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History
Commodore was founded in Toronto, Canada, in 1954 as the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company. The company then shifted into producing electronic calculators in the 1960s, and finally computers in the late 1970s. In 1982, it released its famous Commodore 64, which would carry the brand for a decade. In 1984, Commodore acquired Amiga, one of its fiercer competitors, which was in financial trouble at the time. With the acquisition of Amiga, Commodore was well positioned to dominate the computer video game market. But with the advent of the Nintendo Famicom and the Sega Mark III, Commodore started to lose customers, especially in North America, where IBM PC compatibles were taking the lead while the gaming community moved to consoles.
In December 1990, Commodore released the Commodore 64 Games System, a system based on its Commodore 64, which had been released eight years earlier. The system was a commercial failure. A few months later, Commodore released the CDTV, a home multimedia entertainment and video game console, this time based on the very popular Amiga 500 (released in 1987). The system was another fiasco for Commodore, which needed a win to stay afloat. Commodore decided to try the same thing one more time and create a console based on one of its computers. This time, it went with the Amiga 1200, which had just been released (October 1992).
Release
Released in Europe on September 16, 1993, the Amiga CD32 had a very successful launch. Because it was built on Amiga hardware, all CDTV games were compatible with the Amiga CD32. It also meant that it was very easy for publishers to port Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200 games to the CD32. By Christmas 1993, the Amiga CD32 was the best-selling CD-based console in the UK, accounting for 38% of all sales.
In 1994, Commodore decided to expand the Amiga CD32’s territories to the U.S., Canada and Australia, in either late February or early March. But at the same time, Commodore lost a patent infringement case against Cadtrak over its use of their XOR patent (U.S. Patent 4,197,590). Commodore was ordered to pay $10 million in royalties to Cadtrak. To enforce prompt payment of the $10 million, a federal judge ordered an injunction against Commodore, preventing it from importing anything into the United States. The problem was that Commodore was strapped for cash. It had bet everything on the success of the Amiga CD32 and, while it had a full inventory of consoles ready to be shipped to the U.S. in the Philippines (where the factory was located), it couldn’t import them.
Demise
Although the console was very powerful for its time, most of the games were rushed ports of Amiga 500 games that didn’t look as impressive as they could have. With the upcoming releases of the Saturn and the PlayStation, international sales of the CD32 started to decline. The company had to sell over 300,000 units to avoid bankruptcy, but it had sold only around 100,000 in Europe and a few thousand more in Canada. On April 29, 1994, Commodore declared bankruptcy. The factory in the Philippines kept the units (NTSC units that were waiting to be sold in the U.S. and Canada) until the debts owed to the owners of the facility were settled. These models found their way back to the U.S. through discount and mail-order stores.
Games
By the time the console died, the Amiga CD32 had an impressive library of 175+ titles, excluding shareware.
Ad for the Amiga CD32