Retro Games Ltd’s full-size Amiga 1200 replica is now an officially licensed Amiga product. That is a real, verifiable thing, and it has been legally impossible to say for most of the past thirty years. The machine itself is still not out. THEA1200 was meant to ship on 16 June 2026 and is now down for Friday 4 December 2026, because the Workbench-based operating system isn’t finished. Pre-orders are open at £169.99, the specification hasn’t changed, and the badge on the case is currently the most finished part of the product.
Status: officially licensed by Amiga Corporation, pre-orders open, not yet released
Launch date: Friday 4 December 2026 (originally 16 June 2026)
Price: £169.99 UK RRP (around €189)
Hardware: full-size working keyboard, HDMI output, USB ports
Emulation: A1200 with AGA, plus the older OCS and ECS chipsets
In the box: 25 licensed games, THEMOUSE, THEGAMEPAD
Is THEA1200 really an official Amiga product?
Yes, and the receipt was published by the trademark holder rather than the manufacturer, which is the part that matters.
Amiga Corporation’s own update of 4 August 2026 names its licensees outright: A1200.NET, Antstream Arcade, Blaze Entertainment, Cloanto, Commodore, Hyperion Entertainment, Retro Games, Simulant Systems and SpecNext. Retro Games is on that list, for hardware. A fortnight later the company said it out loud: ‘The Amiga name has a new chapter. With the recent announcement from Mike Battilana and the Amiga Corporation, we’re delighted to see the Amiga brand move forward.’
Compare that with THEA500 Mini in 2022. Everybody knew what it was. It had the wedge and the beige and a launcher full of licensed Amiga games, and it still couldn’t print the word ‘Amiga’ on the box. Retro Games sold it on the silhouette and a definite article.
Why the Amiga name was locked up for three decades
When Commodore collapsed in 1994, the Amiga went into the estate sale and never really came out.
The trademark, the operating system and the hardware designs spent the following thirty years spread across companies that mostly disagreed with each other in writing, at length, in court. Hyperion Entertainment and the Amiga rights holders were still litigating this year. That is a long time for a brand to be worth something and be unusable at the same time.
Mike Battilana, of Cloanto, is the man who ended it. Cloanto had been shipping Amiga Forever for years before Battilana acquired the Amiga properties under a new entity, Amiga Corporation.
Then 4 August 2026 happened, and two agreements landed at once.
The first was with Commodore International Corporation, the recently revived Commodore brand. Amiga licenses the 8-bit Commodore software and documentation to Commodore for use in its products, and recognises Commodore’s ownership of the ‘Commodore’ name and the C= marks. Amiga Corporation keeps the Amiga trademarks and the copyrights in the historical Amiga and Commodore software, firmware, documentation and hardware designs.
The second settled the Hyperion dispute. Hyperion carries on developing and distributing AmigaOS 4 under licence from Amiga Corporation, and the 68k AmigaOS 3.x rights head back to Amiga.
Amiga Corporation’s own line was that ‘the circle is closing’, forty-two years after the 1984 merger, and that ‘the principal rights and assets of the Commodore and Amiga eras rest with Amiga’. Grandiose. Also, for once, accurate. The practical effect is duller and far more useful: there is now one place to ring if you want to put the word Amiga on a box.
Retro Games rang.
Why THEA1200 slipped from June to December
On 6 May 2026, six weeks out from a launch date that had been fixed since pre-orders opened the previous November, Retro Games moved THEA1200 to Friday 4 December.
The reason that travelled was the operating system. Chris Smith, the company’s CTO, said the OS ‘isn’t yet where it needs to be’ — working, but not finished. Retro Games added that it could ship something more basic and make June, ‘but that wouldn’t do justice to THEA1200’.
The reason that travelled less well was in the same statement. Smith also cited ‘global chip shortages and rising plastic production costs, which have taken time to mitigate’, and said these had ‘significantly delayed our overall schedule’. Worth holding both of those in your head, because the OS line is the one the headlines took, and it is comfortably the more flattering of the two.
It’s still the right call. I’d rather a company said this than shipped a launcher with a Workbench-shaped sticker on it. The entire argument for THEA1200 over the mini console Retro Games already sells is that this one has a real keyboard, and therefore a reason to boot to a desktop. A half-done Workbench would have deleted the only thing separating the two products.
Pre-orders stood through all of it. The price didn’t move and the specification didn’t move, and anyone unwilling to wait an extra six months can cancel.
In June the company posted a prototype video running Turrican and Defender of the Crown II, apologising for ‘the noughties production values’ and noting that ‘we didn’t want to keep you waiting’. So hardware exists. It boots. It plays games.
What £169.99 actually buys you
Underneath, per The Register’s November 2025 write-up, it’s an ARM SoC running Linux and a modified build of Amiberry. That is the honest answer at this price, and a more sensible one than pretending an FPGA was ever on the table for under two hundred quid.
Above that sits a full-size working keyboard, HDMI output with upscaling, USB ports, and the Amiga Workbench desktop rather than a games launcher with a lid on it. It emulates the A1200 and its AGA chipset, and also the older OCS and ECS machines, so the A500 library is in scope.
Twenty-five licensed games come pre-installed, among them Beneath a Steel Sky, the Turrican trilogy, Defender of the Crown I and II, Settlers II, Lure of the Temptress and Ruff ‘n’ Tumble. Saves are handled by hand-modifying each game to write through the launcher instead of leaning on emulator save states, which is a great deal more work than the shortcut and produces a much better result. Somebody at Retro Games chose the hard version on purpose.
In the box: THEMOUSE, a two-button USB mouse, and THEGAMEPAD, an eight-button USB pad. Also a USB-C power cable and an HDMI cable. Not a power supply. You get the cable that carries the power and not the thing that makes it, which is a decision somebody was pleased with in a meeting.
The badge was the easy part
The original A1200 shipped on 21 October 1992 at £399, with a Motorola 68EC020 at 14 MHz, 2MB of chip RAM, the AGA chipset, and Workbench 3.0 on Kickstart 3.0. The word AMIGA was moulded into the plastic above the numeric keypad, not printed on a label, because in 1992 nobody had to ask permission. Commodore had needed that machine in 1990 and shipped it in 1992, roughly eighteen months before the company stopped existing.
Thirty-four years on, the badge is sorted. A licence is paperwork. It took an absurd length of time and a fortune in legal fees, but in the end it’s a signature on a document.
The operating system isn’t paperwork. It is the thing that decides whether THEA1200 is an Amiga or a very good keyboard with an emulator behind it, and it is the reason this machine is six months late. Retro Games has been unusually straight about that, which buys it some patience from me.
4 December. Fifteen weeks. The name is real now, and the rest is a software deadline.
Sources
Amiga Corporation, ‘Amiga August 2026 Update’, 4 August 2026: https://amiga.com/news/20260804-amiga-update
Time Extension, ‘The A1200 Is Officially An Amiga Product’: https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/08/the-a1200-is-officially-an-amiga-product
GenerationAmiga, ‘THEA1200 is now an official Amiga product ahead of December launch’, 19 August 2026: https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/08/19/thea1200-is-now-an-official-amiga-product-ahead-of-december-launch/
Time Extension, ‘”The OS Isn’t Yet Where It Needs To Be” – The Full-Size Amiga Replica THEA1200 Has Been Delayed’, 6 May 2026: https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/05/the-os-isnt-yet-where-it-needs-to-be-the-full-size-amiga-replica-thea1200-has-been-delayed
Time Extension, ‘”We Didn’t Want To Keep You Waiting” – Here’s The Resurrected Amiga 1200 In The Flesh’, 9 June 2026: https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/06/we-didnt-want-to-keep-you-waiting-heres-the-resurrected-amiga-1200-in-the-flesh
The Register, ‘THEA1200 is a full-size working Amiga replica’, 14 November 2025: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/14/thea1200_fullsize_amiga_replica/
Retro Games Ltd product page, THEA1200: https://retrogames.biz/products/thea1200/
Time Extension, ‘”The Circle Is Closing” – Duo Of Deals Establishes A “Clear Framework For Commodore And Amiga”’, 4 August 2026: https://www.timeextension.com/news/2026/08/the-circle-is-closing-duo-of-deals-establishes-a-clear-framework-for-commodore-and-amiga
