Activision cancelled them as an affiliated publisher after a year of signing them up.[2] The company went out of business in or about 1990.
General
The company impact has been summed up as, "During MicroIllusion’s brief existence they produced some visionary software that, like so much else that came out of the Amiga scene, gave the world an imperfect glimpse of its
multimedia future. That’s as true of
Photon Paint, the progenitor of photographic-quality visual editors like
Adobe Photoshop, as it is of Music-X, a forerunner of easy-to-use music packages like
GarageBand."[2]
Founding
According to The Digital Antiquarian, "The seeds of MicroIllusions were planted during one day’s idle conversation when Steinert complained to
David Joiner that, while the Amiga supposedly had speech synthesis built into its operating system, he had never actually heard his machines talk; .. He proved as good as his word within a few hours. Impressed, Steinert asked if he could sell the new program ' talk to me' in his store for a straight 50/50 split. Given his circumstances, Joiner was hardly in a position to quibble. When the program sold well, Steinert decided to get into Amiga software development in earnest with the help of his wunderkind."[2]
Discovery (1986), Amiga,
DOS,
C64,
Megadrive (Genesis) created by
David Joiner (Talin). Various addons were released ( language, Math, Science, Social Studies, Spell, Trivia 1)