Chopping heads

When a corporation is bleeding money, often the only way to save it is to drastically lower fixed expenses by firing staff. Commodore had lost over $300 million between September 1985 and March 1986, and over $21 million in March alone. Commodore's new CEO, Thomas Rattigan, was determined to stop the bleeding.

Rattigan began three separate rounds of layoffs. The first to go were the layabouts, people who hadn't proven their worth to the company and were never likely to. The second round coincided with the cancellation of many internal projects. The last round was necessary for the company to regain profitability, but affected many good people and ultimately may have hurt the company in the long run. Engineer Dave Haynie recalled that the first round was actually a good thing, the second was of debatable value, and the last was "hitting bone."

Under Jack Tramiel, Commodore had embarked on a whole host of projects: some practical, some far-sighted and visionary, and others just plain crazy. To try and figure out which was which, Rattigan looked for an experienced opinion. He found one in Charles Winterble, a former Commodore engineer turned consultant who at the time was still under the lawsuit Commodore had going against Atari!

First to the chopping block were Commodore's aging line of PET computers, which had been the first fully-assembled computers to hit the market (they predated both the Apple ][ and TRS-80). The VIC-20, once promoted by William Shatner, was also axed. Next up were the innovative but ultimately pointless collection of small 8-bit computers that were incompatible with the blockbuster C-64: the Plus/4 and Commodore 16, and various other machines that had never left the prototype stage. The Commodore 900, an innovative Unix workstation with a 1024 by 800 bitmapped display, was also canceled.



How many megabytes does that cabinet hold?

Computers weren't the only thing that Tramiel had a hand in. At the time, the company still owned an office supply manufacturing firm in Canada. I personally ran into Commodore-branded filing cabinets far more often than I ever ran into Amigas. Rattigan got rid of these and other distractions.

Rattigan also cleaned up the sloppy accounting processes that had been allowed to fester under his predecessor, Marshall Smith. Three redundant manufacturing plants were closed, and new financial controls were put into place to keep a tight check on spending.

In all, the cuts did their job. Commodore paid off their debts and even posted a modest $22 million profit in the last quarter of 1986.

In the meantime, the Amiga still needed applications if it was to become anything more than a curiosity. One of the first companies to publicly pledge support for the platform was none other than Electronic Arts.

Electronic Arts and Deluxe Paint



EA founder Trip Hawkins poses with an Amiga 1000



Those who have firsthand experience with the modern Electronic Arts typically know it as a faceless corporate behemoth, infamous for absorbing, then strangling independent development teams, eliminating competition by paying for exclusive rights to major sports leagues, and working its employees beyond the breaking point. They may be surprised to find out that EA originally had quite a different mission and philosophy.

EA's founder, Trip Hawkins, was actually fighting against the poor treatment of programmers that he witnessed elsewhere in the industry. When he launched Electronic Arts in 1982, he envisioned an environment where developers and game designers would be treated like rock stars: promoted in major media, given generous royalties, and allowed to explore wherever their imagination and talent led them.

Hawkins saw the Amiga as a groundbreaking platform, a brand new canvas that would let his developers create great new works of art. In November 1985, he took out a two-page ad in Compute! magazine that extolled the Amiga's virtues and promised that Electronic Arts would be supporting the platform for a whole new generation of games. "I believe this machine, marketed and supported properly, should have a very significant impact on the personal computer industry," Hawkins said prophetically in an earlier interview in the same magazine.

EA's first Amiga product, however, wasn't a game at all, but a game development tool. Programmer Dan Silva had been working on an internal graphics editor that was code-named Prism. When the Amiga was released, he quickly reworked the program to take advantage of the new computer's stunning graphics capabilities. Even before it shipped, Silva was already working on the next version, which would contain many more advanced features.

This program was Deluxe Paint, and it launched the careers of thousands of computer graphic artists. With a simple interface featuring a toolbar on the right-hand side of the screen, Deluxe Paint was a powerful tool that could create not only static graphics, but also animation. This made it perfect for creating images for computer and video games, and for a long time Deluxe Paint was the industry standard for creating art for this medium, much like tools such as 3D Studio Max are today.

Even years later, as the PC gaming market began to eclipse the Amiga in terms of sheer size and number of titles, many game development studios still made their art using Deluxe Paint. Its native format, IFF, and animation format, IFF ANIM, are still supported by many graphics packages today. IFF ANIM files were compressed using delta encoding, resulting in smaller files. This was nearly 10 years before animation compression standards such as MPEG were released.

But back in 1986, the combination of an Amiga and Deluxe Paint was unbeatable. While Adobe's Photoshop on the Macintosh platform would eventually become the standard tool for creating two-dimensional graphic images, the Mac was still a monochrome-only computer at this point, and the PC could barely manage four colors even with a CGA graphics card. Again, the Amiga was ahead of its time.

The cover art for the Deluxe Paint II box featured an image of Tutankhamen that had been created inside the program itself. This image quickly became an iconic picture in the computer graphics industry. Even Commodore recognized the power of Deluxe Paint, using the Tutankhamen image on a new full-page ad that—finally!—stated the Amiga's advantages outright.