Entry Level Amigans (cont'd)
By Sven Harvey

Its a phenomenon that really started in the UK, thanks to Sir Clive Sinclair and WH Smiths more than any other. Right at the beginning of the 1980s the UK was beginning its love affair with the micro computer more accurately its love affair with the home micro. It started with Sinclair's ZX80 and ZX81, which along with their main successors the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC started the whole computer hobbyist movement (it helped that the ZX80 originally shipped in kit form!)

During the 1980s the main computing formats in the UK for the home market were the Spectrum, C64/C128 and CPCs, with a similar state in the computer using parts of Europe. In the USA following the success of the Atari 8-Bits and the C64, the main format became Nintendos NES as the Atari ST started to get a foothold in the UK market.

Christmas 1989. A major change in the UK market. The Amiga 500 had been making great strides in catching up with the Atari 520STFM, but thanks to a pack put together by a certain Mr. Pleasance the 1990s started with the Amiga being the dominant format in home computing in the UK and quickly in Europe (especially Germany!). The pack was of course the legendary Batman pack (an A500 bundled with Batman the Movie, New Zealand Story, FA-18 Interceptor and Deluxe Paint 2) and sold more units in the UK during the Christmas 1989 period than any other model of computer or games console up to that point or since (though admittedly that's due to Sony not actually ever managing to provide enough stock to the UK of the Playstation during Christmas).

The Amiga consolidated its position over the following years weathering the storms over the A500+ and A600 partially thanks to the UK only Amiga 1500 PHC (personal home computer) bundle at £999 compared with similar PCs at £1500-2000 at the time. The introduction of the A1200 for Christmas 1992 finally destroyed the remaining market share not held by Commodore in the home computing market, as Atari's Falcon was pronounced DOA thanks to the base 1MB configuration resulting in the machine having its main features deactivated!

The A1200 Desktop Dynamite pack did almost as well during the 1993 Christmas period as the A500 Batman pack had done in 1989 and with the Amiga having a major stranglehold on the market even in the face of the onslaught from the Sega Megadrive (Genesis) and Nintendo's SNES going into 1994 whilst the CD32 had over half of the fledgling CD-ROM market. Nothing seemed to be able to stop Commodore UK and Commodore Europe. Well except maybe the bankruptcy of Commodore International in April of 1994. Damn.

Since then, the ill-advised and overpriced re-release of the base A1200 by Amiga Technologies/Escom in 1996 notwithstanding, the UK software market has lost its way. The alleged broken promises from VisCorp under the leadership of Bill Buck also put an end to the real multimedia developers in the UK with the closure of Optonica and Almathera (both companies reportedly put a great deal of time and resources into developing software and product for VisCorp for which they were never paid).