Amiga World

~ the obit ~

IDG had the premiere issue printed and out before the Amiga was on sale, which is either confidence or a sign of how much money was riding on the machine. Volume 1 number 1 is dated september and october 1985, 106 pages at $3.95, with Guy Wright editing and a first look at a computer almost nobody had touched. The first several issues went out to an audience who could read about the hardware and not buy it.

Amiga World was spun out of RUN, IDG's Commodore 64 magazine, and it inherited that title's job: be the single American publication that takes this platform seriously. For ten years it did exactly that. Andy Warhol was on the cover of issue three in january 1986, having been handed an Amiga at the launch event and painted Debbie Harry on it in front of an audience. That is the kind of thing the magazine had to keep finding, because the machine's actual argument was always that it could do video and graphics work that cost ten times as much anywhere else.

The distance here is a distribution problem rather than a taste one. An IDG magazine printed in New Hampshire did not reach a Turkish newsstand, and imported American computer titles were not something you found at the corner in Ankara. The Amiga itself did travel; the paper that explained it did not, or at least not to me. By the time I was online at all the whole thing was over, and Amiga World's last issue was already three years in the past.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The Amiga was a European machine in the end. In Britain and Germany the A500 was in bedrooms by the hundred thousand and the magazine racks held four or five competing Amiga titles, some with cover disks. In the United States the machine went to a smaller and stranger population, mostly video and broadcast graphics people who had seen a Video Toaster and understood what it meant that a $2,000 computer could do what a whole edit suite did.

Amiga World wrote for that American audience, which meant a lot of pages about DeluxePaint and 3D rendering and video work, and fewer about games than the British magazines ran. It was a trade paper wearing an enthusiast magazine's clothes, and for most of a decade it was the only one of its kind in the country.

~ the day it died ~

Commodore International went into liquidation on 29 april 1994 with the Amiga still selling and nobody willing to keep making it. Escom bought the assets a year later, then went bankrupt itself. Gateway bought them after that and did nothing with them. In the middle of that, a magazine whose entire subject was one computer had no manufacturer left to cover and an advertising base that was folding one company at a time.

It lasted about twelve months past the liquidation and closed with the april 1995 issue, volume 11 number 4. The British titles hung on longer, which fits how the machine sold. What Amiga World left is a ten year paper record of a platform that lost, written the whole way through by people who did not think it was going to.

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