This week Mike Bouma (Slashdot reader #85,252) looked back nearly 30 years to the glory days of the world’s first true 32-bit CD based home console — Commodore’s Amiga32. In the final three months of 1993, the company had sold 100,000 in just three months in Europe, outselling Sega four to one, “and claiming 38% market share of all CD ROM drives sold in the U.K. (according to the Gallup Weekly Report).”
But the next year all over, Mike Bouma writes, summarizing reports from both Amiga Report and Wikipedia:
Operations in Germany and the United Kingdom were still profitable, but Commodore was not able to meet demand for new units because of component supply problems — and could not release the (already made) Amiga CD32 stock in the United States due to a legal patent issue!
Commodore declared bankruptcy on April 29, 1994, causing the CD32 to be discontinued only eight months after its debut.
This look back was apparently inspired by a report from retro gaming vlogger Lady Decade about what then happened to the Amiga CD32 after Commodore’s demise — and about the system that would’ve been its successor: the lost Amiga64.
Earlier this week Mike shared the news that attempts to make a ‘Doom’ clone for the Amiga 500 have already led to a demo map (for both Amiga 500s with one megabyte of RAM and Atari STs with two megabytes of RAM).
And for more vintage retro-gaming goodness, Mike adds that “In my opinion the most impressive game released for the system was Super Stardust by Bloodhouse, published by Team17.”
It was the sequel to Stardust for the Amiga 500 and Atari STE. Bloodhouse merged with Terramarque (famous for their impressive Amiga 500 game Elfmania) to form Housemarque, which is still making games as of today.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.