Alan Sugar is a British businessman, media personality, and politician. Sugar is best known for founding the electronics company Amstrad in 1968, which produced a range of products including computers, audio equipment, and satellite receivers.
Sugar was the chairman and part-owner of Tottenham Hotspur from 1991 to 2001, selling his remaining stake in the club in 2007 as well, for £25m.
He is also known for being the host and “Boss” of the BBC reality competition series The Apprentice, which has been broadcast every year, with the exception of 2020, since 2005.
According to the Sunday Times Rich List, Sugar became a billionaire in 2015. In 2021, his fortune was estimated at £1.21bn, ranking him as the 138th-richest person in the UK.
Alan Sugar game: What game did Alan Sugar create?
Amstrad’s 8-bit GX4000 system launched in September 1990 – the same month that the more powerful SEGA Mega Drive arrived in Europe, too.
It used cartridge games (better to protect against piracy), which sold for around £25 – cheap, compared to a lot of the Mega Drive’s library. But the GX4000’s games could often also be picked up for home computers, on disc cassette, for considerably less. Uh, and indeed, oh.
It was clear from the start that the GX4000 wasn’t in the same league as SEGA’s new console, or Nintendo’s SNES, which was about to launch in Japan.
A £20 million marketing campaign for the GX4000 made little difference to its limited fortunes, and even the Amstrad-centric magazine of the era, Amstrad Action, didn’t maintain its enthusiasm for the platform for its lifetime.
And not long after its September 1990 launch, the GX4000 was being reduced from its RRP of £100 to £80, and later as low as £30 – but even with such a dramatic price cut, it only sold a total of around 15,000 units. In comparison, the Mega Drive sold over 30 million, the SNES nearly 50 million, and the NES over 60 million.
It’s natural to look at Alan Sugar and see a wildly successful businessman. He’s worth over a billion pounds, so he’s not done badly for himself. But in the GX4000, he made one of his most notable mistakes. He thought Amstrad could stand up to the console heavyweights – and Amstrad took a battering.