What killed off the Amiga?

[Epyx]

Ultima 6 did come out for the Amiga but here is the rub....

IBM

256 Colour
Fast..did I mention fast?

Amiga

32 Colour
Slow...as in molasses slow on a 68000 amiga

A shameful port that did not take any advantage of superior blitting on the amiga...it basically ported the CPU intense blitting routines of the IBM version. Which brings us to the other game Wing Commander...

It is also pitiful if compared to the IBM version...slow slow slow slow and again could have been soo much better.

Wolfenstein is crap by todays standards but at the time thousands upon thousands of Amiga gamers saw the drop dead gorgeous 3D (albeit pseudo 3d) 256 colour gameplay and sold their amigas. It can not be underestimated how this game (two years before doom) changed the gaming industry.

[carls]

If you have never read it before, take the time to read An employee's reflection on how CBM killed the Amiga - written some time back by Ed Graner who was shamefully underpaid by CBM:

Ah, capitalism at it's finest :-)

I hear a lot of sad things from ex-Commodore and ex-Amiga Inc. employees. Are there no unions in the US that could take care of these matters? Especially the credit-card part of the story seems totally unbelievable!

[Edwardo_T]

So there were several reasons.
* Amiga was its time far ahead
* The 'wrong' software
* hardware: 'too little too late'
* Not a standard, nor a specialised niche
* Good enginering bad sales, bad managment
* Good programmers, bad that a lot also cracked programs

It is a wonder that it still lasts at all! :-D

[CU_AMiGA]

Edwardo_T wrote:
So there were several reasons.
* Amiga was its time far ahead
* The 'wrong' software
* hardware: 'too little too late'
* Not a standard, nor a specialised niche
* Good enginering bad sales, bad managment
* Good programmers, bad that a lot also cracked programs

It is a wonder that it still lasts at all! :-D

:-) The Amiga spirit will never go away!

[Im>bE]

@ CU_AMIGA

How the hell can something alive be dead ?
??
?
?
??..................

[Karlos]

What killed off the Amiga?

I dunno about the rest of you but it was a dodgy PC PSU that killed off my first A1200 :-P

[chipper701]

2 things... Gould and Ali.

I have a baseball bat with thier names on it. :whack:

[DanDude]

1. terrible executive management of Commodore Business Machines
2. software crackers
3. virii
4. (and most importantly) MICROSOFT and pc clones!!!
:crazy:

[Argo]

I wonder where they are today....

[Cyberus]

I remember it was 1992/1993. I had an Amiga. All my mates at school had Amigas - one of whom was seriously into programming - he did his GCSE coursework in Amiga assembler, and has just finished his PhD in Computer Science at Cambridge. We got grapevine, we ran the Amiga club at school, there were even a few attempts to do some music demos. I loved my Amiga.

Now back to three friends who I used to do role-playing with back then. One of them had a PC for a few years - a hand-me-down from his Dad. I kept telling them how good the Amiga was, and I think a couple of them listened, but didn't get one. Then one of them got a PC (his family did anyway). Suddenly there was X-wing, they all loved it...a bit later he got a CD-ROM, Alone in the Dark, Sam and Max, Day of the Tentacle, Rebel Assault etc etc. Despite all my protestations about how good the Amiga was, that was it, game over....they all have PCs now.

[Amiga1200PPC]

The Amiga has never been killed off.
It was always the PC busyness part which killed companies like Commodore and Escom.

[Belial6]

Piracy and absolutly nothing to do with it.  The Amiga was dead here in the US before the CD rom was widely availible.  Piracy happened just as much on the PC as the amiga.  As a matter of fact, no system has ever been successful without piracy.  This would be due to the fact that people need a critical mass of software availible to them before they will buy hardware.

The upgradability of the A500 was the killer for me.  Particularly hard drives.  I could pay $500 dollars to add a SCSI hard drive to my Amiga, or I could spend $800 for a brand new computer with an MFM hard drive.

Yeah, yeah, I've heard it.  "SCSI is better than MFM".  Well who cares what the underlying tech is.  All that matters is the user interface.  What do I use to put stuff into the computer, and what do I get out.

[JetRacer]

From what i've heard it all boils down to:
Commodore bought the Amiga as being the ultimate video games machine which would generate some quick cash; a high risc pet project.
In that pespective, it's not hard to see why things went wrong from day one.

Other things to add to the list:

The release of the A500 in 1985 should have been followed up by some equivalent of the A1200 already in '88-89. Failure to do so meant a delay of advanced software to appear until it was too late. This may have been more significant than most people think. If the x86 hardware would suddenly halt for ten years while the PPC Macs evolved to 15-20GHz CPU speed... ...it's not the best way to attract software developers, is it?

In a sense one could even blame the success of the C64 for the death of the Amiga, since CBM thougt the Amiga would follow the previus pattern of success. One could even claim that the A1000 was released too soon, before the C64 had become outaged.

And then again, if CBM wasn't in financial troubles already after massive investments in x86 factorys then they may have allowed more frequent releases of Amiga hardware. Who knows?

Read the book: 1001 reasons why the Amiga died :-)

[JetRacer]

About piracy...

It's just outright ####! If I gave you an illegal copy of Photoshop, does it automaticly means that you otherwize spent $500 buying it, even though you are only going to touch up your wedding pictures and then forget it ever existed?

Or that the average kid that pirated $10000 worth of games would have bought them all if the modem wasn't invented yet?

Where wallets end, piracy begins. It's as simple as that.

[CU_AMiGA]

Im>bE wrote:
@ CU_AMIGA

How the hell can something alive be dead ?
??
?
?
??..................

Well, i already stated that the Amiga wasn't dead just in a pretty bad and uncertain position.

[sir_inferno]

piracy doesn't kill anything off. If anything, it promotes people. If i play a really good game that i downloaded something, i go and buy it! it's the same in the music buisness, if i download a good mp3, i go to the store and buy it on vinyl! it was the same with amiga, i think it was just bad luck and bad managment. C= went bankrupt just as they were doing brilliantly, but it was their fault as well fro becoming bakrup