675 Ajax Avenue, Slough, SL1
Company name COMMODORE BUSINESS MACHINES (U.K.) LIMITED
Company number 00956774
Incorporated on 24 Jun 1969
Dissolved on 05 Dec 2000
Registered office address at dissolution Not available
Download Report Not available
446 Bath Road is now someone's house. A 1920's-ish pebble-dashed semi. Sorry. That's boccolks. I don't know how but I was looking at completely the wrong side of Bath Road. 446 Bath Road is, or rather was, probably here. It's gone now, in fact there is no 446 Bath Road anymore which might account for some of the problems I had finding it. The address is also listed at a site called calcuseum, which seems to be a museum site for old calculators; this was another line of Commodores' business at the time.
360, Euston Road, London
It doesn't quite look like that. The perspective got a little warped because I put my camera into panoramic mode to fit in the building and the Euston Road traffic doesn't normally look like a parade of crushed transformers, but apart from that the camera never lies. Turn your back on Euston Station and walk away from it (the best thing you can do with Euston Station) towards Regent Park. Euston Road is a busy road lined with modern glass buildings. It looks more like mini-Manhattan than London.
Before moving on. Here's some speculation. Spectrum Games (who later became Ocean) were advertising a game called Monster Muncher from May to September 1983. It's clearly a Pac-Man clone. "Chomp the apples in the maze before the monsters eat you - if you can swallow the boosters you might even eat them!" The Vic-20 version of the game was never released, according to Games That Weren't, the Spectrum version was but is dropped from adverts once Spectrum Games rebrands as Ocean. Was Spectrum/Ocean put off from releasing a Vic-20 Pac-Man clone by coverage of Atari's legal action against Commodore.
COMMODORE BUSINESS MACHINES... is to build a new £20m home computer factory in Corby, Northamptonshire. It is expected to create 300 new jobs by the end of next year...
It is huge. Too huge to fit into a single photograph. The ex-Commodore factory proved disappointingly resistant to getting any sort of decent angle on the building. I also had trouble locating the place because the address 1 Hunters Way no longer exists. On one side of Hunters Way is a cleared site and on the other sits a corrugated-walled warehouse (which looks remarkably like old photos of the Commodore factory) which houses a company called Advanced Supply Chain Group, address Brakey Road. Which one could it be? I ruled out the cleared site because Streetview showed it used to be the site of a factory called Roquette, and the old images suggested it was an extensive food processing site. I found an old NORTHAMPTONSHIRE TELEGRAPH story about the closure of the Roquette factory which confirmed food processing had taken place there since 1983. The old Commodore factory had to be the building on the other side of the road. The one that really looked like old photographs of the Commodore factory. But how had the address changed? Again Streetview gave me a clue, an old T-junction in the pavement marks where the entrance to the Commodore factory used to be before, at some point in the last 35 years, the entrance shifted to Brakey Road at the back.
I ended up taking a couple of pictures to try and indicate the scale of the site. It really is big. The one above is the Brakey Road end. Annoyingly I couldn't get a good picture from Hunters Way side because it's well screened from the road by trees and someone was doing roadworks. There was a set of temporary traffic lights right where the T-junction sits. There are a few pictures of the Commodore factory in all its glory but I think all the ones of the Commodore sign are taken on the other side of the building. It makes more sense for it to face out onto Steel Road, the main road past the factory, which is now also screened off by trees.
COMMODORE USER ran a bullish interview with Howard Stanworth, general manager of Commodore UK (February 1985 page 70). The Corby factory was working "absolutely flat out," sixteen hours a day, seven days a week to supply home computers to Europe. The new Commodore 16 "made a remarkably spirited entry into the market," "the Vic is still in production here but we're producing more for the world market," of the new Commodore /Plus 4 he said, "our expectations of demand for the machine have been fulfilled." The Commodore 64 was selling well and as ZZAP!64 issue one noted the company had recently presented the Prime Minister herself with two C64s to mark the one and two millionth machine made at Corby. It all sounded great. The problem was that, as with Sinclair and Acorn, 1985 wouldn't be a good year for anyone. Except possibly Amstrad.
The Switchback is a small complex of red-brick office buildings about one and a half miles outside Maidenhead town centre. It looks a lot like the various two story red-brick buildings Bullfrog occupied on the Surrey Research Park and I'd be willing to bet they were both built around the same mid-eighties date. Commodore House is a little vague as an address. Fortunately for me COMMODORE COMPUTING INTERNATIONAL went one better in their June 1987 issue and gave the full address as Unit 4. The whole estate is on a fairly gentle hill and, as you can see, I had to lurk behind a wall to take a picture. This was a Sunday. It's a good job no one was at work, I'd have looked like a right weirdo.
The Batman pack was advertised on television alongside the more boring sounding Class of the 90's pack and you can watch the Stephen Fry voiced commercial over at Youtube. The Batman pack stayed on sale from October 1989 to September 1990. Commodore also experimented with the Amiga hardware to offer the CDTV a combined multimedia entertainment centre and game console. The UK launch came in November 1991 at the World of Commodore show but the unit wasn't a success. Wikipedia reports it selling around 29,000 units in the UK at £499. This was followed in 1993 by the Amiga CD32. The Amiga in pog console form. The machine sold well in Europe, Wikipedia quotes 100,000 units, but sales were discontinued in April 1994 after Commodore International inconveniently went bankrupt.
Company number 00956774
Incorporated on 24 Jun 1969
Dissolved on 05 Dec 2000
Registered office address at dissolution Not available
Download Report Not available
Six facts and two of those are "Not available". This is going to get worse before it gets better.
Why do Commodore? Well, I've already covered Amstrad, Sinclair, and Enterprise. It's time to do the lesser known systems. Commodore UK were founded in 1969, a month before Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I'm obviously not going to start from then, let's go from the UK launch of the Commodore PET. Issue one of PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD (April 1978 page 57) includes an article in which John Coll gets frustrated:
C.B.M. P.E.T. 2001. from Commodore Business Machines... I have tried very hard to obtain information from them without any success. This seems to me to be very bad public relations since they have publicly displayed the machine (for example in London in May 1977) on more than one occasion. To create an interest which they then totally fail to support is not a good sign for the future.
...
The price of the machine is expected to be about £600 and it is to be released 'sometime during 1978' probably very early in 1978. There is a dearth of software for the 6502 and Commodore will be under real pressure to produce a good range. Apparently they intend to produce programs for such things as video games and inventory control. Clearly the P.E.T. 2001 will have an enormous impact when it is released.
Fortunately John Coll is able to give us an address.
446 Bath Road, Slough, Berks
Two months before John Coll's grumpy comment, the Commodore marketing department scored a win by getting a story in THE BRACKNELL TIMES (23 February 1978) "AND now for the housewife who has everything -a computer in the kitchen!" It's one of those coo-er-gosh isn't the future going to be wizard articles. The Commodore PET will apparently teach me Trigonometry (more than my maths teacher could), switch on the electric blanket half an hour before bed, or tell me if I can afford a new dress this month. "In a few years time computers like these could be as ubiquitous as pocket calculators are today." It's the kind of sentence you can imagine Judith Hann dropping on Tomorrow's World. The article also gives a few clues about how Commodore operated at the time. Their head office was in Slough, Bath Road presumably, and they made calculators at a factory in Teeside. The PET was imported from Braunschweig, West Germany where Commodore had a factory .
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| PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD August 1978 page 11 |
By August 1978 PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD was reporting:
In answer to the growing demand for Commodore's highly successful £695 PET personal computer. Commodore Systems Division has set up a carefully selected network of some 25 authorised PET dealers.
Kit Spencer, managing director of Commodore UK, told PCW:
Our recently opened Personal Computer Centre at 360, Euston Road, London, will continue to function as Commodore Systems Division's headquarters, accommodating demonstration, applications, sales and service centre.
I don't think Commodore as a whole moved from Slough to Euston Road, just the Commodore Systems division. The article has a picture showing how it looked in 1978. Let's go and see what 360 Euston Road looks like today.
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| December 2023 |
It doesn't quite look like that. The perspective got a little warped because I put my camera into panoramic mode to fit in the building and the Euston Road traffic doesn't normally look like a parade of crushed transformers, but apart from that the camera never lies. Turn your back on Euston Station and walk away from it (the best thing you can do with Euston Station) towards Regent Park. Euston Road is a busy road lined with modern glass buildings. It looks more like mini-Manhattan than London.
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| Thames Television |
Opposite Warren Street tube station is Euston Tower and a modern development clustered around an open space called Triton Square. This is where the Thames Television studios used to stand. Just along from there is number 338 and then 350 Euston Road. Number 350 runs all the way to the junction with Osnaburgh Street and covers the site where 360 used to stand. The Thames Television connection worked in my favour because TV companies loved to turn the camera on themselves and there's some beautiful archive footage of Euston Road. I grabbed the still on the right from the Thames Television Youtube channel. The footage is dated 1973 and the building which includes 360 Euston Road can be seen at the bottom left of the picture.
818 Leigh Road, Slough,
A site called commodore.ca holds the brochure for the UK's first Commodore PET show; dated 1980. (One of the companies attending was the very veteran software house Audiogenic). The brochure shows that Commodore has moved north of Bath Road onto the Slough Trading Estate. A lot of the trading estate, including 818 Leigh Road, has gone. There's a whole ghost estate archived in the 2008 images. It's eerie because Streetview has a very patchwork view of the area. When a 2008 image is not available Steetview jumps to a later year and moving around causes new roads to open and close, and buildings to appear and disappear; it's like trying to drive round Brigadoon. A search for 818 Leigh Road drops the little red dot over 816, a business called Jardine Land Rover Slough. Looking at the same address in 2008 shows 816 next to an already demolished and cleared site. Was that 818 Leigh Road? Maybe.
The PET was a terrific success. Kit Spencer was interviewed in issue one of YOUR COMPUTER (June/July 1981 page 20) where the magazine reported 45,000 units sold in the UK. The point of the interview was to introduce the next generation, the Commodore VIC-20 described as "a full-colour personal computer priced at less than £200." This was a big deal. The same issue of YOUR COMPUTER carries adverts for the PET at prices from £415 for the basic model (£1500 today) to £895 for the PET 8032 (£3200 now). The VIC-20 was solidly aimed at potential buyers of Sinclair's low cost ZX81 or the slightly more sophisticated Acorn Atom. YOUR COMPUTER's verdict (August/September 1981 page 14):
For anyone considering buying a computer, whether to help them learn about computing or to play computer games, the Vic must be one of their first choices of machine.
Commodore closed their Euston Road centre around the same time. A PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD advert from August 1981 shows that 360 Euston Road had changed hands and was now run by Sumlock Bondian.
675 Ajax Avenue, Slough, SL1
Tim Chaney (later of US Gold and Virgin Interactive Entertainment) joined Commodore early in 1982 and quickly picked up the preferred business methods of Jack Tramiel, founder and head of Commodore International. When Tramiel died in 2012, Tim Chaney wrote an obituary for mcvuk.com in which he listed some of Jack's sales commandments: "Business is War; You don’t have Competitors, only Enemies; Treat every Penny as if it was your own." He also gave a charming anecdote to THE STORY OF US GOLD, page 35:
‘I stiffed this shop in Greenford, and the guy couldn’t pay his bills and Commodore were going after him to close him down. I remember saying to my boss Paul Welch, I put six grand’s worth of stuff in the shop, he was a believer but it hasn’t worked for him, we need him. We need to show some good will. And Paul said, Tim, when I need goodwill I’ll fucking pay for it. And that was the mentality of Commodore. It was a really good time and I was promoted four times before I left late in 1983 to join Camputers.’
There's heartwarming. Commodore had moved again by April 1982 when the first issue of COMMODORE COMPUTING INTERNATIONAL (April/May 1982 page 9) gave their address at 675 Ajax Avenue. It's long gone but unlike the Leigh Road address it's possible to work out where the building was.
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| March 2023 |
These days it's a data centre operated by a company called Gyron. Firebird nerds will understand why I find this a funny coincidence. It's another address which was gone by 2008 but if you look at Burnham Garage Ltd, on the left in that older picture, you can get an idea of how it must have looked. There's also some lovely film of the estate on Youtube, again courtesy of Thames News. One advantage of Commodore International's ubiquity on the internet, I'm much more likely to turn up unique oddities like this profile of Gail Wellington, Head of Software Operations for Commodore UK. The profile gives a little insight into the Commodore offices:
It was a building at 675 Ajax Avenue that was primarily intended to be used as warehouse space with a small, two story section of office space located at the right and front sides of the building. Upon taking occupancy of the building, Commodore’s solution to the lack of office space was to section off about a third of the warehouse space and carpet it. This provided for a large open space in the building with the mail order catalogue group located at one end and the software team at the other. There were no walls, partitions or cubicles of any kind.
April 23rd 1982 saw Sinclair unveil the new ZX Spectrum. POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY got the first review (6 May 1982 page 10) and was quick to compare this new computer to the VIC-20:
The price of the basic unit is a remarkable £125. This will surely eat its way into the market being slowly established by the VIC and others, and since expansion to 48K costs only £60 more, you can start with the 16K version and end up with a 48K machine tor only £185. There is a 48K version of the Spectrum available at a cost of £175: cheaper than a 3.5K VIC!
Coincidentally the same issue ran a news story about Commodore UK's proposed additions to the VIC range:
The Vic-10 has an anticipated selling price of £100 and an expected launch date of September this year... The Vic-30 is essentially a 'big brother' to the other machine... Delivery is scheduled to commence in January of 1983, and the estimated retail price will be £250.
The following week PCW was reporting:
Confusion over Commodore Counter-attack
Speculation is mounting about how Commodore will react to the launch of the ZX Spectrum. The first story we heard from a Commodore mole was that the newly announced Ultimax/Vic-10 computer was to be abandoned and that the price of the new Vic-30 would be reduced to £125 to match that of the Spectrum... One major Commodore dealer claims that he has been assured by Commodore that the Ultimax/Vic-10 will be kepi alive and that the price of the Vic-30 will only he reduced to £160.
Ultimately neither computer would appear. Commodore UK decided to go all in with the Commodore 64 which would start to appear in UK shops by early 1983. I can recommend this video by 8-Bit Show and Tell if you want to know more about the odd half life of the VIC-10 and VIC-30.
Commodore supported the PET with a range of games and software. It was only natural they'd do the same for the VIC-20. One of the games they released was Jelly Monsters. Some background, Atari held the official licence from Namco to release Pac-Man in the US and Europe. HAL Laboratory held the rights to release home computer versions in Japan. Commodore International licenced the HAL Laboratory VIC-20 version of Pac-Man, renamed it Jelly Monsters, and released it across Atari's licenced territory. Why did Commodore do this? Consider the circumstances and filter the following points through Commodores' philosophy that business is the continuation of war by other means.
1. Pac-Man was still insanely popular in 1982.
2. The HAL Laboratory version of Pac-Man was really good.
3. Atari was in no hurry to convert Pac-Man to rival computers.
4. The Atari version of Pac-Man was terrible.
5. Copyright protection for the ideas and concepts of computer games could at best be described as extremely unclear.
Commodore basically did the 1982 equivalent of filing off the serial numbers. They renamed the game and gave it a different (terrifying) cover and chanced their arm that this would be enough to claim they were not copying Pac-Man if they ended up in court. Atari at the time was engaged in an endless round of legal wack-a-mole over Pac-Man clones and seemed to lose as often as they won. Atari failed to get an injunction to stop the sale of On-Line Systems' Jawbreaker. They won on appeal against Philips and their game K.C. Munchkin! It's possible to see why Commodore thought they had a chance
Jelly Monsters got a UK release around late-spring 1982. It's reviewed in issue 8 of COMPUTER & VIDEOGAMES (June 1982 page 21). Unfortunately for Commodore, Atari Games International (UK) Inc. was founded on 14 May 1982, and were keen to protect their licence. "Atari declares copyright war on Pac-Man rivals" was how POPULAR COMPUTING WEEKLY headlined their story.
Atari International (UK) Inc is at present campaigning against video games which infringe the Pac-Man copyright. The campaign is being pursued to protect the customer against imitations.
Commodore, Bug-Byte, A&F, and Micropower were all named. Bug-Byte's Tony Baden gave a common defence at the time, their title Vic-Man couldn't infringe Atari's copyright because copyright only covered game code and not the idea: "We do not agree that they have got copyright except on the Pac-Man program listing — and our listings are completely different."
SOFTWARE GIANTS CLASH. There is a storm brewing in the games software industry which could change the way you buy your discs and cassettes... The issue is software copyright and the adversaries preparing for legal battle are industry giants Atari and Commodore The battleground for this test case is Pacman and the key question will be: Can you copyright an idea?
Commodore had an unusual defence:
In an independent survey recently conducted on behalf of Commodore, the reactions of potential purchasers, under. 17 years of age, to the Vic20 Jellymonsters and Atari 400 Pac-Man were compared.
A Commodore spokesman said: "Initial results suggest that on several parameters, including graphics, sound and enjoyment, there is an 80 percent preference amongst consumers towards Jellymonsters,
“This tends to conflict with the claim of Atari International (UK) Inc that Commodore Business Machines (UK) Ltd is in conflict with consumer interests.”
(PCW 2 September 1982 page 5)
(PCW 2 September 1982 page 5)
November 1982 saw Atari withdraw their request for an injunction against Commodore. They were instead granted an order for a speedy trial (PCW, 25 November 1982). This trial was due to take place in June 1983 but delayed until October (PCW 7-13 July 1983 page 5), by this point Commodore had withdrawn Jelly Monsters from sale. It's missing from the double-page software spread Commodore used to advertise the VIC-20 in early 1983.
The case appears to reach an uneasy stalemate at the end of 1983. Unusually SINCLAIR USER carried the story (January 1984 page 17):
Copyright question remains open
SETTLEMENT talks have been concluded between Atari and Namco on the one hand, and Philips and Commodore on the other. Atari claimed in October that the Philips Munchkin program and the Commodore Jellymonsters infringed its copyright of Pac-Man. It was widely expected that a legal ruling on the case would establish a precedent on software copyright but the parties concerned decided to settle out of court, leaving the question open again.
The copyright issue would finally be resolved in 1985 by the Copyright (Computer Software) Amendment Act 1985, which was superseded by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 which widened the definition of a literary work to include software. The court case itself might have puttered out because by late 1983 neither Atari or Commodore had much of a stake in the outcome. PERSONAL COMPUTER WORLD (November 1983 page 123) notes:
The decision to start proceedings came at a time when Atari was basing its marketing on the games exclusively available for its machines—letting the software sell the hardware. Since then it has changed tack and begun to produce some of its games software for other people’s machines to dissuade imitations.
Atari was no longer worried about keeping its licences to itself, and Commodore was less interested in the Vic-20 because it had a new computer on sale. The Commodore 64.
The UK launch date of the Commodore 64 slipped from September, to December 1982, with around 6000 units getting to shops for Christmas. 1983 saw Commodore consider a move away from Slough and THE TIMES reported the company's plan to open a new factory in Corby.
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| THE TIMES Tuesday March 15 1983 page 21 |
The new factory will be the European manufacturing and distribution centre for the Commodore 64 and Vic-20... The company expects output from Corby to reach 700,000 units a year by the end of 1984. Commodore's more expensive business systems will continue to be made at Braunschweig, West Germany.
...
Commodore has been haggling with government officials since Christmas over the amount of financial assistance it needed to establish a centre in this country. The company said it would extend its German plant if Britain did not offer a sufficiently generous inducement. In the end, it settled for a little over £2m in grants.
Jack Tramiel left Commodore International in January 1984. It never seems to have become really clear what caused the boardroom dispute that led to him leave the company he had founded and run since 1955.
1 Hunters Way, Weldon Corby, Northamptonshire NN17 1QX
Commodore were in place in Corby by September 1984. Commodore UK managing director David Pleasance describes it in this video recorded at the Amiga Ireland Meetup 2018
It was massive. We brough a 10 acre site and filled it. It was assembly lines. It was warehousing and storage and offices. It was absolutely huge.
It was massive. We brough a 10 acre site and filled it. It was assembly lines. It was warehousing and storage and offices. It was absolutely huge.
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| September 2023 |
It is huge. Too huge to fit into a single photograph. The ex-Commodore factory proved disappointingly resistant to getting any sort of decent angle on the building. I also had trouble locating the place because the address 1 Hunters Way no longer exists. On one side of Hunters Way is a cleared site and on the other sits a corrugated-walled warehouse (which looks remarkably like old photos of the Commodore factory) which houses a company called Advanced Supply Chain Group, address Brakey Road. Which one could it be? I ruled out the cleared site because Streetview showed it used to be the site of a factory called Roquette, and the old images suggested it was an extensive food processing site. I found an old NORTHAMPTONSHIRE TELEGRAPH story about the closure of the Roquette factory which confirmed food processing had taken place there since 1983. The old Commodore factory had to be the building on the other side of the road. The one that really looked like old photographs of the Commodore factory. But how had the address changed? Again Streetview gave me a clue, an old T-junction in the pavement marks where the entrance to the Commodore factory used to be before, at some point in the last 35 years, the entrance shifted to Brakey Road at the back.
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| September 2023 |
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| COMMODORE USER February 1985 page 71 |
[Update, 19/09/24] I was delighted to get an email from Bill who very kindly agreed to let me use his description of work inside 1 Hunters Way:
I used to work in the Commodore factory in Corby. Hard to believe it was 40 years ago, and of course it was all over by Jan 86.
There was quite a buzz in the town when they opened in late summer 1984, considering the residual high unemployment numbers after the steelworks closure. Although of course they were being "bribed" with a number of cash grants and other inducements. Applicants had to do some basic English, maths, and other tests at the JobCentre in the town centre, before being interviewed by the firm at the same venue.
I used to work on the 64 assembly line, where my task was to use a high -powered overhead screwdriver to fix the circuit board into the bottom half of the computer’s plastic shell. They came whizzing down the conveyor belt, and you really had to be quick and nimble with the screws. Our output was phenomenal.
As you can imagine it was a stressful job, and after a while I asked to be moved to the warehouse. Moving and stacking boxes was more physically demanding, but less mentally draining!
As well as the 64 we also made the Commodore 16, a computer of the same shape and size, except the plastic shells were black. It also cost less.
A quirky aside was that Commodore sponsored the local non-league football team, Corby Town, and employees could get a free season ticket. Which I obtained. None of my fellow workers were interested though.
By contrast, over in Germany, for five years from 84 to 89, Commodore sponsored the German and European golden boys of Bayern Munich (although they really should have sponsored Eintracht Braunschweig). [Update ends].
Commodore wanted 1984 to be a good year despite Tramiel's departure. It was largely. Commodore picked up a Royal Warrant which means they supplied goods to the Royal Family; I wonder who played the C64 version of Stop the Express? Commodore produced C64 software from 1982 to 1985 but, as with Sinclair and Amstrad, their own range never really caught fire. Tim Chaney re-joined Commodore in 1984 as THE STORY OF US GOLD recounted:
Tim went back to Commodore, hoping to return to selling hardware, but to his dismay he was given the position as head of software sales. ‘Commodore only had one piece of software that was any good, written by Andrew Spencer, called International Football, and it was on a bloody huge cartridge. Everything else was pretty much shite."
ZZAP!64 drew attention to one interesting Commodore game, Jack Attack:
I was intrigued by the scenario in the new Commodore game Jack Attack reviewed in this issue. It features a guy called Jack going around getting pleasure out of squashing people's heads. That wouldn't by any chance be be a reference to big tough Jack Tramiel, the former Commodore boss who deserted them for Atari, would it..? You naughty boys.
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| ZZAP!64 May 1985 page 26 |
There are two Central news reports which when watched back-to-back show how quickly things went sour. The first report, 13/11/1984, is about the opening of the new factory and its creation of 850 jobs. The second, 03.01.1986 , is about the closing of the factory as a manufacturing base and the loss of the majority of those 850 jobs. Commodore, "found themselves locked in a marketplace with intense competition and a fall off in demand. It's led to overproduction and too costly an operation in Corby." 170 staff would be kept on to run sales, distribution, and servicing.
Commodore House, The Switchback, Gardner Road, Maidenhead, Berks SL6
Commodore was still in Corby around June 1987 but by the end of the year they had returned south, to Maidenhead. YOUR COMMODORE (January 1988 page 106):
Commodore Where Are You?
At the Your Commodore office we are repeatedly asked for the address and telephone number of Commodore U.K. Many people, after referring to their computer manuals, believe them to be based in Corby.
The Commodore plant at Corby was closed down some lime ago. Reproduced here you will find the correct address for Commodore U.K. We suggest that you write this correct address in the front of your computers manual for future reference.
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| March 2023 |
The Switchback is a small complex of red-brick office buildings about one and a half miles outside Maidenhead town centre. It looks a lot like the various two story red-brick buildings Bullfrog occupied on the Surrey Research Park and I'd be willing to bet they were both built around the same mid-eighties date. Commodore House is a little vague as an address. Fortunately for me COMMODORE COMPUTING INTERNATIONAL went one better in their June 1987 issue and gave the full address as Unit 4. The whole estate is on a fairly gentle hill and, as you can see, I had to lurk behind a wall to take a picture. This was a Sunday. It's a good job no one was at work, I'd have looked like a right weirdo.
The Commodore 64 would stay in production until 1994, giving it a 12 year lifespan which was the longest of the Sinclair/Amstrad/Commodore trio. David Pleasance, in an interview for BCS, confidently stated the total worldwide sales were 27 million. However Commodore was losing interest in its old workhouse. The new 16-bit Amiga was the future. The Amiga had been in development for years and I was curious to see when it first got mentioned in the UK press. I think HOME COMPUTER WEEKLY edges it with this report from 4 September 1984. I can't explain how weird it is to read about Commodore's purchase of the Californian company Amiga, and their futuristic Lorraine prototye and then turn the page to see an advert for Micro-Gen's game Automania.
The Amiga didn't get launched in the UK until October 1987. It went head to head with the Atari ST. When I brought an Atari ST in 1988 I thought I was opening a new front in the war against the Commodore 64 (battle cry: Sinclair forever!), how was I to know Atari was owned by Jack Tramiel. He'd brought the company from Time Warner in July 1984 and was using it to try and crush-maim-destroy the company that had turned its back on him. The Atari-Amiga war wasn't a new 16-bit front in the anti-Commodore war, it was an extension of the Commodore civil war. The Atari ST had a head start. It was released in the UK around the summer of 1985 and picked up a lot of early 8-bit defectors. Commodore clawed back the lost ground with a series of packs, with the most memorable being the Batman pack which David Pleasance negotiated directly with Ocean, as he told BCS:
The proposition was to build a bundle around Batman the Movie and for Ocean to give Commodore exclusivity for two months. After two months the games firm could sell the game across the counter.
...
‘Ocean was also worried that it’d paid a million dollars for the licence and it would cost a million dollars to make the game. They knew how many they needed to sell and were worried that this activity would damage their numbers.’
...
In the end, Ocean agreed... ‘And yes, we did affect Ocean’s sales. They ended up selling five times more copies than their biggest estimate of sales. And I didn’t take 10,000 pieces from them. I took 186,000 pieces. That’s how many Amiga 500 Batman packs we sold in 12 weeks.’
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| ZERO August 1990 page 8 |
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| AMIGA ACTION March 1994 page 9 |
"What does it mean for UK Amiga users?" asked Amiga Power (June 1994 page 10). The good news, Commodore Business Machines (UK) Ltd was an independent company and could continue trading following the demise of the US parent. The bad news, Commodore UK probably had no more than two or three weeks stock of the CD32 and Amiga and no way to get more. Although actually, it did. According to ars.technica:
During this time, Commodore UK, Ltd. continued to operate. It had been the strongest of all the subsidiary companies, and it always had a positive cash flow. As the other subsidiaries went under, Commodore UK purchased all of their remaining inventory and continued to sell Amigas to British customers.
It's a gloomy kind of existence, gnawing sales from the bones of your comrades, but it worked. Commodore UK kept going and developed a plan to buy the assets of Commodore International. A lot of the contemporary coverage is lost 1, which is annoying, but a year later AMIGA POWER summarised it as " 'There'll be a management buy-out within two weeks,' Commodore kept promising us, but there never was." (June 1995 page 8). In the end German company ESCOM had deeper pockets and AMIGA POWER ended their coverage with this picture of a thwarted David Pleasance.
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| AMIGA POWER June 1995 page 9 |
What happened next? I guess Commodore UK must have somehow remained part of the overall structure of Commodore International, with the result that it got absorbed into ESCOM as part of the takeover. The UK arm was quietly wound down and dissolved on 5th December 2000; and that's the last of my six facts.
1 If you've got scans of any of the following issues of AMIGA FORMAT please fling them in the direction of The Amiga Magazine rack: page 20 August and September 1994, page 18 October 1994, page 22 November 1994, page 22 and 24 December 1994, plus page 10of the April, May, and June 1995 issues.
Or did I get it all wrong? Let me know one way or the other. Also, if you live in Braunschweig, why not send me a photo of the old Commodore factory. It's at Carl-Giesecke-Straße 2, 38112 Braunschweig, Germany and I understand the site also includes a Commodore museum, which is nice of current owners Streiff & Helmold GmbH. Leave a comment or email whereweretheynow@gmail.com. Other methods of communication include Instagram, shammountebank,and Bluesky @shammountebank.bsky.social. I've finally parked my Twitter account but I'll keep it going for DMs.
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