People

David Pleasance

The man who tried to buy the Amiga

Commodore's UK managing director through the CD32 and the collapse — and, in 1994, the leader of a management buyout attempt for the company and the Amiga. His pitch was that Commodore's problem was American: 85% of the business came out of Europe.

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David Pleasance ran Commodore UK through the machine’s last years — the CD32 launch, the bundle that carried it into its final Christmas, and the parent company’s collapse in 1994. He then led a management buyout attempt for Commodore and the Amiga.

He appears in this Vault first as a quotation in somebody else’s story, which is the usual fate of executives. He is worth an entry of his own because the period press recorded him being unusually candid twice, in opposite directions: admitting a failure while it was happening, and making a case for the company nobody in America was making.

Candid about the CD32

Amiga Format, January 1994, on why Commodore’s four-game CD32 bundle contained what it did:

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’s managing director telling a consumer magazine that his own launch bundle was assembled from whatever existed — see Flair Software, which supplied two of the four games.

He was also, in the same period, publicly optimistic in a way the numbers did not support: the CD32 had reached 75,000 UK sales by the end of 1993, about a third of the launch projection, and Pleasance was predicting more than 70,000 further sales. Commodore entered liquidation within four months.

The buyout attempt

Amazing Computing put him on its September 1994 cover — “AC Exclusive: David Pleasance on U.K. Management Buyout” — and ran an interview in which “Commodore’s U.K. General Manager… shares his thoughts, and hopes on his management buyout attempt for Commodore and the Amiga.”

His argument was that the received diagnosis had the geography backwards. Asked whether Commodore had failed by neglecting the American market:

No, I don’t share that view, and the reason that I don’t share that view is for many years now 85% of Commodore’s business has come out of Europe. We do not have the dependency on America that everybody believes we should have.

He had grounds to say it — “I spent ten months in 1992 in America looking at the retail market” — and paired it with an explicit break from how the Amiga had been managed:

Unlike the previous corporation, we will endeavor to sublicense and cooperate with anybody who wants to develop and manufacture things that work for and with Amiga products. We will work with anybody in any capacity to extend the Amiga and its acceptance world-wide, unlike the previous management who did not want to do anything.

One line in the transcript is worth keeping for what it says about the moment. Mid-answer, he stops and asks the interviewer:

How much of this do you want on-the-record?

What happened instead

The bid failed. Amazing Computing tracked the process into 1995, with Bahamian liquidator Franklyn Wilson meeting both Pleasance and Alex Amor, and its columnist assessing the field bleakly:

most Amiga developers are in poor financial health, and have no money to put towards a bid for the Amiga. So the odds of a bid by Amiga developers are not good.

The assets went to Escom, then Gateway, then fragmented — the sequence the Commodore entry covers.

Why he matters

Pleasance is the clearest case in this Vault of the European subsidiary understanding the product better than the parent. Everything the British and continental entries here describe — the Amiga’s dominance of the UK games market, the magazines, the demoscene, the publishers who stayed on the platform years after Commodore died — is the 85% he was talking about.

Whether his buyout would have worked is unknowable and he is not a neutral witness to it. But the specific claim is checkable and it was correct: the Amiga was a European machine run by an American company, and the man saying so in 1994 was the one running the European end.

See also

Not yet fact-checked. This entry was drafted by an AI and nobody has verified it. The dates, figures and technical details may be wrong. Use it to find your bearings, then confirm anything that matters against a primary source.