Amiga CD32: Commodore’s last stand

On September 17, 1993, just seven and a half months before it went bankrupt, Commodore trotted out one last new product: the Amiga CD32. It was a 32-bit game console based on the Amiga 1200. Was this yet another case of Commodore ineptitude, or did Commodore actually have a good idea this time that failed for other reasons?

Previous Commodore game consoles

Commodore sold game consoles before the CD32, and no, that’s not me making the common social media hot take that the C-64 was a game console with a keyboard.

In the 1976 time frame, Commodore sold Pong clones. Given the general availability of pong-on-a-chip ICs, this was a crowded market. Most of the knockoffs added a few additional ball-and-paddle games to play for more variety than the original, but the arrival of cartridge-based consoles like the Fairchild Channel F in late 1976 sunk demand for them very quickly.

Commodore was ready to try again in 1982 with aconsole it called the MAX machine or Unimax. It used the same chipset as the C-64, but had a membrane keyboard a la the Magnavox Odyssey 2, and much less RAM. It never really got a chance to succeed though. Commodore only released it in Japan and only in limited quantities. High demand for the C-64 meant it didn’t make sense to produce MAX machines; Commodore needed those chips for C-64s instead.

The later C-64GS was just a C-64 motherboard in a game console case. It flopped, largely due to a lack of games on cartridge.

The CDTV was an Amiga 500 in a case that looked like a piece of hi-fi equipment with a CD-ROM drive. It couldn’t decide if it was trying to be a living room PC or a game console.

How the Amiga CD32 was different

The Amiga CD32 didn’t try to be anything other than a game console. Its design resembled a Sega Genesis. It wasn’t exactly an Amiga 1200 in a different case. But I don’t think it’s worth belaboring the differences. If you want to read 1,000 words about the differences between a CD32 and Amiga 1200, you can find that elsewhere. The CD32 was a game console intended to play Amiga games on CD.

What was the point? As a computer, the Amiga was a mild disappointment. It sold 5 million units when Commodore was trying to sell 12 million like it had with the C-64. It didn’t have anywhere near as many titles available for it as the C64 had. But it had more games available for it than the average game console. Respinning the Amiga technology as a game console seemed like a risk worth taking. I doubt anyone expected it to outsell Sega or Nintendo. But if they could sell a million units a year, they could succeed while failing. This was a company that had once sold 3 million computers a year, but by 1993, they were selling more like a million a year. Selling a million consoles a year would be a failure for Sega, but to Commodore, it sounded pretty good. It would basically double their sales.

Why the Amiga CD32 was doomed

In a better world where Commodore survived past April 1994, I am not convinced the CD32 would have sold 1,000,000 units a year for very long. It had four problems.

The first was that it was expensive. Commodore priced it at $399. It was going to be competing with a Sony PlayStation at $250. The second was the lack of a franchise title. Sega had Sonic. Nintendo had Mario and Zelda. Amiga had a Sonic knockoff called Zool, and the Zool games weren’t going to sell the console. The third problem was the lack of 3D acceleration. The Amiga could do 2D games really well, but the future was 3D and the CD32 wasn’t ready to compete with the Playstation’s 3D abilities.

And probably the biggest problem was the business model. Commodore was going to run into the same problems 3DO did. By the 1990s, Sega, Nintendo, and Sony had figured out game consoles are a loss leader. You sell the console at a loss and make up the difference by selling high-markup games for several years to come. All Amiga titles were third-party titles, and Commodore wasn’t collecting royalties.

With no royalties collected, the CD32 games could be cheaper than other console games. But Emerson tried that model with its Emerson Arcadia a decade earlier.

Why you may have never seen or heard of the Amiga CD32

Commodore did manage to sell around 125,000 units, and that accounted for an impressive 38% of CD-ROM drives sold in Europe in 1993. Between its large library of titles and the existing base of Amiga owners who liked the idea of playing Amiga games on the living room TV, the CD32 could have sold more units if Commodore had them.

But let’s talk about the elephant in the room. If you’re in the USA like me, you probably don’t remember ever seeing one, even if you saw other obscure consoles like the Turbografx-16 and Atari Jaguar. That’s because Commodore produced a quantity of units to sell in the USA, but a patent lawsuit kept Commodore from releasing it here. Commodore didn’t have the money to pay the royalty and they didn’t have the money to pay the contract manufacturer, so those CD32s sat in the Philippines until after Christmas 1993. Commodore was able to sell the CD32 in Canada and a few units leaked across the Canadian border into the USA, but you never saw one in a big-box store.

What Commodore should have done instead of the Amiga CD32

In retrospect, Commodore would have been better off using the chips that went into the CD32 to produce more Amiga 1200s. The Amiga 1200 wasn’t selling badly and didn’t have the anchor of a $10 million patent royalty attached to it. And the money that went into developing and launching the new product could have gone toward producing almost anything else. Commodore’s disastrous Q4 of 1993 wasn’t due to lack of demand, it was due to not having inventory to sell.

There’s a saying in baseball that goes, “Don’t try to hit a ten-run home run.” I think the CD32 was a reasonable idea. Maybe even a good idea, but too flawed to be a great idea. I also think it was a case of Commodore trying to hit a ten-run home run, when a four-run home run is the maximum possible.

But I do have to give Commodore credit for trying. They didn’t roll over and play dead at the end. They stepped up to the plate and took a swing. And the CD32 wasn’t a swing and a miss, but it wasn’t the big hit they needed to stay in the game either.

And this is Commodore, after all. The company was doomed so effectively anything they would have done differently just would have delayed the inevitable by a quarter or two. But it’s still fun to speculate on what might have been. At least I think so.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.