Times change, hype doesn't

Here's something weird. I happened to find an old issue of Finnish computer magazine Hakkeri ("Hacker"), which was published in mid-nineties by Casamedia. I used to be a regular at the CasaBox.

This particular issue was 1/94. It had weird game-related news like "Doom has been released" and "A new version of the Commodore 64 emulator has been released". (Umm, yeah. The new version of "the Commodore 64 emulator". In retrospect it's pretty hard to guess which emulator that was, but I take an educated guess it was CCS64. There pretty much weren't other C64 emulators then! [Or was it this? My memory is a bit hazy.])

The most important thing, and probably the most educational piece of news in retrospect, was, however, an article titled "Commodore takes it like a man."

"...if the numbers have any other basis in reality aside of the market leader's hallucinations, the company seems to be doing just fine... ...the current sales... are approximately 30,000 per week, the total being close to 400,000 units already... ...is selling up to four times more than Sega's similar offering. The company has... heh, a 'problem': [David Pleasance says] 'Our problem is that we aren't manufacturing enough of the machines [to meet the demand]...'"

Sounds interesting, huh?

Now, you may think that's just a typical marketspeak, and you may have heard similar speak from most of the major console manufacturers of the day when they spew ramblings of their own consoles.

The bit I omitted in the dot-dot-dots was the fact that they're talking of Commodore CD32.

Which, you may be aware, didn't quite live up to the hype what comes to the sales. (Nor, exactly, did Sega CD, but that's just a small detail.)

People, please, remember this. Don't believe the hype. Here we see a company spinning "yeah, we're doing fine", and if you look at them a decade later, the frigging company doesn't even exist.

This is exactly why I hate the marketing bullshit that's being spewed around the new consoles. I hope this small example was enlightening enough in this respect.