They stopped innovating.

The A1000 was released in 1985, the same year as the NES was released in America. It was a huge leap in capabilities over it's contemporaries.

But their massive lead was slowly whittled away by technology improvements. In 1992 they released AGA, which was barely twice as good as the original A1000 chip-set, while the IBM PC had innovated all the way from 4 color CGA, though EGA to VGA/SVGA with CPUs which were fast enough to any 2d (and increasingly 3d) effects in software.

Commodore really needed to get AAA out the door by 91 to hold onto their lead.

Doom was probably the final nail in the coffin, you simply couldn't implement it on the Amiga chipset due to it's planar graphics.

Doom killed the Amiga kind of like how Quake killed Cyrix x86 clones and to a lesser degree AMD's K5.

It's interesting how John Carmack's technical vision decided the winners in the computer industry at the time.

Doom was just the nail. Economically, Commodore was messed up by the time Doom came around. But I agree, Doom made it very evident, I remember it well - suddenly, a 486 became a "must have" for rich geeks.

I grew up with a Commodore 64 but once my older brother started getting loaner machines from work, it was quickly dispatched.

We were usually playing Pirates!, Carmen Sandiego, Cauldron I & II, Ultimate Wizard & the Bard's Tale games and dialing into BBS on the C64. The usual way of dialing with leaked calling card numbers.

Eye of the Beholder on the 386SX machines was cool and all, but once he 'liberated' a 486DX from work and we started playing Doom and using his job's dialup service, the C64 was done.

The best Wolfenstein 3-D ports were on the Apple IIgs, Atari Jaguar and Panasonic 3DO. FWIW.

3DO, so much promise...

Management stopped and restarted AAA and 3000+ several times, including replacing a significant chunk of hardware people with PC guys. That ultimately led to the cheap hack of AGA, the cheap and nasty (4000), and the cost saving entry (600) that cost significantly more to produce than the 500.

AAA was started in 88 if I remember right, and abandoned when the rest of the world had pretty much reached it.

The drama between Commodore and Atari in the 1980s is really interesting. I wonder what kind of computing world we'd be living in today if Atari had gotten the Amiga technology, rather than Commodore. I suppose with Tramiel still at the helm at Atari it wouldn't have been so different. I do wish could just spin-up a scratch universe to see what another company would have done w/ Amiga, though...

There were like 200 people left in Commodore who identified and send up proper invention for promotion, and the chiefs who were good to salute good groundswell instead tried to fund moving design to Flash LSI in which there could be no production future. All producers, all bad put orders; not that local foundry accord answers how to go into production in Massachusetts ca. 1990!

Yes, planar graphics had their strengths, but no chunky graphics (or only via a slow software routine) really made it difficult for the Amiga to keep up.

> Microsoft was still not that strong back then

Microsoft were pretty well established and very successful by 1985 (when the Amiga was launched). The following year they IPO'd for $61 million dollars - not a lot these days, but back then it was a reasonable chunk of cash for a company of its size in the day.

For Commodore, the edge of the pan was well in sight by 1985/86 because their management and overall strategy was a mess.