiga’ work was also finished on the custom chips named Denise, Agnus & Paula, although at this point they were far too large to be housed inside a home computer.
It was around this time that the company came on the radar of Warner Communications owned Atari who under the leadership of James J. Morgan offered to buy shares in Hi-Toro at $3 per share and loaned the company $500,000, in a move of complete dickishness Atari had no intentions of ever releasing the Amiga but wanted the custom chips for itself, icluded in the laon agreement was a caveat that meant that id the loan was not repaid the company would forfeit the Lorraine to Atari, so knowing that the company had no way of paying them back they held up the paperwork on the share purchase then lowered the offer to 98 cents per share, it looked like the Amiga was destined to die.
However unbeknownst to Mr Morgan Warner Communications had been looking to offload Atari, during 1983 thanks on no small part to the video game crash Atari had been losing money at a rate of over one million dollars a week, but it seemed they had found an interested buyer in the form of Jack Tramiel, the former co-founder of Commodore who had recently left the company on acrimonious terms following a heated bust up with Commodore Chairman and co-founder Irving Gould.
The issue for Commodore was that Tramiel despite being known as a fierce boss was obviously well liked by many in the company, a number of whom left to join him at hs newly purchased Atari, Commodore went as far as filing a lawsuit against four engineers defecting from Commodore, charging that they stole computer-design secrets that they intended to use at their new jobs with Mr. Tramiel and Atari in a bid to delay Atari from releasing any new hardware.
One of the defendants was Shiraz Shivji who had been one of the engineers who had helped build the C64, Shivji had been working on a new machine for commodore dubbed the Commodore 900 as a low cost UNIX workstation to replace Commodores aging PET platform, Commodore charged that it was their IP relating to the C900 that Shivji had taken to Atari.
Despite Atari not being named as a defendant Commodore moved to prohibit Leonard Schreiber, their former general counsel who had also defected to Atari , from advising the now Atari-employed engineers because it contended he possessed proprietary Commodore information, this tit for tat trading of lawsuits would do nothing for either company, neither of whom had particularly deep pockets.
Left with a dwindling technical staff Commodore was left in a position with no new hardware ready for release and no readily available expertise with which to design one, which left them having to look outside of the company if they were going to remain competitive, having domineered the 8-bit micro space under the leadership of Tramiel they weren’t going to just let him take the 16-bit market all to himself.
In a bid to produce it’s own rival computer Commodore became aware of the Amiga project, having been impressed with the hardware Commodore lent Amiga Corp $1m to pay back the Atari loan, sensing a way to immediately gain powerful new hardware whilst simultaneously sticking it to their old boss, Commodore offered to buy the company outright for $24m with its eyes firmly on releasing the hardware as the Commodore Amiga.
Tramiel filed a $100 million countersuit against Amiga Corporation arguing that Amiga had taken money from Atari and instead of using it to develop the chipset the company had requested, had instead in bad faith developed technology that benefitted Amiga alone at the exclusion of Atari and that as the orginal contract stated “Amiga shall not grant any other party a license to make, use or sell chips or products” Amiga was clearly in breach, Atari also contended that Amiga Corp cancelled the deal informing Atari that the proposed chips didn’t work, which they argued was nonsense as “the chips worked perfectly well and may form the basis of a new computer that Commodore plans to market next year”.
Although not named as a defendant in the suit Commodore entered proceedings arguing that nowhere in the contract did it state that Amiga was prohibited from using Amiga developed chips itself and therefore as Commodore was now the parent company of Amiga they couldn’t be barred from using any Amiga developed technology, to counter Atari launched another lawsuit in federal court this time against Commodore claiming patent infringement.
The four engineers were aquited in 1985 with US district judge John P. Fullam stating that “these four fellows did not steal any computer secrets and Commodore could not prove that they did…” however it was also stated that they had taken some documentation in error, or as lead council for the defendants Phillip Kircher put it “in the rush to move a couple of boxes were put on the moving vans.” Atari obviously volunteered to return the erroneously acquired boxes, with both sides claiming an “absolute victory”, the other lawsuits dragged on until 1987 before being settled with prejudice for an undisclosed amount.
The team pushed on and by 1985 the first iteration was ready to be shown at the CES in Chicago and what a machine it was, promoted simply as “The Amiga from Commodre” displaying the infamous bouncing ball demo it blew the crowds away, this was a game changer, or at least it would have been if the price tag hadn’t been $1,295.00 placing the machine firmly outside of the reach of the average home consumer.
The redubbed A1000 hit the market in 1985 and almost immediately floundered, production issues and poor marketing hurt sales, by the end of the year around 35,000 units had been sold, it was a severe financial blow for Commodore who even went as far as pulling out of the January CES in 1986, to make matters worse they weren’t outselling Atari’s newly launched ST computer, Commodore decided to shake things up, so they appointed a new CEO Thomas Rattigan.
Rattigan had previously been the CEO of Pepsi, his appointment somewhat mirroring that of John Sculley at Apple, his first order of business was to trim the fat, he immediately discontinued the Vic 20 and Commodore PET, gutted the C64 line-up cancelling many of the derivative machines, but his big plan was to bet on the Amiga with the development of two new machines, a high end workstation dubbed the A2000 and an entry level home version called the A500.
By 1987 the A500 was finally ready, stripped of the more expensive PC trappings of the A1000, like its monitor and bulky shell, the A500 was an all in one wonder with an RF modulator to hook up to any television, and for the more modest price of £499 it was released to the market.
Designed around the same OCS (Amiga Original Chipset) that powered the A1000, the A500 was based around the Motorolla 68000 CPU working in conjunction with the revised PLCC Fat Agnus which handled memory access alongside the Denise, and Paula chips which handled Graphics and Audio respectively.
Rattigan’s gamble had paid off, he had turned Commodore around from a $237 million three-quarter loss to a $22 million profit within a single quarter, not only that but sales of the Amiga line-up were starting to overtake those of Atari with the ST range, so Commodore being Commodore and Gould being Gould in a move that confused almost everyone Rattigan was immediately fired, Rattigan sued Commodore for breach of contract and was awarded $9 million.
Sadly in America Commodore had developed a reputation of being difficult to work with and hostile to retailers, many of whom decided not to support Commodore products, America was also a different market when it came to computers they were mainly seen as office machines, if you wanted to play games you either bought a Nintendo or borrowed your dad’s Apple II, it also didn’t help that an Infoworld survey at Comdex in 1997 revealed that found that no developers present were planning on releasing software for the machine.
The A500 however proved an attractive proposition to UK developers which along with Germany would prove to be a key market for the system, Europe had always been more interested in home micros over consoles and the 8-bit era had been defined by machines like the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, the BBC model B and Commodore’s own C64, so the upgrade path to the 16-bit generation was an obvious one, whilst sales of 8-bit micros had tailed off in North America following the 1985 release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, in Europe where they didn’t get the NES until a staggered release thorugh 1986 — 1987, the micro market continued to flourish.
Many European developers started designing games from the get go, Commodore UK was also savvy with it’s marketing, and in 1989 official packs started to appear the first of which designed to hit the lucrative Christmas market was the Bat Pack, which saw the A500 offered with Deluxe Paint II, Batman: The Movie, The New Zealand Story and F/A-18: Interceptor all for the more reasonable price of £399, putting the A500 within the reach of almost everybody.
1989 also saw the Amiga establish its lead over the Atari ST, bolstered by game releases such as Bloodwych, Populous, Stunt Car Racer, Rick Dangerous, Crazy Cars II, Treasure Island Dizzy, Exolon, Blood Money, It Came From The Desert, Myth, Rainbow Islands, North & South, Stormlord, and Xenon II: Megablast, although multiplat games were being released simultaneously for both platforms the lead machine was starting to switch from ST to Amiga, a trend that would continue into the next decade.
In 1990 a new bundle supposedly aimed at the more serious user was released featuring Deluxe Paint II along with F29-Retaliator, Escape From the Planet of the Robot Monsters and Rainbow Islands, dubbed the Flight of Fantasy pack, how it was supposed to appeal to more serious users was anybodies guess, but it did actually feature three more very good games that showcased the power of the A500, so that at least was a bonus.
1990 also recieved a slew of notable releases including Captive, Speedball II: Brutal Deluxe, Castle Master, Loom, Midwinter, The Immortal, Awesome, Corporation, Operation Stealth, Powermonger, Flood, Wings, 688 Attack Sub, Cadaver, Anarchy, James Pond: Underwater Agent, Kick Off 2, The Lost Patrol, and Kid Gloves which despite not being a great game garnered some noteriety in the UK from being featured prominantly on Saturday morining television where kids could phone in and play the game by issuing commands over the telephone.
Commodore continued their bundle push with another arriving in time for Christmas the Screen Gems pack, which they argued was geared more toward the gamer of the 8-bit era looking to upgrade to a more powerful machine, included in the pack was the now ubiquitous Deluxe Paint II as well as Days of Thunder, Back to the Future II, Night Breed and Shadow of the Beast II, whilst Shadow of the Beast II was graphically excellent it was a notoriously punishing game, both Night Breed and Days of Thunder were considered to be rubbish, and Back to the Future II was quite simply one of the most hateful games to appear on the system, compared to the two previous packs, this was a major step backwards.
1991 was arguably the key year for the A500, despite emerging competition from the Sega Megadrive and Nintendo SNES, game developers really hit their stride with the Amiga hardware and the ensuing torrent of games was overwhelmingly great, games such as The Secret of Monkey Island, Turrican II, Lemmings, Another World, Lotus Turbo Challenge II, Formula One Grand Prix, Moonstone, Eye of the Beholder, Mega Lo Mania, Supercars II, Populous II, Rodland, Hunter, and Utopia, the year was rounded out with a new package in time for Christmas dubbed the Cartoon Classics pack, comprising of Deluxe Paint 3, Captain Planet, The Simpsons and the legendary Lemmings, all supplied around the recently upgraded A500+ with a full 1mb of ram and the new ECS chipset.
1992 would see the A500 range discontinued and replaced with the ill-fated A600, a cosmetic upgrade that nobody had asked for and it appeared nobody wanted, although hardware sales were poor, the software scene however was going from strength to strength, as the software industry was still basking in the glory of its golden age, which would run through 1993 and include releases such as Secret of Monkey Island II, Pinball Fantasies, Civilization, World Circuit, Cannon Fodder, The Settlers, Flashback, Dune II, Simon the Sorcerer, Syndicate, Ambermoon, The Chaos Engine, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Lemmings II, Superfrog, and Frontier: Elite II.
Outside of Europe another key market had emerged in Australia, where sales went on to top one million units a huge number of which were the A500, unfortunately as good as the local office were at pushing the computer to the home user they suffered the same drawback as both the UK and Germany in as much as the American head office were next to useless with their support, despite dedicated Amiga magazines, computers prominently featured in daytime soap operas, and retail outlets carrying dedicated Amiga sections in their stores, America clearly saw them as a secondary market and treated them as such.
The writing however was on the wall, for all the good Commodore UK were doing, Commodore international seemed content to stumble from blunder to blunder, never learning the lesson of the dead on arrival CDTV, within a couple of years, they released the upgraded lineup of the Amiga A4000, A1200 and the CD32 console, none of which could curtail the downward trend.
The A1200 suffered through a lacklustre software lineup, the first bundle on sale for the machine was the Desktop Dynamite pack, which would end up being the most popular A1200 bundle released by Commodore, it contained Deluxe Paint IV AGA, Print Manager, Wordworth 2 AGA, and two games Dennis and Oscar, which were both dire Euro-platformers that did little to show off the strengths of the machine, and it was a capable machine, but at that point the backward compatibilty worked as a drawback, with the large installed user base of of A500 software developers had no real incentive to release A1200 specific software and only a few titles ever took real advatage of the expanded AGA chipset.
Although for anybody watching the industry 1993 was the approaching the end for Commodore in its key markets consumers wouldn’t have known much was wrong, the year saw a number of high profile releases including Syndicate, Turrican 3, Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues, Cannon Fodder, D/Generation, Frontier: Elite II, Apache, The Chaos Engine, Body Blows, Dune II: Battle for Arrakis, Simon the Sorcerer, Project-X, Chuck Rock II, Creatures, Desert Strike, Skidmarks, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, The Settlers, Lemmings II: The Tribes, James Pond 2: Codename Robocod, Uridium 2, Walker, The Lost Vikings, Pinball Fantasies, Micro Machines, Second Samurai, and Zool 2.
The CD32 was to all intent and purpose a console version of the A1200 hardware coupled with a CD-ROM drive, released in September of 1993, the console was overpriced, under supported and came coupled with one of the worst control pads of any system, the machine would shift around 100,000 units in Europe before being discontinued in April of 1994.
The A4000 found its niche in video production, becoming home to NewTek’s video toaster, which was a popular tool for both amatuer and commercial video production, the video toaster 4000 is probably most famous for being used in the production of the J. Michael Straczynski TV series Babylon 5, along with being used by Digital Domain who used Amiga 4000/040s to help craft effects shots for films like True Lies, Apollo 13 and Titanic.
Despite being superseded by newer models the humble A500 would remain successful, in 1994 despite the lackluster reception to the new hardware over one hundred and fifty A500 games were released, another ninety would follow in 1995, before things began to inevitably slow down as the release of the Sony PlayStation changed the marketplace forever.
Commodore international would meet its eventual fate, by 1994 only the UK and German arms of the company were turning profit, and on April 29th 1994 (one day after my 18th Birthday) The Company declared bankruptcy and ceased to exist. Commodore UK managed to hang on a little longer, even putting in a bid to purchase the parent company, but after fierce competition from bigger players like ESCOM, they were forced to withdraw, filing for bankruptcy on August 30th 1995.
After acquiring Commodore for $14m in 1995 ESCOM split the company in two, branding it’s PC computers with the Commodore name, they did manage to keep the Amiga name going for a little longer with the release of the A4000T in 1995, designed by Commodore before the buyout and released in very small numbers back in 1994, the 4000T was a standard A4000 in a tower case, Escom’s revision was based around the Motorola 68060 processor (replacing the 68040 in the orginal), it is the only machine in the Amiga lineup to feature both a SCSI and IDE interface, rumours suggest it sold less than 2000 units. Escom quickly became victims to their own overexpansion and filed for Bankruptcy on July 15th 1996.
Several attempts have been made to revive the Amiga brand in the years that followed but none have achieved any great success, initially it was sold the US manufacturer Gateway 2000, they sold the rights shortly afterwards without releasing a single product under the name, Amiga Inc. became the copyright holder licensing the name to other companies for use on platforms like Hyperion’s AmigaOne brand, in February of 2019 Amiga Inc. transferred all Amiga related rights to C-A Acquisition Corporation owned by Mike Battilana, director of the company Cloanto, who are responsible for the Amiga Forever emulation package.
