What if Commodore had lasted one year longer?

[mc68060]

What if Commodore had gone bankrupt in April 1995 instead of 1994? What do you think would they have been able to pull off in the Amiga sector in that year?

[PortuguesePilot]

TBH? Nothing.

[Estrayk]

There was nothing to do against clone pc's.
Silicon Graphics, Acorn (computer series), Atari, Commodore, Sharp (X68000), Fujitsu (PCx9xx), Tandy, Amstrad.......... they all fell


The Macs did not fall by a miracle.

[dreadnought]

We could make even more "what if" threads than we do already.

[lesta_smsc]

"What if Commodore had lasted one year longer?"

It would have ended the following year lol... unfortunately, there was no hope for Commodore, from being a market leader they fell heavily behind. There is always a rise and fall of nations / empires and this was the time for Commodore...

[A500]

As someone put it, it was the spectacular lack of R&D that torpedoed any chance of success after the "golden years". To me the interesting question would be "what if Hi-Toro had actually found a competent buyer in 1983-4 who was willing to invest heavily into marketing and development for years to come?"

[grond]

They would have sold more CD32s and would then have gone bankrupt. They definitely wouldn't have put out any technology we hadn't got already.

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by Estrayk

The Macs did not fall by a miracle.

Miracle = cash injection by Microsoft to avoid having even more troubles with the antitrust case

One more year would've changed nothing. The Amiga was already very long in the tooth by then. It would have been ultimately killed and buried by the first 3D consoles (late 1995) anyway.

I would instead pose the following question: "what if Commodore kept Jay Miner and actually went with the Ranger design?".

You would have had a killer machine in the markets by 1987. Nothing else could've compared (it would have been on par with the X68000, which had plenty of arcade-perfect ports to show its power) and it could've brought the much needed cash and success Commodore needed to stay alive.

[mc68060]

Ok, so no AAA chipset for us then But at least we'd probably have gotten a few more games if Commodore had lasted longer... so many games were announced back then but they never materialized...

[Pyromania]

Originally Posted by mc68060

What if Commodore had gone bankrupt in April 1995 instead of 1994? What do you think would they have been able to pull off in the Amiga sector in that year?

Maybe Quantum computers would have been invented sooner? Probably not, I’m not sure what would have happened but maybe quality software and hardware would have kept coming out for the Amiga. Many great projects were cancelled once Commodore went bankrupt.

[Anubis]

Year or even 2 longer would mean not much to computer scene, as there was no R&D for a new shiny thing called 3D that could compete with rise of PC compatibles. Those 'what if' threads don't make much sense... what if Commodore invested and released something like Play Station instead of Amiga without keyboard called Amiga CD32??

Strange is that they did not learn much from C64GS... and there was nothing worth mentioning in R&D\.

[Pyromania]

What if McDonalds sold healthy food? Would the world be less obese? Yes, playing the what if game can go on and on and on. Commodore should have never laid off the Los Gatos Amiga Team. That held the Amiga back once other technology companies studied how the 1985 Amiga custom chips worked.

[PortuguesePilot]

Originally Posted by mc68060

Ok, so no AAA chipset for us then But at least we'd probably have gotten a few more games if Commodore had lasted longer... so many games were announced back then but they never materialized...

Even in that regard things looked grim. Most of the software for the Amiga came from European developers and published by European software labels - basically inheriting the software dynamics that ruled the European Spectrum and C64 operations - but by the mid 90's those dynamics were changing. Small studios were being bought and assimilated into bigger ones (I think everyone remembers the whole Infogrames and Ocean ordeal) and the old "single coder" or "coding/graphic/music trio" that were usual on the European game development scene was starting to prove short as the advancement in hardware went on (especially the PC but also the consoles and the competition from Japanese game development, which had employed vast teams of technicians). The international gaming market showed that the Europeans would have to change and adapt or perish. The other alternative was to focus on the European computer gaming scene, which was rather small and already dwindling (except for the PC).

Adding to this, by 1993 the Atari ST is dead, the Archimedes never really took flight, the Macintosh was residual and more business focused, the PC was a bit of mess (although they were everywhere from schools, to businesses to homes, you - as a software developer - had to cater to the minimum common standard to increase compatibility, which sort-of prevented some games to really "take off") and the Amiga... well, the Amiga was riddled with piracy, which meant that for game developers, developing games for the Amiga was not very profitable any more. Also, people in the business weren't stupid. They followed the whole Irving Gould and Medhi Ali cock-up and understood that the Amiga was going nowhere. If you looked closer, by the end of 1993, games where already looking much better on the Mega Drive, the SNES and on PC whith the Amiga versions - when they existed - being quick-conversions of C code or even of 68K ASM from the Mega Drive but all stripped down to suit the OCS/AGA with little or no Amiga-specific optimisation.


This all without even mentioning the Playstation, which was an absolute game-changer. Such a game-changer that even the dynamics that I spoke above were affected big time. And even if - as you all probably remember - the Playstation was a sort of a "silent hit", by 1993 all the gaming community were already expecting the SEGA Saturn (it seems laughable now in retrospect, but at the time the Saturn was heavily hyped and people thought that the new SEGA machine would replicate the Mega Drive's success into the 32-bit era. We all know now that it didn't, but at the time everyone thought it would. Rumours of the Playstation existed, sure, but people thought "Sony makes excellent stereos and Walkmans. Does it know how to make a console, though? That's more SEGA's job, isn't it?"). Also, while by 1993 the SNES was still going in full-force, with lots of support from Nintendo and many 3rd parties, there were already talks of a replacement (which only came a lot later, though, via the N64, and even that was somewhat inconsequential towards the mammoth that PS1 had by then become) but in 1993 the rumour of a new Nintendo console to rival the Saturn was already a rage and judging by the professional way that Nintendo handled both the NES and the SNES, people had high hopes for it too.

"Er, excuse me, PP... but I didn't ask for a time snapshot, I just asked what could Commodore have done with an extra year". Yes, I know. But the time snapshot serves to show the global stage on which our poor little Amiga was struggling. What had Commodore done the year before? Released the CD32. Which everyone saw as just a rehash of a rehash (CD32 was a consolised A1200 which was basically a slightly improved A500) and, so, the software houses saw the CD32 as weak, dépassé hardware that stood no chance against the 3DO much less the new Saturn. The weak R&D of Commodore, the dwindling hardware sales of mid-1993 onwards, the prospect of future consoles, the competition from foreign developers, the extensive piracy going on (with crackers being waaaay too savvy in cracking disk protections) and the rise of PC's popularity (i80486DX2@66MHz anyone?) meant that the Amiga was absolutely "Doom"ed (see what I did there?). An extra year would have meant very little, even on the gaming development. You saw those odd games that were released that year after the folding of Commodore? "Black Viper" or "Fightin' Spirit"? Games that were made in Poland or Italy still operating within the old - and by now virtually dead - Spectrum-like game development dynamics? Maybe we could have seen a couple more of those. But that's about it. Big AAA titles? Big studio releases? I don't think so... So, an extra year would have accomplished nothing on the hardware department and very little in the software department.

[eXeler0]

Originally Posted by mc68060

What if Commodore had gone bankrupt in April 1995 instead of 1994? What do you think would they have been able to pull off in the Amiga sector in that year?

By the description above they would have been in real trouble all that year so no miracle new products, but maybe they could have finished AAA and announced a an upgraded Amiga but probably not actually have launched it so it would have been a "paper launch" at best.
1995 was a tough year for a lot of competitors to Sony in the gaming biz, and PCs in the "serious market"..
~1991 was the last year Commodore still had some cash to spend but the decisions after that were just not right.

[Promilus]

AAA wouldn't make much of the difference. Any plan they had for the future required cutting some portion of backward compatibility (actually most of it). In the end it'd be non-x86 PC like SAM or Pegasos which would die out eventually due to lack of software, high hardware price (with more or less mediocre performance) and slow OS development. It'd take a Steve Jobs level of insight to find a way out from the sh..thole Commodore occupied willingly in their last years. If you read history of Commodore you'd know that the company itself was just buying off brilliant individuals and companies to suck them dry. But they were pretty bad at managing R&D teams as well. C65 is example of pretty stupid waste of resources.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by mc68060

Ok, so no AAA chipset for us then

No big loss. AGA wasn't being fully exploited anyway, so what would be the point?

But at least we'd probably have gotten a few more games if Commodore had lasted longer... so many games were announced back then but they never materialized...

Yes, quite a few more games - especially for the A1200 and CD32.

If Commodore had survived another year I am assuming they beat (or at least held off) the XOR troll and were able to sell CD32s in the US. This might have provided sufficient incentive for the production of a lot more CD32 titles.

The CD1200 might have been released, allowing A1200 owners to run CD32 titles, further expanding the market.

The CD1200-Plug in card for Amiga 1200 included the Akiko chip, and an FPGA to control Akiko, control a Memory SIMM, and processor expansion socket for a Motorola 68030....

If Commodore had had the budget, a new ASIC would have been built, with just the CD32 drive logic and corner turn memory coupled with the interface logic, which would have made room for a 68030 socket. The whole point was to show that Commodore engineering was healthy and had roadmap into the future, not just at the high end with Acutiator that Dave was working on, but also at the consumer end with taking the CD32 capabilities to the A1200. There were still rumors of interested buyers as late as Feb 1994. We were hoping that these kinds of projects would encourage a buyer.

FastRAM, hardware C2P and 68030 CPU in a 'low-end' package that any A1200 owner could upgrade to. Combine that with a year's worth of new titles that make good use of that hardware (and much better PC ports, including Doom), and you have something a buyer might be interested in.

So Commodore still goes bankrupt, but the new owners (who take over immediately - not 2 years later) have a real asset that they can run with. Next step is to add hardware 3D to the CD1200 board, and an expansion board for the CD32 that does the same (plus of course new machines with the same hardware built in). Developers flock to the enhanced CD32 platform, including Core Design who in 1994 are working on a game called Tomb Raider for the Sega Saturn, and now for the Amiga!

Imagine if the Amiga had stolen the PlayStation's thunder. Jay Miner's dream would have been realized. Amiga would be a household name. Nobody would be whining about all the things they 'got wrong from the start' (OK maybe not that last one - whining about things Commodore supposedly got wrong is in our blood!).

[grelbfarlk]

Hombre would have launched, they would have had a nicely fast RISC architecture to build in cheap and fast versions, they would have had a rich ecosystem of system friendly 3D accelerated real time rendering applications to feed the growing pool of cheap console computers and games while having a better workstation level system that exceeded the capabilities of the Video Toaster workstations of the previous generation due in no small part to the massive bandwidth increases.

[Matt_H]

Game changer. If Commodore had a healthy 1994 I think the CD32 would have given them a very strong foothold in Europe, strong enough that Commodore UK probably would have had the resources to succeed - quickly - in their management buyout following the parent company's bankruptcy. So instead of some Escom 1200s briefly rolling out in 1996 before Escom went under we might have had some AAA machines with sustained manufacturer backing. Third-party support would have held on, meaning PAL Video Toaster/Flyer systems probably would have come to dominate broadcasting in Europe. That kind of growth surely would have sustained them into the next generation for 1997 and beyond.

[Pyromania]

@Matt_H

Great alternate universe theory.

[Amigajay]

As most have said, nothing would have changed given an extra year, bar a year of extra Amiga titles like more Ocean Mega Drive ports, CD32 owners got a dozen plus CD only games, and the market itself for AGA software would have lasted slightly longer on the other end due to more AGA hardware on the market for indie publishers to have survived on.

As for hardware, the A1200 failed to deliver on the 18 months it had under Commodore, another 12 months wasn’t going to bring in more sales than the previous 12 did.

The CD32 would have bombed in the states, Commodore once again were misreading the market over there, should have chucked those units at the UK and Germany and maybe without the lawsuit we would have had those extra 12 months.