Flair Software
Two of the four games in Commodore's last bundle
A small British publisher whose games filled the CD32's final retail pack — including the one the £299 bundle was named after.
Flair published a handful of Amiga games in the early nineties — Trolls, Oscar, Dangerous Streets, an Elvira arcade game. It is in the Vault because of where two of them ended up: inside the box with Commodore’s last machine.
Fast facts
- Press evidence in this library: Amiga Power, 1992–1994, at £25.99, developed in house.
- Published: Trolls, Oscar, Dangerous Streets, Elvira: The Arcade Game.
- The bundle: Commodore’s four-game CD32 pack at £299 — Dangerous Streets, Oscar, Diggers and Wing Commander — was named after the Flair game.
What a bundle is for
A hardware bundle is a sales argument. The games in the box are the manufacturer’s statement about what the machine is for and who should buy it, and they reach far more people than any individually purchased game: everyone who buys the hardware gets them, whether they want them or not.
Amiga Power announced it in 1994 under the headline “CD32 takes off”: four titles at the same £299 as the existing two-game pack — Oscar, Diggers, Wing Commander and “the eponymous Dangerous Streets”. Two of the four are Flair’s, one is Millennium’s, and Wing Commander had come to the Amiga through Mindscape.
Leading with Dangerous Streets was a strange choice, and the reason is worth being fair about. Commodore needed a CD fighting game because that is what the Mega-CD and the consoles were selling, it needed one immediately, and it needed one it could licence cheaply. Availability beat quality, as it tends to when a hardware launch date is fixed.
The bundle’s own trajectory tells the rest. Within months a retailer was advertising in Amiga Power a CD32 with Microcosm, The Chaos Engine, Wing Commander, Dangerous Streets, Diggers and Oscar — six games — for £229.99, seventy pounds below the four-game price. Commodore went into liquidation that year.
Being in the right place
There is no suggestion Flair engineered this. A small publisher with two finished, colourful, CD-suitable games in 1993 was exactly what Commodore needed, at exactly the moment it needed it, and the deal followed.
That is worth recording because the era’s histories tend to explain outcomes through merit — the good games rose, the bad ones sank. Plenty of what happened was timing and availability, and a company’s most consequential release can be the one that happened to be finished when somebody was looking.
Flair’s games consequently sat in more Amiga owners’ hands than many far better ones, and are remembered by CD32 owners who never chose them.
Why it mattered
Flair is the bundle as a distribution channel, and the CD32 as a machine that had to be furnished quickly with whatever could be got.
It is also the third Vault entry to arrive at the same moment from a different direction. Millennium supplied Diggers to the same pack; Commodore collapsed months later. Two small publishers’ catalogues are, between them, most of what the CD32 shipped with — which is the whole story of that machine in one sentence.
The bundle, and why a small publisher filled it
The subtitle above is exact, and the period reporting shows how it came about.
Commodore’s CD32 launched bundled with two games — Oscar and Diggers — and in the last days before Christmas 1993 added two more. Amiga Computing, February 1994:
The Dangerous Streets bundle comes with new titles Dangerous Streets and Wing Commander in addition to Diggers and Oscar, which have been supplied with the console since launch… Commodore say that if bought individually the four games would cost £120, but despite this they have been able to maintain the machine’s original £299 price tag.
So of the four games in Commodore’s final CD32 pack, two — Oscar and Dangerous Streets — were Flair’s, and the pack took its name from one of them.
Why: there was nothing else to choose from
The reason is on the record, from Commodore’s own UK managing director. David Pleasance, to Amiga Format, January 1994:
We were under a lot of pressure to get the bundle into the shops, and we launched it when we weren’t really ready. There wasn’t that much software to choose from to put in the package, but now there are plenty of games around and we had the opportunity to choose the best.
That is a hardware manufacturer conceding that its launch bundle was assembled from whatever existed. A small British publisher supplied half of it not because it had beaten the competition but because, at that moment, there was barely any.
The numbers around it are the other half of the story. Amiga Computing records the CD32 having “achieved 75,000 sales in Britain by the end of last year — around a third of the original projection made at launch”, with Commodore nonetheless claiming it was outselling the Sega Mega CD, and Pleasance predicting more than 70,000 further sales.
Commodore was in liquidation within four months.