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1954 - Commodore

Commodore was founded in Toronto, Canada in 1954 as the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company. The company then shifted into producing electronic calculators in the 1960s to finally computers in the late 1970s. In 1982, they released their famous Commodore 64, that would hold the brand for a decade. In 1984, Commodore acquired Amiga, one of their more fierce competitor who was in financial trouble at the time. With the acquisition of Amiga, Commodore was well positioned to dominate the computer video game market. But with the advent of the Nintendo Famicom (NES) and the Sega Mark III (Sega Master System), the Commodore was starting to lose customers, especially in North America when the IBM PC-compatible were taking the lead while the gaming community had moved to console. In December 1990, Commodore released the Commodore 64 Games System, a system based on their Commodore 64, released 8 years ago. The system was a commercial failure. A few months after, Commodore released the CDTV, a home multimedia entertainment and video-game console, this time based on the very popular Amiga 500 (which released in 1987). The system was another fiasco for Commodore who needed a win to stay afloat. Commodore decided to try the same thing one more time and create a console based on one of its computers. Based on their newest computer, the Amiga 1200, the Amiga CD32 would be Commodore last attempt to avoid bankruptcy. Although the CD32 did well in Europe, it was stopped from being released in the U.S. due to an unrelated legal dispute on patent infringement. Although sold in Canada, the NTSC unit intended for the U.S. were stock in the Philippines waiting for the legal dispute to be settled. Sadly, without  being able to sell the CD32 in the U.S., Commodore didn’t generate enough revenue to stay afloat and had to declare bankruptcy.