On April 29, , Commodore International Limited announced that it was starting the initial phase of voluntary liquidation of all of its assets and filing for bankruptcy protection. Commodore, once the savior of the Amiga, had failed to save itself. Why did this happen? Was it inevitable, or could the company have made different choices and kept both itself and the Amiga platform alive and healthy?
There are those who would argue the former. Computing platforms tend to start with many different competitors and then slowly dwindle down to one or two survivors. Those seven became five and then essentially one after mergers and acquisitions. There were more than personal computer platforms in the early '80s, but by only two remained that sold enough to be measurable: PC compatibles at 91 percent share and Macintoshes at 9 percent. But is the survival of more than two computing platforms an ironclad law of technology or just a coincidence?
There are exceptions—game consoles went through two separate generations with three viable competitors: Nintendo, Sega, and Sony in the s, and Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony from the s until present-day. In addition, a declining market share is not irreversible. The Macintosh, after hitting a low of under two percent in , has since rebounded to a healthy 7. Could a trio of PCs, Macintoshes, and Amigas have coexisted in an alternate universe?
I think so. Ultimately, the failure rests with Commodore management, who not only failed to adapt to a changing marketplace, but in many cases were actively hostile to their own company.
To understand what they did and why they did it, we have to jump far back in time—to the creation of Commodore itself. Jack Tramiel founded Commodore in , leveraging his experiences repairing typewriters after the war to build up a small stable of office products, including adding machines. Jack was a Holocaust survivor, and his aggressive, take-no-prisoners approach to business sometimes got him in trouble.
In , he was involved in a scandal when the Alliance Acceptance Corporation, a Canadian financial company, suddenly collapsed. Tramiel had close ties to Alliance, and although he was not indicted, the scandal wrecked Commodore. To survive, Tramiel was forced to sell a large share of his company to Irving Gould, a Canadian financier. Gould now held the purse strings.
For a while, this strategy worked well. Then, he believed that Jack was trying to position his sons to take over the company. In any case, Gould managed to get Tramiel to suddenly resign from the company he founded in Gould then proceeded to hand-pick a series of CEOs with little or no experience in the personal computing industry.
Some, like Marshall Smith, were terrible, whereas others, like Thomas Rattigan, managed to bring the company back to profitability. One thing was consistent, however: Commodore CEOs, like hockey coaches, were hired to be fired.
Jones later went on to build the Grand Theft Auto franchise and has recently completed Crackdown for the Xbox Stand-out tables included the music-themed Beat Box and the rocket launch-themed Ignition. Pinball games often lacked quality gameplay due to the absence of accurate pinball physics, but the Amiga had enough processing power to handle the physics, the faked-up dot-matrix display, multiple play modes and other bells and whistles.
The game itself produced a whole mess of sequels, including Pinball Fantasies and Pinball Illusions.
It also helped birth console pinball games such as True Pinball. Digital Illusions went on to create the Battlefield series and was later acquired by Electronic Arts. Top-down squad action makes up the core of the gameplay, while the theme song, "War Has Never Been So Much Fun," further outlines the darkly humorous nature of the title. Cannon Fodder actually shows ambivalence toward war. We hope you never find out the hard way.
Background scenery scrolled slower than the foreground, and it was split into as many as 12 layers. The game also had lush fantasy artwork and a cover from famed fantasy artist Roger Dean — a complete experience. To be honest, Shadow of the Beast is less important for its gameplay than for its amazing graphics, which just about outdid many arcade games at the time. Shadow of the Beast itself spawned a couple of sequels and console conversions.
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