Kotick wanted Commodore console

Speaking of his regrets in a fascinating speech at last week’s DICE summit, Activision boss Bobby Kotick has admitted that he rues missing out on the chance to buy Amiga during the late 1980s.

A keyboard-less Amiga, he believed, could have triumphed in the console war of the time.

It would have blown away the 8-bt NES of the time,” Kotick confessed. He got as far as raising finance and cementing commercial partnerships but was unable to secure a deal. Commodore’s management at the time wanted to be in the computer business.

They wanted to compete with Sun Microsystems,” Kotick added.

Commodore did in fact release a device very much like Kotick describes. In 1993 the Amiga CD32, 32-bit CD-based machine was designed around the Amiga 1200’s architecture, hit UK retail.

Sadly, a legal dispute prevented Commodore shipping its vast stockpiles of hardware to the US market. In the end Commodore hit bankruptcy before it was able to try and break the US market, leading to the company’s demise.

To read MCV’s more detailed breakdown of the highlights of Koticks’s speech, click here.