Some readers may remember that I reviewed David Pleasance's worthy tome about his time at Commodore way back in June 2020. Shortly after that, he launched a Kickstarter campaign to follow up the Amiga story after the demise of Commodore in 1994. Co-written with Trevor Dickinson of A-Eon fame, this would be a definitive history of what happened next. However, it became clear that there was too much content for a single volume and an additional request was made to backers to fund a second volume. After some unexpected delays caused by the global pandemic, the first volume arrived on my door step a couple of weeks ago.
Covering the period 1995 to 2004, what Pleasance and Dickinson have achieved is to make sense of the often convoluted tale of just how screwed up the Amiga scene became after Commodore's almost inevitable implosion. Indeed, gentle reader, never has such a telling of the complete shit show that was the post-Commodore Amiga ownership been published, and we still have volume two to look forward to. Now, to be fair, the nine years covered here contain the worst of the story, or so you would think. They are the most active years, but anyone familiar with the Amiga over the last decade will know that the course of the OS and hardware has not exactly been smooth. From "white knight" investment from Escom, to the frankly desperate tale of the Gateway period and whatever the fuck the Amiga Inc thing thought it was, every nook and cranny of the Amiga's journey post Big-C to 2004 is covered here.
Reading this book brought back a lot of memories from the period. I was an avid A500 user and, by 1994, was trying to figure out how to afford an A1200. The demise of Commodore put that idea on hold and even when Escom achieved the no-mean feat of restarting the production of the A1200, the new, higher price of £399 was too much for me to afford, even if they were readily available in the new Escom shop in Stanley. Sadly, I was also too late to pick up a fire-sale machine when the company went bust.
The reason for this bon-mot is to emphasise that even in 1995/6, there was still a market for a machine like the A1200. Sure, it was dated tech and, compared to PC's of the period, vastly underpowered, but machines could still be sold. What happened after Escom demonstrated the strengths of the Amiga platform and the many, many weaknesses of those who tried to control it. Basically, the idea of a relatively cheap home computer disappeared as an almost steady stream of corporate purchasers tried to monetise the powerful and useful operating system without understanding or supporting the original user base. The same user base that, even as the years passed, maintained faith in the platform although it started to decline as the lack of direction took its toll. Look at the circulation of Amiga Format (as reported by the ABC in the UK) over the 1990's: Jan-June '92 - 161,256 copies per month. July-December '93 - 142,326 copies. July-December '95 - 60,008. Those are pretty decent numbers considering Commodore was long gone by then.
However, by the time we enter the Gateway/Amiga Inc period, circulation was down to 22,175 (July-Dec 97) and by the last issue in May 2000 (for July-Dec '99), they were selling only 11,146 copies per month. This (admittedly unscientific) observation provides evidence of the market decline even as each new owner of the Amiga fucked about with their various half-baked and under-funded plans. Talk about wasting an opportunity.
Of course, by the mid-1990's, the home computer market was transitioning to the more powerful (and expensive, although becoming more affordable) PC, and video gaming had seen the introduction of the revolutionary PlayStation and Saturn. Unless a company had really deep pockets, there was little scope for a repeat of the Amiga's early success. Hell, at that point, even Apple was struggling to survive, having had some truly bizarre and disastrous business decisions foisted upon them by execs who clearly didn't understand why their particular machine was popular. As with the Amiga and ST, the then executive management never really saw past the idea of the computers being a commodity and that led to poor choices and alienation of the users.
Anyhoo, after that diversion...
The tome itself is of high quality and the paper stock shows off the contemporary photographs, illustrations and screenshots well. As for research, the two author's have tried to speak to as many of the people involved in this period as they could. Some declined to comment but overall, there is a sense of fairness about the coverage and nobody has been subject to a "hit-job", at least as far as I can tell.
The book takes a chronological view of the period but, as is unavoidable with such a twisted and winding story, there are sections that repeat information, just to give context to the next stage. This makes sense and is really only limited to the odd paragraph here and there. Other than that, I found no issues with either the style or tone of the prose. Given that it only takes the story up to 2004, I am really looking forward to the second volume when it is released and I highly recommend this first volume. If there is only one take away from this story, it's that executive management really did not have a clue about users. That outlook did for Atari, it did for Commodore (and every successor company covered in this tome) and nearly did for Apple. Anyway, there you have From Vultures to Vampires Volume One, a well written and comprehensive history of the first nine years of the Amiga post-Commodore.
You can order a copy of volume one directly from David Pleasance here, as well as pre-order volume two. Copies can also be ordered from Amazon and, in the UK, WH Smith.
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