It’s hard to convey the significance of the Magic Pack’s software bundle without looking at today’s PC package deals. The best way to describe it would be to buy an off-the-shelf PC deal and get full versions of Microsoft Office Professional, PhotoShop, and a selection of games included in the price. Let’s face it… it’s just not going to happen! The Magic Pack really was that good.
However, despite the incredible strength of the Magic Pack it wasn’t to be the Amiga’s saviour. It was plagued with problems.
Despite being – on paper at least – probably the best package that the Amiga had seen since it’s launch, it wasn’t enough to give the Amiga the sales boost it needed following the turbulent times it had suffered in recent years and sadly, the Magic Pack never really made it out of the starting blocks.
In all honesty, it was released far too long after the original A1200. It came out at a time when the market needed a brand new Amiga with a quantum leap in technology at the heart of the platform. Add to this the woes of facing the launch of the PlayStation. Everyone was talking about Sony’s wonder console and games like WipeEout, arcade perfect ports like Ridge Racer – we had hardware the likes of which we had never seen before and here was Amiga Technologies offering us a system that – certainly in gaming terms – couldn’t even get out of the starting blocks in comparison.
There was no denying that many had issues over the increased price of the A1200 range – higher than before Escom came onto the scene. Add to that the technological problems encountered with the new machine and it was never going to have a chance of being a large scale commercial success.
On a technical level, one of the main problems that occurred with the new A1200 was with the internal floppy drive. When production moved to Scotland, Amiga Technologies encountered issues sourcing Amiga-specific disk drives (which enabled the Amiga to take advantage of higher capacity storage once disks were formatted – 880k compared with 720k on the PC / Atari ST – amongst other things). This lead to Amiga using PC drives and modifying them for the A1200 but it wasn’t an ideal solution as many users quickly found out…
A number of games that used non-standard disk formats (many for copy protection) including the Doom-inspired Fears, refused to load on the new A1200. While it didn’t affect every game (or “scene” demo), it affected a large number of titles to the extent that it left a large number of new Amiga owners rather irate.
It didn’t help matters further that there was still no CD-ROM drive in the Amiga as standard. While the CD32 hadn’t been the greatest success story ever, it did prompt developers to explore the idea of releasing games on CD for the Amiga. With the CD32 being little more than a CD-based A1200, it would have been a perfect time for the new A1200 to have been re-released with an integral CD-ROM drive. With the growing number of titles on the market, it would have given users a fantastic incentive to upgrade to the new A1200 to take that next step towards CD-ROM gaming… and at the same time it would have dealt a deadly blow to the Amiga’s growing piracy problem.
Another thing that no doubt contributed to the failure of the Magic Pack was the marketing or more accurately the lack of it. While the Amiga was owned by a large company in the shape of Escom, Amiga Technologies had no access to Escom’s marketing budget. Very little in-store promotion took place in Escom’s own stores (in the few that did stock the machines) and there simply wasn’t enough mainstream press advertising to tell people to buy the machine. Too much effort was focused on the existing Amiga user base, preaching to the converted.
It was clear that looking back now, Escom’s primary goal was to expand their business into the UK and use the Commodore name for their PCs. Once acquiring Commodore, they proceeded to open several hundred Escom PC stores throughout the UK. While the majority of consumers in the UK had no brand awareness of Escom, they had heard of Commodore so the brand was used on Escom’s PC range to help market them in their stores. Where this could have been an ideal opportunity to place the Amiga at retail throughout the UK, this simply didn’t take place. Who knows how different things may have been had Amigas been on display and showcased properly in every store across the country?
It was sad to see the Amiga’s retail life come to an end in this way. We had a stunning package marred by hardware problems and a marketing fiasco behind it. Despite a lack of advancement on a technological level, at least the Amiga went out giving users a superb package to remember.
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