Fallout

Initially everyone thought the death of Commodore wouldn't have much of an impact on the Amiga itself - the hope was that another company would come in and rescue the platform. Unfortunately, Commodore's finances were in a big mess and the liquidators took over a year to sort everything out before the Amiga and its assets were sold at an auction in New York.

Dell, IBM and a management buyout team attended but finally the Amiga was bought by a middle ranking German PC manufacturer - Escom. Initially they promised much - continued support and develop the platform but in the end the delivered little or nothing in fact.

More and more of the development teams that had been made great by the platform were abandoning it - you can hardly blame them, it was like Sony had gone belly up and your local Video repair man had come in, bought the rights to the PlayStation and said "yeah, I'll continue to support the platform guys!".

The situation grew worse, Escom employed a lot of dodgy former Commodore employees (good job guys - thanks a lot) and coupled with its over ambition expansion into European high streets the company were saying "goodnight" just a year down the line. This lead to another period of uncertainty in which even stalwarts like Sensible Software and Team17 pulled out of the Amiga market.

In this period several companies tried unsuccessfully to buy the Amiga, including US technology firm Viscorp. Eventually the rights were sold to Gateway - that big PC company with the cow logo. Gateway promised a new OS and hardware and for a while it looked as if it was going to happen - however, after changes in management at Gateway things changed.

The new bosses weren't really interested in the platform and while the Amiga team were busy developing their new plans they were unaware that nothing was ever going to come of them. Another period of limbo occurred where no one was really sure what was going on - Amiga were promising the world but as usual nothing every happened. Throughout this period the Amiga market continued to decline and that eventually led to the closure in late 1998 of CU Amiga Magazine and more recently Amiga Format - the world's most popular Amiga Magazines. Without them the Amiga has really disappeared, the community that was present through them is now only available over the Internet which isn't the same really.

Finally, the management at Amiga Inc. bought the company from Gateway and again the platform finds itself in the position of developing a new OS and hardware.

[This concludes the history of Amiga section of the series. Starting Saturday we will look at a couple of the Amiga's greatest games and also at another aspect of the platform. Then sometime next week we'll bring you up to speed regarding the Amiga's progress over the last year or so.]

//agi. [agi@fsmail.net]