In the month that Amiga Power closed it's mighty oaken doors for the final time, I've decided to examine the view of those endearing Amiga diehards who maintain that the machine isn't dead.

I'm bored of lists.

THE AMIGA'S NOT DEAD!

You see, there are those (and there are more of them than you'd like to think) who claim the Amiga's still a viable format, and that it's simply rubbished because it's not trendy and cool.

Like the PC, presumably.

They say that if only software houses would develop Amiga games, they'd still sell by the truckload and life would be like a big bowl of fish.

I wonder if the figures back them up...

PUNK'S NOT DEAD!

Let's start by taking a look at the ordinary A500 chart. How many copies a month do you imagine a Top 10 Amiga game would shift these days? 5,000? 10,000? 20,000?

Or something more like 332, which is coincidentally the number of copies of Premier Manager 3 sold this July, while it held down the Amiga No.5 position?

Too low down? Let's go right up to No.2, where we can find Worms. Specifically, 526 copies of Worms.

JFK'S NOT DEAD!

"Ah, but the A1200's where it's really at," they whine. "Everyone's got one."

The best-selling A1200 game in the world in July was popular Mario Kart clone Xtreme Racing. No fewer than 296 people crammed through the doors of software shops nationwide for a copy.

A little further down the Top 10, we encounter snazzy Doom clone Gloom, from the most prolific Amiga developers around, Guildhall, who'll be retiring soon on the profits from 118 sales.

LLOYD GEORGE ISN'T DEAD!

"But it's hardly fair judging sales from one summer month's figures alone! What about total sales? Why, I read in several magazines that Amiga Worms has sold over 100,000 copies, for example!"

Well, no. The official figure for total sales of Worms on all floppy-disk formats put together is currently 35,757. That includes PC sales, currently making up 45% of the total.

Which would seem to make total Amiga sales of Worms more like 19,666. Oops.

NAPOLEON ISN'T DEAD!

If you read any of the Amiga newsgroups on Usenet, you'd believe that every Amiga owner out there had an A4000 with 32Mb RAM and a £600 accelerator board, providing a huge potential for sales.

The fact that the entire A1200 Top 10 put together sold just 1,437 games last month rather blows that idea, though.

And even with the average budget game costing a fiver or even less, the Amiga budget chart can't muster a single game selling in four figures. So.

JESUS ISN'T DEAD!

All of these figures are the official Chart-Track/ELSPA stats, which, while not covering every single game shop in the country, do account for nearly 80% of them. So it's pretty conclusive.

The Amiga is dead. And while there are many people to blame for that to one degree or another, it's mostly dead because no-one's buying Amiga games anymore. This means YOU, Amiga owners.

It wasn't a conspiracy. It was you.