Top 10 'Most Influential' Amiga Games

stacybro writes "There is an article on Wired about the Top 10 most influential Amiga games. As someone who actually programmed on the Amiga way back when, I can attest to how far they were ahead of the clones when it came to graphics and audio hardware. I often wonder where the PC world would be if Amiga or Apple had had the marketing smarts (or maybe it was cut throat attitude) of Microsoft. 'Defender of the Crown (Cinemaware, 1986): Way before the Hollywood-ization of the game industry, Cinemaware evoked the era of classic movies with this game and others, such as Wings and the classic B-movie tribute It Came From the Desert. Cinemaware titles were definitely precursors of the CD-ROM era of flashy titles such as Myst and The 7th Guest. More importantly, they brought strong and realistic characterization and depiction to the world of computer games. Cinemaware is still alive today and currently working on an update of Defender of the Crown.'"

Comments

apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[Joe The Dragon]

and may even took them over when Amiga when down.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[Captain Splendid]

You know what the really sad thing is? All of the games listed there that I've played, save two (Pinball Dreams and Lemmings), I played on other platforms (NES, SNES, Genesis, PC).

Oh, and where the hell is Populous/Populous 2? Those games alone would have made me run out and get an Amiga if I'd had the cash. Talk about addictive.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[drinkypoo]

Oh, and where the hell is Populous/Populous 2? Those games alone would have made me run out and get an Amiga if I'd had the cash. Talk about addictive.

I was going to raise the same objection, but then I looked it up and Wikipedia claims that it was out for Atari ST and PC before Amiga.

I don't think that's true, exactly; I think it was out for Atari ST, then Amiga, then PC. But I don't have a cite, and I could well be wrong.

Certainly the game was best on the Amiga.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[goatpunch]

Certainly the game [Populous] was best on the Amiga.

It was better on the ST- if you system linked an ST to an Amiga with a NULL modem cable the ST and let the CPUs battle, the won due to it's slightly faster CPU speed (8MHz compared to 7.09MHz (PAL)).

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[operagost]

Are you kidding? Apple thought users only needed two colors and one mouse button. The only similarities between an Amiga and a Mac were the CPU.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[drinkypoo]

It was better on the ST- if you system linked an ST to an Amiga with a NULL modem cable the ST and let the CPUs battle, the won due to it's slightly faster CPU speed (8MHz compared to 7.09MHz (PAL)).

I used to have a 68020 accelerator in an Amiga 500... :)

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[jddj]

No. No, no, no.

I say this as a former Amiga owner/lover, and someone currently sitting at a desk with a Powerbook, a W2K, an XP and an Etch machine cranking away (very hot in here right now...). I coded multimedia apps on Amiga, recorded 3D to my PVR hard-disk-recorder, was heavily invested in my Amiga stuff.

But it became all-too-clear to me what was wrong when I showed the Amiga's NTSC-TV-resolution picture to a PC-using colleague and heard him go "oooh - gross!".

The standard Amigoid response is to explain how the flickering NTSC-resolution picture is somehow superior to the stable, higher-resolution and cheaper-to-buy progressive-scan image the PC guy is used to.

The response of smart marketing people is to figure out what the PC guy wants to buy and deliver that or something marginally better for a premium price.

The Amiga's hardware was so locked into the NTSC/PAL mindsets (and truly DID excel at these things) that moving to higher resolutions the market was starting to demand required abandoning the prized "Amiga hardware" that made the brand special. Without the "Amiga hardware", you had a commodity box with an "incompatible" processor, card bus and OS (in the mind of a consumer).

So while the "Amiga hardware" made the Amiga quite special, it also proved its undoing, particularly as Apple and eventually PC card makers provided the desired higher resolutions and as time went on, got smarter about providing tools for analog and eventually digital video (and sold them at QUITE a premium I might add. Geeks decry high prices for hardware, but a good profit margin keeps a company around. For how long has Apple been on the brink of bankruptcy now? Where is the Amiga?))

Yes, I realize that 3rd parties eventually grafted on solutions - beginning with high-res greyscale displays for the "Desktop Publishing" (remember that term?) software that (as a professional matter) never really arrived for the Amiga either. (voice of experience: I remember wanting to tear my eyes out after working with the first of the bezier-curve drawing apps for the Amiga for an hour on a 640x480 interlaced screen, black pixels on white background, AAAAAHHHH!. Meanwhile, my day job offered me the opportunity to work with Adobe Illustrator 88 on a 21" greyscale progressive-scan monitor. The writing was on the wall for the Amiga...).

Apple absolutely did the right thing for their brand by ignoring NTSC/PAL analog video resolution, focusing on higher-res, higher-refresh square-pixel displays and developing the QuickTime architecture for digital video. They knew where their bread was buttered.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[snsr]

Woah! I hadn't thought about Populous in decades :) Thanks for that.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[Dogtanian]

It was better on the ST- if you system linked an ST to an Amiga with a NULL modem cable the ST and let the CPUs battle, the won due to it's slightly faster CPU speed (8MHz compared to 7.09MHz (PAL)). That may have been true on computationally-intense games, but the Amiga's custom sound and graphics hardware would have more than compensated in most cases due to them taking the load off the CPU. The ST lacked in those departments. In particular it used a variant of the same off-the-shelf sound chip as found in many 8-bit computers; the Amstrad CPC, the later ZX Spectrums (128K models) and even the Oric 1(!).

It *could* do sampled sound, but the chip itself didn't specifically support this, so I assume it was necessary to keep "feeding" the chip, putting a load on the CPU; whereas the Amiga could just point the sound chip to the right section of memory and let it get on with it. This was- I assume- why ST games didn't normally feature impressive sound; also, its natively chip-generated sound wasn't even as good as the Amiga's.

We can probably apply similar arguments to the graphics.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[drinkypoo]

I just realized how hilarious a statement this is. Not because it doesn't make sense - it does! In fact, an Amiga 2500 (Amiga 2000 with, typically, a 25MHz 68030 accelerator board installed, but sometimes a 68020 IIRC, but I'm talking about the '030 version) with an Emplant board is faster at being a Macintosh IIci than the real thing - and the IIci has, guess what, a 25 MHz 68030. But mostly because Apple didn't have accelerated graphics of any sort until the Macintosh II line, and the 8*24 GC display card, in spite of the fact that it was a purely graphical system without a text mode (or at least, if text mode was a ROM feature, it was only used for the debugger.) Whereas of course anyone who belongs here knows that the Amiga was stuffed with custom chips.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[GreggBz]

I've heard every obscure theory under the sun as to why the Amiga failed. Folks, it's simple really. Commodore went bankrupt because the ran a bad business. No fundamental change to the technology of the platform, nor a sweeping OSS movement of the operating system was needed. Jezz, they sold millions of A1200's and the 1200 was long after Amiga's heyday. I don't think beige cases, 15Khz video signals or the lack of business applications killed the golden goose that was the Amiga platform. The potato headed management and idiots in marketing at Commodore killed it. Much as a cunning CEO named Bill Gates has ruled the software business for decades. Read this sometime.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[goatpunch]

That may have been true on computationally-intense games

We were discussing a computationally intensive game, Populous. The increase in CPU speed also gave the ST a small edge in 3D graphics, which the Amiga's custom hardware couldn't help with. The ST's sound chip was humbled by the C64, let alone the Amiga.

The decision to get an ST for me was based on the available Hi-Res monitor which helped me justify it to my parents 'for school' (to be fair I did some pretty cool stuff with ProText and Calamus) and the fact that I knew a bunch of ST owners who supplied me with several 80-capacity disk boxes full of games.

A friend of mine who worked in a computer shop really did hook up an ST to an Amiga and get them to play Populous head to head.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Crikey, that must have done all of 14Mhz? Would any games run correctly with that, most programmers made lots of assumptions about clock speed in those days? Would have been great for GFA Raytrace though, would have only had to wait 10 hours to render that ball on a checkerboard instead of 20. The biggest performance boost I got was installing a 2MB ram upgrade, and then copying Protext's dictionaries to a ramdisk. Hithertoo unknown spellchecking rates were acheived.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[goatpunch]

Remember 'sprogging'? Raising a small section of land near your big buildings so that they'd shrink and create up a new person? They built it into Populous 2, I think you right-clicked on the house.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[jddj]

Well, to dramatically shorten my above post:

"run[ning] a bad business" would consist of offering product the customer doesn't want at a higher price than product the customer wants more.

My original brief isn't really a technology assessment - it's about marketing, and when the customer doesn't understand what the custom chips in the box deliver, (s)he really doesn't care except for the features and benefits the product can deliver and at what price.

Marketing isn't something that happens after you've designed the motherboard. You need to build what people will buy, not a technology wet-dream (lookout iPhone!!!).

If the customer wants modern video resolutions, lower price, compatibility with quality software that's actually available for purchase at the nearby store, the Amiga failed on all of these grounds long before Commodore finally bit the dust, regardless of the spectacuar technical merits of the chips in the box or the tiny-but-wonderfully-capable OS.

Of course you have to make money per unit, and of course you have to advertize it, but to badly paraphrase the (first) Clinton campaign: "It's the F&B/price, stupid."

Apple, Microsoft, et al understood this. Most of us geeks have a hard time swallowing it.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[Bluesman]

The Amiga was released long before the Microsoft and the PC was the 800 pound gorilla of the home PC market. There was no dominant software platform. If anything, it was the Commodore 64, the best selling home computer up to that point. It was everywhere. Toys R' Us had an entire aisle devoted to C64 software -- it was Nintendo and Dell rolled into one. There was no Microsoft Office, it wasn't even on the radar. Totally level playing field as far as software goes.

On top of that, the Amiga was far and away the best machine for price/performance. The Amiga 500 was $500. You couldn't touch a Mac or a PC at that price, let alone one that had a color GUI.

So, on all counts, the Amiga was exactly what the customer wanted.

But nobody knew about it, not because there was bad marketing, but because there was no marketing. Not ever. Nobody outside of the the hard-core tech nerds had ever heard of the damn thing. It wasn't in the business computer mags, it wasn't on TV, it wasn't anywhere.

It was, perhaps, the biggest missed marketing opportunity of the 80's. Commodore was a household name, and I guess they expected that, and that alone, to translate into Amiga sales. Huge mistake. Even Microsoft pushes Vista, even though it's nearly inevitable you'll buy a copy someday.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[Dogtanian]

You're looking from a US-centric perspective. The Amiga did very well in Europe, particularly after the mass-market A500 came out. It only started to fail there in the early 90s, when C='s failure to keep the Amiga's spec up-to-date in the face of competition from PCs on one side and 16-bit consoles on the other proved its undoing. (Long version).

The Amiga also used to be common in TV/3D production, and that only really changed (so I believe) after C= went bankrupt, I assume because relying on a dead platform is bad practice, and also (I again assume) because it made no sense when PCs were becoming more powerful.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[soft_guy]

What the hell does "should of" mean? I think you failed english.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[G-funk]

That's unpossible!

On a serious note, "should of" is right up there with "more then foo" in the "mannerisms of illiterate Americans" category.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

Aston Uni AmigaSoc used to have a joke that the Atari ST could reproduce the sound of 21 musical instruments: eighteen Casio PT-10s, two penny whistles and a kazoo.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[Ford Prefect]

It *could* do sampled sound, but the chip itself didn't specifically support this, so I assume it was necessary to keep "feeding" the chip, putting a load on the CPU; whereas the Amiga could just point the sound chip to the right section of memory and let it get on with it. This was- I assume- why ST games didn't normally feature impressive sound; also, its natively chip-generated sound wasn't even as good as the Amiga's.

I'm not sure if the Amiga's sound hardware could natively generate sound - it may have been sample playback or nothing. But then, with four independent channels of sampled sound, each with its own playback speed and volume, you're hardly going to complain... ;-)

The ST's sound chip was indeed an embarrassment by comparison (it could beep, it could burp and it could hiss), although things did improve with the STe. That had two channels of CPU-ignoring sample playback (left and right), and the experience spotty demo coders had in persuading the older ST's sound chip to playback four-channel Soundtracker modules in a processor-friendly manner obviously helped them write decent mixing routines for the STe.

Hardly any games ever used the improved abilities, of course.

And then there's the Atari Falcon030, which still urinates over the audio capabilities of many modern computers. Eight channels of 16-bit, 48kHz sound, mixed with a DSP chip - allowing such things as MP2 playback with bugger-all load on the main processor.

By which time it was all irrelevant, and Atari stopped making computers shortly afterwards. So long!

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[mdwh2]

We were discussing a computationally intensive game, Populous. The increase in CPU speed also gave the ST a small edge in 3D graphics, which the Amiga's custom hardware couldn't help with.

Surely the 3D graphics in Populous weren't 3D in anywhere near the same sense as we know them today - I thought it was isometric graphics, i.e., just pasting 2D graphic images onto the screen. And the Amiga's custom hardware certainly was good at that.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[mdwh2]

It's true that a simple high-resolution (even if it was only 2 colour) display option on the Amiga's original chipset would have done a lot to help the Amiga in more general business applications.

But later on this wasn't an issue - the Amiga could display higher resolutions on monitors without flicker just like a PC. It is not true at all to say that this required abandoning the custom chipsets, as the updated chipsets were still custom, and backwards compatible. I happily ran 640x480 without interlace, and without needing whatever "grafted on solutions" you are referring to.

The stigma only stuck because most people used a TV, which was why the resolution was poor, and back then PCs couldn't use a TV at all (well, without additional hardware).

The situation you describe of needing to move onto graphics cards was well after Commodore went bust, so can hardly be seen as a cause of failure (if Commodore had still been around, presumably they'd have stuck updated chipsets - whether they were "custom" or generic like you get in Macs and laptops - into newer Amigas).

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[mdwh2]

I agree - also an often forgotten point is that Commodore also produced PCs, so it's not clear that the Amiga was the fault for them going bust.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[goatpunch]

We were discussing a computationally intensive game, Populous. The increase in CPU speed also gave the ST a small edge in 3D graphics, which the Amiga's custom hardware couldn't help with.

Surely the 3D graphics in Populous weren't 3D in anywhere near the same sense as we know them today - I thought it was isometric graphics, i.e., just pasting 2D graphic images onto the screen. And the Amiga's custom hardware certainly was good at that.

Yes, I agree. I was trying to make another point. I'll rephrase:

As well as being of some advantage for CPU-intensive tasks, the increase in CPU speed also gave the ST a small edge in other games such as Stunt Car Racer and Castle Master that used polygonal 3D graphics, which the Amiga's custom hardware couldn't help with.

Re:apple should of used some of the amiga hardware

[drinkypoo]

Crikey, that must have done all of 14Mhz? Would any games run correctly with that, most programmers made lots of assumptions about clock speed in those days?

Most games worked properly. Not all.

The recoverable ramdisk is STILL my favorite thing about the Amiga. If we had that technology on PCs we could reboot Windows a lot faster :)

The top of the list in my mind...

[CaptainPatent]

Nothing beat the breathtaking brutality of blowing up a worm with a rocket launcher!

Cinemaware is still alive today currently working

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn! Never thought the DNF team was in second place!

Proud A500, A2000, A3000, A4000 owner and Cinemaware player.

Datastorm

[Threni]

I got an emulator only the other day, just to play this. It's like no-ones heard of it. Everyone knows all the crap Ocean conversions and movie licenses, but Datastorm is pure gameplay. It's basically Defender 10 (or so) years on. One hard, fun game. And it's legally downloadable from the author's website here: http://www.sodan.dk/oldbits/oldbits.html

Re:Datastorm

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not the only one, I played it to death as well. As well as Sword of Sodan by the same author. And Roketz. And Deluxe Galaga, and many more fantastic games like that, no doubt countless others with you and me. But these games are never mentioned in such 'top x' lists because the authors are underqualified in one or more respects:

1. The best games often came from small software houses (or even shareware/PD on Fish disks or Aminet) without big advertising budgets or flashy packaging and were only known 'in the scene' (i.e. the kids actually playing and swapping them), not by dad who bought it for junior based on marketing and otherwise had no clue (which is why he got a PC unless junior put a stop to it :). There was no Internet, just magazines, but there was a healthy underground scene that spread the good stuff like wildfire.

2. Fog of war. It's been 20 years. Of which the author of such top lists probably spent the first 5 actually dealing with the subject matter, then switched to consoles and PC games to repress and dilute the memory, became Politically Correct (if you still talk about Amiga these days you're the weirdo). Those neurons tuned to incredibly sensitive (and *fun*) 2D gameplay have withered, died and made place for 'rich multimedia' (slap on a CD-ROM) and 'immersive visual experience' (multimillion buck cutscenes, graphics at the cost of gameplay). Viewed from that perspective and distance, one tends to remember the 'cinematic' titles which otherwise sucked (except for Defender of the Crown, which was actually fun to play - even titillating for a kid of the age at a certain point ;).

3. The cynic says: plain and simple commercial interests. A list of 'obscure' games doesn't get a huge number of hits, or a /. mention. Even trawling Aminet turns up more interesting stuff (RoketzPD - pretty amazing, NetWar, KnockOut, WBSteroids, simple but great fun etc.).

You had to be there. In the right age group. On the right continent. And not care what people think now. Writing in retrospect is subject to the usual revisionism in which apparently only the US and Apple exist (despite Amiga marketshare, according to some accounts, in 1990 approaching 30% of home computing in Europe).

So what are we talking about again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummmm, hardware?

It came from the desert

[caffeinatedOnline]

Ah, the memories that title just invoked. I had forgotten about this game. Trying to shoot the antenni off the ants, trying to bed the girl, driving from point a to point b dodging more ants, and that damn mine!! I owned my Amiga for years, and I think that I may have beaten this game once out of the millions of times I tried. They should make a repeat of this game!

Re:It came from the desert

[Anonymous Coward]

It Came From The Desert got me into a lot of trouble the last time I was in a hospital.

Who knew it wasn't actually a good idea to steal a wheelchair and bust out of there the first chance I got? Damn orderlies!

Re:It came from the desert

[jamesh]

They should make a repeat of this game!

There was 'It Came From The Desert II'. I think it was really just more of the same, but that wasn't a bad thing!

Wings

[Rob the Bold]

I liked Wings on the Amiga. My Cinemaware favorite. I even hacked a joystick adapter to use a 15-pin analog joystick on my Amiga to use with it.

And holy crap! Wings is available again -- on the GBA! http://www.cinemaware.com/gbawings_main.asp Now can I had a flight stick for a Game Boy?

Re:Wings

[Rob the Bold]

Double Holy Crap! You can download disk images of many of the old Cinemaware games! http://www.cinemaware.com/vault.asp?vault=games

Re:Wings

[LordSkippy]

Wings was great! Except that you'd spend what seemed like an eternity trying to shoot down a German, and then one of your wingmen would swoop in from nowhere and get the credit for the kill. We use to "soften" up our wingmen for the Germans by peppering them with a few shots at the beginning. The Germans would then be able to take the out quickly, and that would leave the bulk of the Germans for us. Had to be careful though, because if you're bullet took the wingman down, there'd be hell to pay back at base!

Ah, good times, good times.

Let me be the one to say it

[Opportunist]

Where the hell is Turrican? And where is Wing Commander?

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[AKAImBatman]

And where is Wing Commander?

Wing Commander was developed for the PC and later ported to the Amiga. Not the other way around. At the time of its release, I remember Roberts saying that he made Wing Commander just because everyone was telling him how impossible it was to do on the PC. Of course he kind of cheated seeing as how Wing Commander required a high-end 286. Not that it was a big issue in the long run. The Wing Commander series would push hardware requirements for many years to come, and was a driving force behind the 3 year upgrade cycle. :)

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[drinkypoo]

Wasn't Wing Commander a PC game first? Regardless of the answer, I absolutely agree WRT Turrican, which is STILL the most-mentioned Amiga game. BTW you can get a 32kB knockoff of the first level of Turrican for windows (I believe it works on the latest wine as well.)

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[operagost]

When Wing Commander was released in 1990, the 386 was the current CPU and the 486 had just been released. The 286 was old hat.

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[AKAImBatman]

The 286 was far from "old hat". Many folks still had XTs or 286s. I had a high-end Turbo XT at the time, and wouldn't upgrade for another year and a half. The 486 was available, but only the richest of rich had them. They were expensive.

You need to remember that there was nothing driving the upgrade cycle at the time. Many people were happy with their Commodore 64s. It wasn't until games like Wing Commander that the upgrade cycle really started. Especially when you consider that a high-end 286 was the minimum specs required for the game. ;-)

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[xero314]

Of course he kind of cheated seeing as how Wing Commander required a high-end 286. I first played Wing Commander on an 8086, so I wouldn't say that Wing Commander required a high-end anything let alone a 286. You couldn't run it with all graphical options on but it would run smoothly otherwise.

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[antime]

Turrican was a C64 game and Wing Commander a PC game.

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[MarcoAtWork]

although there was a turrican c64 port (quite amazing in its own right) turrican was an amiga/atari st game.

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[antime]

Both Turrican 1 and 2 were originally developed on the C64, then ported to other platforms. Turrican 3 was originally released on the Megadrive (as Mega Turrican) and later ported to the Amiga.

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[MarcoAtWork]

you are right, I googled around and that is correct, funnily enough way back I had turrican on my atari st before my c64 friends got it, I guess they didn't know it existed before or something...

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[kabz]

In 1988, a 12 MHz 80286 Dell was the biz.
Eight whole years later, I was on a 80386SX25, no floating point, though that was kinda crappy. Still better than the MCA crap floating around about then.

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[AKAImBatman]

You couldn't run it with all graphical options on but it would run smoothly otherwise.

I sincerely doubt that. The only "graphical options" it had (other than the extra graphics if you had EMS) was EGA or VGA. I ran (or at least tried to run) Wing Commander on an 8MHz XT with an EGA adapter. It was anything but smooth. Unless you count about 5-10 FPS as "smooth". I did, however, run it on a 486. Which I only realized many years later (and after beating the game) was WAY too fast. :P

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[Malfourmed]

Where's Marble Madness??

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[xero314]

I sincerely doubt that. Doubt it all you want, but trust me, the first system I ever ran it on were the CAD machines in the computer lab at the college an associate of mine worked at. I was a pretty dedicated Commodore user at the time so didn't have a PC available and my buddy had a copy of Wing Commander. So we would play it at his work, a blatant abuse of university equipment that nearly got him canned, but that is beside the point. I can't remember the full statistics on the machines but I do recall they were 8086 (because the only 286s available were lacking hard drives, and Wing Commander did not run well from disk, at least we never had the patients to get through the start up) with EGA adapters, and I'm not positive but I believe these were either have been 7.14mhz desktop pros or 8 mhz NEC clone based machines. We ran through WC and the First of the Secret Missions on those machines. Had all the visual options turned off, such as in being able to see the character controlling the yoke and in cockpit damage details (which is probably the EMS options you mentioned), and the systems had no sound processors, but other than a slight pause during explosions the game actually ran quite well.

Looking at the claimed minimum requirements for the game I wouldn't believe it either had I not actually been there and done it. Then again it wouldn't be the only time Origin overstated the minimum requirements for a game, as was well documented in the Mac Version of WC 3.

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[AKAImBatman]

other than a slight pause during explosions the game actually ran quite well.

I'm thinking that you're remembering the game through rose tinted glasses. At the time, quite a lot of games were PAINFULLY slow. (I remember Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego being oddly faster on a CGA PCjr than it was on a beefy EGA XT! Of course, that had everything to do with fill-rates.) So Wing Commander running at 5-10 FPS probably didn't seem so bad. It really was supposed to run faster than that. :)

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[xero314]

I'm thinking that you're remembering the game through rose tinted glasses. I'd call it relative, not rose colored. And I will agree it certainly wasn't optimal, like running WC off of floppy, I was just saying it was playable and enjoyable on a 8086, and didn't require a 80286 or higher. The box claimed 286 12 mhz or better with Dual Floppy or a Hard Disk. Never tried it with dual floppy but if it was anything like one floppy it would have been far less enjoyable than the frame rate on an 8086. And since most sci fi movies are 24 frames per second, I can't see playing a game at 10 fps being all that bad (I'm old enough to remember slower frame rates than that).

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[AliasTheRoot]

I had a 1mb 286 when wing commander was released, and bought a sound blaster especially to hear the music and speech in it. Of course you had to spend hours fscking around with EMS/XMS to get that working.

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[turrican]

"Where the hell is Turrican?"

I'm right here!

(...see username. Sorry had to be done - karma be damned!)

Re:Let me be the one to say it

[Opportunist]

Don't sweat it. You should see me when an "opportunity" comes along.

Populous?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't seem to find populous in that list, what a shame. That game basically started the entire god game genre (which eventually led to its creator Peter Molyneux receiving an Order of the British Empire).

Re:Populous?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't seem to find populous in that list, what a shame. That game basically started the entire god game genre (which eventually led to its creator Peter Molyneux receiving an Order of the British Empire).

Nah, SimCity had Populous beat cold on that front. </fightingwords>

Re:Populous?

[dougsha]

What a wonderful and wonderfully addictive game.

Re:Populous?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, Mr. Molyneaux went on to make the computerized version of "don't pee on the electric fence"... er, I mean "don't poo on the villagers's food supply"... rather "don't eat the villagers"... AKA Black & White.

Populous

[Tsu-na-mi]

Rather than Syndicate, I think Bullfrog's Populous was more influential. It ushered in the era of the 'god' sim. Most of the rest I can agree with, but I had never even heard of Another World, and I consider myself an avid Amiga gamer back in the day.

I think the author may have a bit of tunnel vision, insofar as the games are rather limited to a few publishers (Psygnosis & Sensible Software make up half the titles).

Notably missing are Blood Money, Arkanoid (maybe because it's a port), and Battle Squadron.

Re:Populous

[penp]

Another World was later released in the states as Out of this World. The version I played was licensed by Interplay, on MS-DOS. I think I also played a version of it on SNES. It was an amazing game, well ahead of its time.

Re:Populous

[Das Modell]

Chaos Engine and Superfrog are probably my favorite Amiga games. I've completed CE with all six characters, and done about three to four miscellaneous playthroughs. Superfrog is still my favorite platform game.

On a somewhat related note, when I noticed this post I was listening to music from the old Amiga demo 'Sequential' by Andromeda. I can't say I've seen too many demos in my lifetime, but Sequential is my favorite by far. The modern PC demos I've seen have been underwhelming and not very interesting.

Re:Populous

[StikyPad]

Another World was in all the Ami mags, and it was pretty popular. I remember playing it, and getting almost nowhere near through it. (Same with all of the SotBs). Actually, a Windows XP version was released recently, and you can download the demo here.

Re:Populous

[Moflamby-2042]

I remember playing Another World, it was a remarkable game and I'm glad to see it on this list. It looked and played very differently than every other game style I'd seen to date, the fluid animation and bizarre alien utopian city and tech future art really did give an "Another World" feel to it. But I remember it being far too short playing it from start to finish. To me it actually did easily surpass most of the games in this list. Syndicate was great and Populous should be on the list too along with a dozen or so others (even though calling it a top ten then would be a hard sell). I'd also like to add Dungeon Master and the X-com UFO game into the list..

Re:Populous

[A_Non_Moose]

I'm forgoing mod points to reply and get a bit of perspective on this, because I'm suprised I missed/don't recall
some of the things that the article talks about.

Rather intriguing to find out Syndicate got its start on Amiga (tunnel vision, or not).

Lest you think me a heathen/n00b, I got my start on the Atari2600 (Asteroids, Atlantis, Subterrania, Tanks), then
a Classic Nintendo (Rolling Thunder, Metroid, Double Dragon--to the point me and roommate almost got murdered by our 3rd roomie). Mid to late 80's

Then on to systems I never owned, but had access to: Few Friend's Commodor(s) (SP?) Tetris, Monkey Island, Hunt for Red October (always beat the roomies high score. Wasn't his, but his good friend's, while said friend was out to sea.) Three people, three games, hours of fun/wasted time. Heck, Monkey Island was done in shifts, sometimes.
(end of 80's, beginning of 90's)

I think there was an new machine later, it was either a C64 or Amiga that had Red October, also. But was way too
difficult as ships never used depth charges, but those mini-torpedoes that fired straight down and never missed.
(90 to 92'ish)

Prince of Persia on a supervisor/friend's machine...286 or 386, and BBS's, and seeing a "PC" and what computers
could do by the time my enlistment ended in 93'ish.

That out of the way, I've never heard of Populous or Another World, but Syndicate I'd played on my PC after playing DooM a year after it came out (no interest until I played it, same with Descent).

But Syndicate +/- American Revolt and Hi Octane (Bullfrog, IIRC) were some of the most fun and addictive game
in the past 10 years or so.

So I guess I'm asking of /. and those with a bit more gaming experience, did these titles die with the platform, fade slow/fast after other machines came around or some other reason. (I think Worms had a PC port as
I recall several people telling me about it during my MW2 revival stage.)

Some other Amiga games worth mentioning

[SirBruce]

The update to Defender of the Crown already came out a few years ago. IMHO, it largely sucked. I only played it a couple of times before putting it back into the box. I never did get the hang of the 'cinematic' swordfighting controls.

Virtually all of Cinemaware's games could have been listed, but DotC and Wings are probably two of the best examples. Rocket Ranger and It Came From the Desert are also heartily recommended.

The list in the quoted article does have some glaring ommissions. Dungeon Master was the first 3D realtime action CRPG, and I think the Amiga version was superior to both the ST and PC versions. Also woth mentioning are Populus and Artic Fox, which I think really shined in the Amiga versions. Finally, there is Faery Tale Adventure, which I think was one of the best isometic action CRPGs ever, irrespective of platform.

Re:Some other Amiga games worth mentioning

[nogginthenog]

IIRC Dungeon Master was the first Amiga game to require 1Mb of RAM and actually increased memory upgrade sales.

Re:Some other Amiga games worth mentioning

[snuf23]

I think the first update was "Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown". There was also a "digitally remastered version". The latest is Defender of the Crown: Heroes Live Forever, which looks like it has some cards thing going on in it.
I think Faery Tale Adventure was great for the huge world that streamed in seamlessly off the disk. Admittedly the world was fairly sparse but at the time there was nothing else like it. It also had some pretty good music. Getting the turtle and later the golden swan to ride was sweet!

Re:Some other Amiga games worth mentioning

[bri2000]

I seem to recall that as well (and that was at a time when the 512KB Amiga upgrade was costing about £150). I think the reason DM isn't on the list is that it was released for the ST about a year ahead of the Amiga version. I certainly remember all the ST fanboys at school using the availability of DM as one of the principal arguments in favour of the ST (that and the MIDI port).

Missing Games

[Wyrd01]

Everyone's going to have their own take on what was influential to them. I grew up playing games on my dad's Amiga (500 through 4000 over the years). My shoddy descriptions won't do them justice, but two games that were very important to me are missing:

Faery Tale Adventure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faery_Tale_Adventure
A giant, continuous world full of quests and tasks to run. Like most old games it was very unforgiving... you could die quickly and easily if you weren't careful. I spent hours exploring that world. I remember finding a flying goose and being able to fly across the land. Ah the memories.

Dungeon Master: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master_(compu ter_game)
The first real-time, first person dungeon crawling game. Casting spells involved clicking a series of runes in a particular order, Fireball was Fire then Wing. On the 13th level of the dungeon was the boss, whom you had to capture in a forcecage, a very challenging battle. You could also go down to the 14th level whose only resident was a huge dragon. Food was a big issue in the game, you had to manage your food stocks carefully. The dragon at the bottom of the dungeon could be killed for a heaping pile of Dragon Steaks. To me this was the most influential game on the Amiga, it is my favorite Amiga game of all time.

Re:Missing Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Dungeon Master ROCKED. It really had replayability, and the constant resource constraints made you always feel under pressure. Poison and starvation were real threats. If you have a hankering for it, it's been ported to Java:

http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~alandale/dmjava/

It isn't the same dungeon, but the spells and game play seem very, very similar.

Re:Missing Games

[SheldonYoung]

I still hear the music from the Faery Tale Adventure in my head from time to time. Not that it was particularily good, it's just the game was very long and it played over and over and over. By that logic I'm sure I'll remember some Slashdot stories forever.

Re:Missing Games

[GreggBz]

Dungeon Master originally appeared on the Atari ST. :-p
Not to diminish it's brilliance though. The stereo sound on the Amiga really made it creepy.

Re:Missing Games

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy needs a +5 troll mod if ever ANYONE needed it...

Re:Missing Games

[jdigriz]

Never got by the darned switch puzzles in DM. DM2 was fun too. I also liked picking up items and holding them at chest height to throw them. Ninja level gained, sweet! Throwing a falchion into a bad guy was just evil.

Re:Missing Games

[fbjon]

Man, that is a game I had completely forgotten. Damn you, now I had to go download the music!

Another World...

[posterlogo]

...also known as Out of this World is one of my most favorite games of all time. I played the MSDOS version at a time when graphics were getting fairly decent. Even though Another World used very simple vector graphics, the motion capture that went into making the character animations was absolutely amazing. The art was beautiful and the original music fit really well into the bizarre fantasy/scifi world envisioned in the game. It was the first time the visuals, music, and story of a game really came together to create a truly immersive mood for me.

Re:Another World...

[dunezone]

I actually played it on a Genesis emulator, seriously though,if you have the walk through this game only takes about 45 minutes to complete and is worth a play for anyone just for the artwork and game play it has.

"Influential" Amiga Games? In 2007?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I still own two Amigas, but were there really ANY "influential" Amiga games? I mean, games that were unique to the Amiga platform that anyone outside Amiga cared about? I think the marketplace has spoken pretty loudly on this topic: if there HAD been any influential games, Amiga wouldn't have been extinguished. (Do you know anyone who bought an Amiga just to play game X? Neither do I.)

Innovative sound? Sorry, but I got my Amiga in part to play with music and the 8-bit stuff is what eventually kicked me over the PC world (and then soon into Linux).

And why do we still care in 2007, 15 years after Amiga's peak?

Was Amiga big enough to call influential?

[stratjakt]

Don't get me wrong, I'm an oldschool commie fan.

The C64 was huge.

The Amiga... not so much..

I remember Populous and Battle Chess

Obvious Omissions...

[cca93014]

Dungeon Master, Carrier Command, Kick Off 2, Xenon 2, F/18 Interceptor

Dungeon Master was way, way out there. You could even carry your characters over to the sequel title!

There was so much originality in the Amiga gaming scene that is sadly, sadly lacking in modern gaming. Looking back at the Amiga it was so far ahead of its time in so many ways...food for thought...

Re:Obvious Omissions...

[blincoln]

You could even carry your characters over to the sequel title!

The Bard's Tale games on my Apple IIe when I was a kid let you do the same thing. In fact, at least one of them (III) let you carry over your characters from other series entirely - e.g. Wizardry.

The obscure and unfinished Star Saga trilogy let you migrate your characters from the first game to the second.

I believe Might & Magic II let you bring your characters from the first game over as well.

Nothing against the Amiga - it was an awesome platform years ahead of its time - but it wasn't the first to allow that kind of thing.

Re:Obvious Omissions...

[JoeCommodore]

Dungeon Master, yeah, now that was something. I'll add to the list

- ArmourGeddon - switch between piloting one of several combat machines (heavy tank, light tank, helicopter, strike fighter, stealth bomber, and armored hovercraft) combat against the computer or another player via serial. All the simulators were quite fun to control. Sure with the BZFlag guys would get ideas from it.

- Gauntlet I and II - FOUR Players at the same time with all the good sound and graphics! Sure did the arcade version justice also of note were the Amiga versions of the Arcade hits Star Wars and Empire Stries back too.

- Vroom - Very nice Formula one racing, hit the wheels of your opponent right and you can sail over them (in arcode race mode). Not much high-detail but well done visuals and mechanics.

- Elite: Frontier - The best sequel there is, it was a showstopper of Elite goodness.

Re:Obvious Omissions...

[StikyPad]

Not just gaming.. Remember demos?

Re:Obvious Omissions...

[DoChEx]

What about Hunter??? it was the GTA of its day, but you where a solider http://amigareviews.classicgaming.gamespy.com/hunt er.htm

ah the amiga

[micro911]

i don't know what life would have been like if i had never played on the amiga and the pinball games that came with it... aaaahhhhhhh

SpeedBall

[SheldonYoung]

SpeedBall II: Brutal Deluxe is still the most adrenaline-pumping game I have played, though the original Half Life came close. The balance and playability of SBII was spot on, the sounds complemented the atmosphere and two-player mode was immensely fun.

Re:SpeedBall

[trouser]

Icecream!

F18 Interceptor!

[smellsofbikes]

I think it might've been as late as 1988 when my brother and I had F18 interceptor networked on our amigas: head-to-head networked air combat flightsim, with excellent color, speed, and stereo sound, when a lot of people were still using black-and-white Macs that went 'beep'. My friends in college were literally unable to believe such things existed until they saw it.

Re:F18 Interceptor!

[necro2607]

Wow, after finding these screenshots... well... that is insane. This game was released in 1988?! Very impressive graphics... :)

Re:F18 Interceptor!

[Anonymous Coward]

>This game was released in 1988?!

Compare with Spectrum Holobyte's F-16 Falcon of the same time. Those were good years.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga/falcon/screens hots

Re:F18 Interceptor!

[smellsofbikes]

In close-up dogfighting it didn't refresh often enough and got a bit blocky and clunky-feeling. But, y'know, everyone else was playing 2d things like castle wolfenstein.

Re:F18 Interceptor!

[Anonymous Coward]

Then they would have fainted if they had seen the OpenGL networked-multiplayer fighter simulator that came with the SGI IRIX graphics workstations.

Re:F18 Interceptor!

[tttonyyy]

I think it might've been as late as 1988 when my brother and I had F18 interceptor networked on our amigas: head-to-head networked air combat flightsim, with excellent color, speed, and stereo sound, when a lot of people were still using black-and-white Macs that went 'beep'. My friends in college were literally unable to believe such things existed until they saw it. Oh yes! That game was cracking good fun. Used to take it in turns with a mate to see who could pull off the most outragous stunts, like touching the plane's belly in the sea without crashing, flying inverted under the bridges, or just taxiing it over a bridge. :)

Very well designed game for the time, and impressive to play.

Re:F18 Interceptor!

[An ominous Cow art]

F-18 was good... Falcon was even better. The sound of starting up your engine, then going to full afterburner, was.... awesome.

Another World

[alexhs]

Another World was known as "Out of this World" in the US.
It was one of the most famous adventure games of the era (at least in France), with Alone in the Dark.

Should still Live on in WinUAE

[Anonymous Coward]

In case any of you are interested in re-living the past, these games should work flawlessly under UAE. Off the top of my head I know that soccer and Shadow of the Beast work.

I don't remember the game "Worms" looking so much like an ad for Jabra headsets, though.

It was a blast programming the Amiga

[dougsha]

I'm still enormously proud of my Cinemaware game "King of Chicago". It was Cinemaware's 2nd best-seller in its first 2 years - waaaaay behind sales of Defender of the Crown by Kellyn Beeck (250k units DoC - amazing in '85, 50k KoC - nice in sales in '86). King was definitely not one of the 10 most influential Amiga games, however, because I rolled my own interactive narrative system - Dramaton ( GDC talk on Dramaton: http://www.zogax.com/verbiage/battle.htm ) - which was just a little too out there for anyone to replicate.

I did the first version of King on the Mac in '86 and then ported it to the Amiga and the Apple IIGS. I did my own art on the Mac (using digitized clay heads) but C-ware wisely redid the art for the Amiga, which had a lot to do with the big sales. Rob Landeros (who later formed Trilobyte and did 7th Guest) did the art.

Coding on the Amiga was a blast. The main online hangout for developers was BIX, the Byte Information Exchange. Simple things like screen-flipping for animation were poorly documented and there was little agreement in the first years about the best way to code them. You had to get down and dirty writing little fragments of code executed by "the copper" - the video coprocessor system.

"Cinemaware is still alive today and currently working on an update of Defender of the Crown.'" - And screwing the original game devs royally. They stripped any mention of Kellyn Beeck from their current version of Defender of the Crown and left my name off the King of Chicago credits on their website. Here's a little discussion with a current Cinemaware employee on the Indie Gamer's forum about their current version of Defender of the Crown http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=9738 &highlight=King/.

At least they'll never butcher King of Chicago because they'll never figure out Dramaton.

Self-horntoot warning - I am also very proud of the game I did before King of Chicago - ChipWits - which I am reviving at http://chipwits.com/ .

Re:It was a blast programming the Amiga

[NullProg]

I have most of the cinemaware titles on my IIgs. My kids play the crap out of DOTC and Zany Golf from EA. Never played King of Chicago. I think Cinemaware hit its peak with the release of the three Stooges :)

+10 Retro.
Enjoy,

Re:It was a blast programming the Amiga

[Carrot007]

Hey I actually remeber that game, it was kinda good! Spent a fair few nights playing it on my old A500!

I think they should also have stated devpac was one of the most influential games. The amiga was responsible for getting many people into programming, for me that's when programming really made sence.

Re:It was a blast programming the Amiga

[blincoln]

Self-horntoot warning - I am also very proud of the game I did before King of Chicago - ChipWits - which I am reviving at http://chipwits.com/

Wow, that is old school. I remember when the family of a friend of mine in elementary school got a first-generation Mac and ChipWits was the one game they had for it. It seemed impossibly complex at the time, and every once in awhile I've wondered what it would be like now. I'm glad you're reviving it.

Off-topic, no karma bonus.

Re:It was a blast programming the Amiga

[pigeontheory]

I have nothing but fond memories of the Cinemaware games. I certainly did not envy my PC counterparts for CGA graphics were crap compared to Amiga's games. ie Defender of the Crown/Three Stooges. But for some reason, I'd have to say that the Psygonsis game Barbarian had me hooked. Spent hours trying to conquer those screens. Impossible to play today, yet I still don't know how much patience I had back then. Also, the Titus games (Fire and Forget, Crazy Cars) were LOADS of fun. And the music! (sniff)

Re:It was a blast programming the Amiga

[BumBiscuit]

Feel free to toot away on that horn. King of Chicago was great fun, and a close race with Rocket Ranger as my favorite Cinemaware title. Helping Pinky turn the other hoods against The Old Man was a hoot.

Thanks for the great memories.

Re:It was a blast programming the Amiga

[El_Oscuro]

I used to play Defender of the Crown on the C-64, and it was a total blast. The graphics and sound were awesome. I don't think PC games came close until Doom.

Re:It was a blast programming the Amiga

[dougsha]

Thanks, BumBiscuit. Did you play it on the Amiga?

I'm going to be reviving my Dramaton system to do some online games.

Re:It was a blast programming the Amiga

[BumBiscuit]

I did play it on the Amiga, but sadly, I did not own one myself. I was reduced to playing occasionally at a friends house, which was far less than I would have liked to.

Thankfully, I've been able to revisit your fine game recently through the magic of emulation. Sorry to hear that Cinemaware isn't doing right by their original developers, but they do earn some points in my book for making the old ROMs available.

Re:It was a blast programming the Amiga

[Dogtanian]

I think they should also have stated devpac was one of the most influential games. You do realise that Devpac was an assembler and NOT A GAME, right?!

Re:It was a blast programming the Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

What, do you want a medal or something? King of Chicago was a boring wet-fart of a game, the only slightly redeeming feature was the graphics. Of course it came in a long second to DOTC, because that game was actually playable.

Re:"Influential" Amiga Games? In 2007?

[Anonymous Coward]

We care because people in the game industry who are now 25-30 had Amigas 15 years ago, when they were growing up.

The Amiga died in about 1995... the CD32 and A1200 had poor performance compared to the 486 PC. The Amiga was better during the PCs 386, but not the 486, and many people held onto their Amigas until the Pentium.

Alien Breed

[dalmiroy2k]

The only Amiga game that interested me back in the 90's that wasn't on the PC or SNES/Genesis is Alien Breed.
There is a freeware remake available for Windows:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/xavnet/alienbreed/

Influential AMIGA games? Uh, whatever.

[Malkin]

I'm afraid that there's not a single one of these ten "innovative entries in the Amiga game canon" that was exclusive to the Amiga. If you don't believe me, look it up. It would've been MUCH more interesting, to me (not having been able to afford an Amiga in high school), to see what sort of innovative things people did using Amiga's fancy hardware -- especially since this is in the HARDWARE category and not the GAMES category. Instead, the article sort of leaves me scratching my head, and not caring much.

Black Crypt

[Morinaga]

I loved Black Crypt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Crypt

Re:"Influential" Amiga Games? In 2007?

[Anonymous Coward]

you're either an idiot or you have a memory problem.

Another World still lives

[austinpoet]

http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/ It has been updated and runs on XP. I guess there's also a mobile version too.

Fighter Duel Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

> were there really ANY "influential" Amiga games?

Yup.

Jaeger's Fighter Duel Pro was original to the Amiga, and really should be on this list. It looks horrible today, but it was the first two-player combat sim with flight physics. And on Amiga 1000s across modems I should add. That got a lot of coders interested in what was possible.

Playing the game the first time was the same sort of eye-opener as first plays of Doom and Myst. It was extremely inspirational.

Re:"Influential" Amiga Games? In 2007?

[antime]

All the Amiga users in the world didn't just suddenly disappear when the platform died. Lots of people who grew up playing Amiga games ended up working on games for other platforms, taking their Amiga influences with them.

HOW could you LEAVE OFF the ULTIMATE amiga game...

[merreborn]

No BLAZEMONGER?

Theme Park and Frontier Elite 2

[JohnnyKimble]

Another of Peter Molyneux's masterpieces, I spent many weeks playing Theme Park. Watered down cola + salty chips = lotsa money. And no mention of influential Amiga games would be complete without a mention of Frontier Elite 2, the greatest game I've ever had the pleasure of playing.

Re:Theme Park and Frontier Elite 2

[DCBoland]

Yes! Im sick of asking everyone if they played Frontier Elite 2 and getting nothing but blank faces. It amazed as a young gamer and amazes me more now as a programmer; written in assembler and giving the player a procedurally generated universe to explore, all on one floppy disk. For those who missed it on the Amiga, a shareware PC version is available here: http://www.eliteclub.co.uk/download/

Re:Theme Park and Frontier Elite 2

[ajs318]

Well, the original Elite on the BBC Model B was pretty good for its time. Bear in mind it was running on a 2MHz 6502 with just 32KB of RAM, of which 10KB was swallowed for the frame buffer and another 2.5KB for housekeeping (3.5KB on a disk-based system, but you can swap in from disk in a way you can't with a cassette).

Re:Theme Park and Frontier Elite 2

[Ford Prefect]

Yes! Im sick of asking everyone if they played Frontier Elite 2 and getting nothing but blank faces. It amazed as a young gamer and amazes me more now as a programmer; written in assembler and giving the player a procedurally generated universe to explore, all on one floppy disk.

I missed playing it when it was first released (friends raved about it, however) and eventually got round to playing it many years later on a super-speedy emulated ST. It was brilliant, and this was when I was familiar with 3D accelerated graphics, high resolution texture mapping and all that.

Recently, I signed up for a week's free trial of Eve Online, hoping for a multiplayer version of more than the same. I was sorely disappointed - the combat was many steps backwards, there was nothing to explore and planets were just a pretty backdrop that could be flown straight through. I lasted less than 24 hours.

I'm cautiously optimistic about a new project called Infinity: The Quest for Earth - its seamless, planetary landings to space stations to solar systems seem a natural progression on Elite 2's, and the combat in the combat prototype seems remarkably familiar, too.

And yes, there should be an entire procedurally generated universe to explore. No word on it fitting on a floppy disk, however... ;-)

Re:Theme Park and Frontier Elite 2

[JohnnyKimble]

The modern day equivalent of Elite 2 is the X# games. I was pleasantly surprised with X3: Reunion (http://www.egosoft.com/games/x3/info_en.php). Ok, it wasn't as massive as Frontier was (although it is pretty huge), but I think anyone who enjoyed Frontier, will a least have a bit of fun with X3. It has a similar structure in terms of it's gameplay elements (trading\combat\missions\ship upgrades) and also adds in the ability to build your own space stations. I get the similar sense of freedom I got with Frontier when playing X3.

Just think where Atari would be..

[n6kuy]

..if Commodore hadn't stolen the Amiga from them.

Re:Just think where Atari would be..

[Dogtanian]

..if Commodore hadn't stolen the Amiga from them. Commodore didn't steal the Amiga from Atari, they simply out-manoeuvered them. Jack Tramiel (who had left C= and purchased Atari's computer division by this time) thought he had the Amiga company by the balls and could push them into surrendering the company/rights to him; he was wrong and he didn't succeed. But I'm sure it wasn't for wont of effort.

Can't say I give a toss; it went to court, and he lost. Call it bullying or not, but Tramiel was/is the type of guy who would use any means, fair or foul to get what he wanted. Synapse, a developer of countless classic Atari games went bankrupt because they signed a contract with Atari to develop some software, when Atari was owned by Warner. When Tramiel took over, he acted as if they contract was no longer binding upon him (with no basis AFAIK), paid Synapse nothing and rightly assumed that Synapse wouldn't be able to afford to take it to court.

As an ex-Atari owner (well, actually, I still own my 800XL and 130XE), who still has some residual loyalty to the badge (if nothing else), I'll still say this... Even if we were to accept that the Amiga was "stolen" from Tramiel's Atari using legally dubious and devious techniques, who gives a toss? He was no better. That's the exact type of thing he did himself all the time; beaten at his own game. It's business, and no-one owes him or Atari any sympathy.

Amiga was a nice computer, but I can't say I ever gave a toss about Commodore either, though.

Re:Just think where Atari would be..

[hazydave]

Consider also what Commodore brought the Amiga. First of all, the Amiga, Inc. people really, really didn't want to be acquired by Atari, and would have made out very poorly, financially. Commodore, as it turns out, paid them very nicely. And while I agree on the marketing side of things (C= didn't market the Amiga any better than anything else C= marketed), the technical issues were day and night, Commodore vs. Atari. Commodore did actually have a fab that could make the chips for the Amiga. They brought additional engineers into the projects, expanded the projects, set up a truly functional Developer program, evolved the OS and the hardware (not as much as any of us wanted, but way more than anything Atari ever did).

And in fact, the Amiga did ok under Commodore for awhile. It wasn't a rapidly growing business, but it was steady until the early 1990s, which a whole new level of mismanagers were hired. They managed to royally screw up what could have been some really interesting years for the Amiga.

In the end, the notion of doing in-house graphics hardware had to die, just as doing in-house CPUs had once worked for Commodore, but didn't by the time the Amiga came along. We in Engineering knew this; in fact, there was a project in 1993 indended to deliver a PCI-based successor to the Amiga graphics chips... it even had a real GPU (actually based on the PA-RISC processor ISA) and 3D engine. This was at least potentially something that would have sold in the PC market as well as being sold in Amiga computers.

-Dave

Re:Just think where Atari would be..

[Dogtanian]

They brought additional engineers into the projects By contrast, on buying Atari, Tramiel supposedly fired all the engineers. I read elsewhere that they had a SID-beating sound chip lined up for the 8-bit computers... it was shelved because the people who knew how it worked were all gone. Sad...

(Would've been better than the ST's off-the-shelf sound chip as well).

Commodore did actually have a fab that could make the chips for the Amiga. Atari always seems under-resourced to me. They abandoned the Falcon shortly after it came out to concentrate on the Jaguar, and the Lynx never got the breaks it deserved. It didn't help that they seemed to spread themselves to thin and lack focus (a habit going back to the Warner days). So you may be right that it's fortunate they didn't get their hands on the Amiga.

And in fact, the Amiga did ok under Commodore for awhile. Yep; particularly in Europe. Even the ST did well here for a while, until the Amigas came down in price. The ST was also very popular with musicians well into the 90s.

in fact, there was a project in 1993 indended to deliver a PCI-based successor to the Amiga graphics chips... it even had a real GPU (actually based on the PA-RISC processor ISA) and 3D engine. This was at least potentially something that would have sold in the PC market as well as being sold in Amiga computers. It's interesting to speculate on where this would have taken Commodore and the Amiga itself, had they survived. Would it have given it new life or would it have eventually steered the Amiga technology towards the amorphous PC black hole? Who knows...

Sorry, Psygnosis games sucked donkey balls.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

(link to Wikipedia entry on overrated, has-been games factory)

Sorry, Psygnosis games sucked donkey balls.

Sure, Shadow of the Beast looked cool in the shop in demo mode, but the play of the game was worse than Atari's PitFall from ten years before. If anything, Psygnosis's legacy is "games that look better in the screenshots and demos than they do in normal play". (Oh, they also had annoyingly long cut scenes that you couldn't click through.)

And ALL of Psygnosis games had the reputation of copy protection vampires: they wouldn't launch from Workbench, wouldn't copy easily (in case your Amiga ate the originals) and they were touchy as hell (couldn't run on A1200s or A500s or visa versa).

And yes, I read the titles on the Wikipedia page...I still own a few of these, but thank God I got them for free, because Psygnosis games aren't the ones that made my Amiga computing a positive experience.

Re:Sorry, Psygnosis games sucked donkey balls.

[Dogtanian]

ALL of Psygnosis games had the reputation of copy protection vampires: they wouldn't launch from Workbench, wouldn't copy easily (in case your Amiga ate the originals) and they were touchy as hell (couldn't run on A1200s or A500s or visa versa). To be fair, most other Amiga games didn't run from Workbench either, and Psygnosis were far from the only company that had compatibility issues when the A1200 (or even A500 Plus) came out, due to games "hitting the hardware" directly for the performance boost.

I would say that Psygnosis did the classic Lemmings; but then again, maybe not. They just distributed it- it was DMA Design (now Rockstar North) who actually created/wrote it.

Wierd dreams...

[Joe Snipe]

Jeez, what the hell was that all about? Good gameplay, hard as hell, man eating balls; it took me a full day to figure out the cotton candy machine, and that was the very first screen!

Re:Wierd dreams...

[Peganthyrus]

I had a legal copy - so I got to read the novella packaged in the box!

The story, according to that, was that you were a guy who was being hassled by a minor demon. She was making you have constant nightmares in an attempt to drive you crazy. Eventually your tiredness resulted in some accident that ended you up on an operating table, where you slipped into deep, disturbing anaesthetic-induced nightmares...

This sort of also explains the final screen, which I only got to by using the cheat code. IIRC you had to escape the cotton candy machine, then walk halfway into the funhouse mirror, and tap out 'SOS' in Morse code on the Help key. Your life display would change to an infinity, and you could hit some key (probably Help) to skip screens.

Beautiful and strange game, not actually much fun to play except for the lure of seeing what surreal, disturbing imagery would show up next.

Re:Influential AMIGA games? Uh, whatever.

[Carrot007]

Being exclusive is not really the point.

The amiga version being the first is what usually made an amiga game, occasionally being a significantly better version also made a game and "amiga game", etc...

Exclusiveness is nothing to do with it.

Re:"Influential" Amiga Games? In 2007?

[Dogtanian]

I still own two Amigas, but were there really ANY "influential" Amiga games? I mean, games that were unique to the Amiga platform Well, plenty of Amiga games were converted. Does this disqualify them?

I think the marketplace has spoken pretty loudly on this topic: if there HAD been any influential games, Amiga wouldn't have been extinguished. By the same logic, there were no influential C64 games because that machine is also dead... huh?!

The Amiga was extinguished because Commodore did too little to improve its specs in the face of competition from commodity PCs. By the early 1990s, PC prices were falling rapidly, and their specs were vastly improved over the text-and-CGA-if-you're-lucky crudeness of mid-80s PCs (when the Amiga launched).

(Of course, the Amiga was never *that* popular in the US, but here in Europe it did very well during the late-80s/early-90s.)

The Amiga was incredible when it came out, and it's probably fair to say that it was the first true mass-market multimedia computer. 4096 colour graphics in HAM mode? Amazing. Sound? Amazing. Pre-emptive multitasking OS? Beat the living *heck* out of MS-DOS, and even Windows 3.0/3.1's co-operative multitasking wasn't as good (locked up if one application refused to cede control). And that came out five years later(!) Yeah, it was expensive when it first came out, but that's life... remember that all this was back in 1985.

Sadly, Commodore rested on their laurels; the A500 was much cheaper and still cutting edge, and proved very popular. However, until 1990, even the "serious" Amigas were just more expandable versions of the basic 68000/original-chipset design (IIRC some had accelerators slapped in). 1990's high-end A3000 was 68030-based, but very expensive and not radically new technically.

It wasn't until the A4000/A1200 were announced in late 1992 that "true" next generation Amigas came out. Put simply, they were too late; the A1200 was a good machine, and had it come out 18 months earlier at a similar price it might have done well... but by 92/93 the Amiga market had already started to seriously decline. In little over a year, the focus at my school had shifted from exchanging pirated Amiga games to PC games.

I should make clear that Commodore also- apparently- went bankrupt because of some dubious business practices and milking of the company that would have been illegal under US law (by this stage C= was based in the Bahamas). Everyone points at the CD32 as a flop console that put the nail in C='s coffin, but actually it was selling quite well. Nothing exciting, just an A1200 with CD drive and no keyboard, but it was a decent cash-cow in Europe. Unfortunately, everything else just went belly-up; C= weren't even very successful at commodity PC manufacture.

Innovative sound? Sorry, but I got my Amiga in part to play with music and the 8-bit stuff is what eventually kicked me over the PC world Hello? The Amiga came out in 1985; what was there in the PC world that was remotely comparable at the time? I remember seeing an Amiga on TV in 1986 and being absolutely blown away by the quality of the sound. The first FM-synthesis/sample-playing Sound Blasters didn't come out until 1989.

And why do we still care in 2007, 15 years after Amiga's peak? Why do we still care about anything in the past regarding computing? There's a temptation, because the current standard is the PC, to draw the line back that way and see history from a PC-centric perspective. Fact is that the Amiga was a significant machine in its time; it's dead now, and I think it should be left in peace, but if we're discussing history it has an important place.

Oh, yeah.... and the Mega Drive

[Dogtanian]

I should also have made clear that the Amiga was also hit at the lower end by the rise of the 16-bit consoles. In Europe where the Amiga was popular, the 8-bit NES never did big business (it was outsold in the UK by Sega's Master System!), and the market had remained much more 8/16-bit computer-based.

However, this changed with the launch of the Mega Drive (Genesis) and SNES in the early 90s. The Mega Drive in particular was better at side-scrolling parallax/plane effects, and again, the Amiga was no longer the cool machine that everyone wanted.

Wanderer

[GFree]

It's probably not one of the "most influential" Amiga games, but I have a fondness for a game called Wanderer. It was a Boulderdash clone, but with many extra features such as flying arrows and a few others traps. I really should track it down and use an emulator - good times.

The death-scream when your avatar is killed is pretty funny too.

*walk underneath boulder*

*THUMP**THUMP**THUMP**THUMP*
*BLHAHHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

Re:"Influential" Amiga Games? In 2007?

[Dogtanian]

The Amiga died in about 1995... the CD32 and A1200 had poor performance compared to the 486 PC. The Amiga was better during the PCs 386, but not the 486, and many people held onto their Amigas until the Pentium. Thing is, the A1200/CD32 were also a lot cheaper than the 486s you describe, and had they been released before the cheaper PCs (above them) and the 16-bit consoles (below) got more of a toehold, they might have done quite well.

The "cheap" PCs were *not* cheap by today's standards; however, they came with a VGA monitor, hard drive and 256-colour VGA graphics. Adding those to a base Amiga would have been pretty expensive (I never had a hard drive for mine); so I guess that was part of the attraction.

Monkey Island II anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Island_2:_LeCh uck's_Revenge

Any game that requires 11 floppy disks has my respect...

Lemmings, Ambermoon and Captive

[Rycochet]

Lemmings first - anyone fancy playing it in your browser? Try DHTML Lemmings - try not to kill it ;-)

Thalion went a long time ago, but released all of their stuff for the public - one of my favorites was the unfinished (in english at least) Ambermoon - an epic RPG - that, and many more, available on the Thalion Webshrine - break out your amiga emulators ;-)

Finally - one of my favorite games of all time was Captive. Sadly the sequel lost some of it's fun for science (to my mind) - it's another RPG, with you controlling a group of 4 droids. The intro music was brilliant - get it here, for a screenshot and a better description read the wikipedia entry. It is notable in that it had 65536 levels - each one having a *lot* of planets to explore... If you'd like to see a tribute to it appear, go check out the FreeCap Project - they need all the help they can get :-)

Re:Influential AMIGA games? Uh, whatever.

[Anonymous Coward]

When games become very popular and influencial, they tend to get ported to other systems. Why would this automatically remove their influencial status?

I was always like GOT DAMN

[celerityfm]

In middle school back when I was playing Trade Wars like it was my job my bud had an Amiga 2000 I think and promised to show me some gaming graphics that would blow my PC away. Surely I thought nothing could top Kings Quest. He showed me one of the games on this list, Shadow of the Beast- making sure to point out the parallax insanity going on. Then I thought surely if a game comes out for the PC thats ALSO on the Amiga that they will be the same.

And then I witnessed Ocean's F29 Retaliator - released on both DOS and Amiga-- one feature difference that stood out was the "rolling start" scenario where you basically jump into the air with bogies all over the sky and battlefield for you to attack. The DOS version always had the bogies starting in the same spot- but the amiga? Randomized every time. Simple things like that made me want one. Even still I played the crap out of the DOS port- playing multiplayer over the modem and eventually with a null modem cable. God bless those little buggers.

And now I can "have" an amiga thanks to emulation, but it just doesn't feel the same tho.

Cannon Fodder

[tomaasz]

I gotta say Cannon Fodder (check sig).

And to give this post a little added value, here's a link to an interesting page about the making of Cannon Fodder 2: Cannon Fodder 2: The Untold Story. It's long and fun to read.

some more...

[radarsat1]

obviously they couldn't mention every game in the 'top 10', but some others that i distinctly remember:

- Shadow of the Beast: first time I ever saw parallax scrolling!
- The Killing Game Show: most awesome intro animation ever.

Re:some more...

[Anonymous Coward]

- The Killing Game Show: most awesome intro animation ever.

OH, how I loved Killing Game Show! It also had among the most awsome game Music, next to Agony.

Re:some more...

[www.teotwin.com]

Killing game show, still my fav game of all time. In fact i resurrected my amiga 1200 late last year when i found and bought KGS on ebay. Already had it emulated, but opening the box had the same smell as a decade back and brought back memories. The intro animation was great, music awesome (i looped it on a cassette tape and listened to it on walkman every day on the bike ride to school), and gameplay brilliant. Ive a feeling if it were updated with new gfx and more modern puzzles it would sell a copy or two.

What, no Sentinel?

[brianeisley]

Used to play that obsessively on my best friend's A500. To this day, I haven't seen anything like it.

Re:What, no Sentinel?

[jamesh]

That one was on the C64 first i think, so it probably doesn't count as an Amiga game...

It was great though wasn't it :)

Another World was never released on Amiga in the U

[celerityfm]

Never hearing of Another World is possibly because it was never an Amiga game in the US (and then it would have been called Out Of This World instead)...atleast according to Moby Games.

Hot of the press - Most Influential Linux Games

[Marcion]

What great Amiga games, I remember every one. So my reply is here:

Top 10 Most Influential Linux Games

Yes linux does really have ten games :-)

First out on the Beeb

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentinel_(compute r_game)

Re:HOW could you LEAVE OFF the ULTIMATE amiga game

[FIGJAM]

Yeah that is classic! I died over 1000 times just thinking about playing it!

Law of the West!!

[Anonymous Coward]

What no Law of the West?

Nuclear War?

Speedball was originally a C64 game... although there was a great game called MudBall that I can't find any reference to.. where the ball was a fish and the refs were poisonous to the touch...

Presumably missing because it was a port

[mbessey]

Marble Madness was a (near perfect) port of the arcade game, so not really an "Amiga" game, per-se. And I don't think it was really all that influential, either. There are a few maze games out there these days, but it's a pretty anemic genre.

Simcity?

[LoudMusic]

Am I wrong in thinking that Maxis's original SimCity was first launched on Amiga? I ran it on my Tandy 1000 RL (with Hard Drive) in the early nineties (same computer is currently my monitor stand). SimCity has even had a modern release.

Populous I can get onboard with. That game rocked. The second was pretty good as well. And surprisingly the third one is one of my all time favorite games - I've even played it in the past year.

Re:Simcity?

[Brad1138]

That is correct, I had it and played it a lot. It was similar to Sim City 2000, Had no sewer system or arcologies etc. I remember reading That Sim city 2000 was what the designer had wanted the original Sim city to be. I threw my A500 away a few years ago, just didn't have space for it and I could buy one on EBay for under $10. But I think I still have the Sim City floppies around somewhere.

Re:Simcity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simcity was first created on the C-64, actually. A lot of code was crossed over from Raid on Bungling bay.

It's a corruption of "should've"

[mbessey]

"should have" -> "should've" -> "should of"
It drives me batty as well. It's almost as bad as "I could care less".

Re:It's a corruption of "should've"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's for this reason that I'm a proponent of "shoulda". Nothing wrong with contractions, and it approximates to "should have"

Re:It's a corruption of "should've"

[Anonymous Coward]

I could care less but what does "batty" mean ?

Re:It's a corruption of "should've"

[Corwn of Amber]

Batty? "Batshit insane KILL THE MORON kill the moron KILL KILL"

Re:It's a corruption of "should've"

[Threni]

> It's almost as bad as "I could care less".

I was quite surprised to hear Larry David say that.

Where is

[jounihat]

Pirates? North & South? Monkey Island? Manager? Dreamweb? Chaos Machine? Wonder Boy? Rampage? Stunt Car Racer? Stunts? Formula One Grand Prix?

Come on! Shadow of the Beast was cool, but one of the most influental games on Amiga? Not a chance. And who really played Worms on Amiga?

Re:F18 Interceptor! (..yeah; and Backlash.)

[newr00tic]

Yes; I know.. ;) (Well, nothing about the multiplayer part but, still.)

..One of those games for which you almost bring out that blue 'ol CodeWheel again; -spinning it from time to time like if some sacred prayer-beads or something.. ;]

'

I found the little game called Backlash mildly amusing too, though; --1st "person" where you had to dodge fireballs and stuff, and get at the flying saucers and all that.

Defender ofthe Crown?

[91degrees]

The cinematic bits were pretty good, but I was disappointed that the Amiga version left out a couple of the weapons that were in the C64 version. I believe these were in the Atari ST conversion though, so perhaps this should be considered the most influential Atari ST game.

Re:Defender ofthe Crown?

[dougsha]

Kellyn Beeck and his devs did Defender under insane time pressure. It was one of the first 4 games that Cinemaware published and the message from them was to cut features to hit the deadline. Subsequent versions of the game were able to implement more of his original design.

How about this game: Cube Defender of the Polyvers

[BlueTrin]

This game beats all the competition

Re:Influential AMIGA games? Uh, whatever.

[ajs318]

The point is, these games were first developed on the Amiga. If they got ported to other machines afterward, that doesn't make them less influential. If anything, it makes them more influential (since the presence of the game on the Amiga had an influence on other systems).

The Amiga was one hell of a machine for its time. Unfortunately -- and this is a problem which occurs with any single-source product, not just the Amiga; Macs and Palms were always (in)famous for it -- it was just too expensive. Eventually, all the technologies that made it special were bolted onto the 80486 platform, churned out by manufacturers in the far East.

It's the same thing with all technology. Being the first (which they can't take away from you) doesn't count for anything like as much as being the only one (which they will take away from you). If you were the first in your street to own a (car|stereo record player|colour telly|VCR|microwave oven|satellite dish|DVD player|DVD recorder), the kudos won't last; and by the time everyone else has one, theirs will be better than your ancient one.

Influential Amiga Hardware

[BigBlockMopar]

It would've been MUCH more interesting ... to see what sort of innovative things people did using Amiga's fancy hardware -- especially since this is in the HARDWARE category and n...

Three words:

Newtek Video Toaster

I worked in television at the time, and I'll tell you that the damned things revolutionized broadcasting. That cute animated logo for the 6 o'clock news was a mere static card with trumpet fanfare before the Video Toaster.

But they've already been discussed here.

Re:Influential Amiga Hardware

[Malkin]

Heh, fair point. But, I already knew about the Toaster. We worked with a toaster at one of my previous jobs, long ago, and I've also worked with a guy who used to work at Newtek. ;)

I was mostly curious about what was done with the hardware, with respect to games, that was different. Not just "better looking" graphics, either. For a kind of lame example, the Amiga version of "Lemmings" allowed more lemmings on the screen. I imagine that the other platforms couldn't quite hack it. :)

It came for dessert

[Otis2222222]

That game always reminds me of the scene in Space Quest IV where you look through the "Bargain Bin" at Radio Schock and a bunch of spoof titles were sitting in there. "It Came for Dessert" was my fave...

Marble Madness anyone?

[Njoyda Sauce]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Madness

Although not originally released for the Amiga, his game was one of the most influential I can think of. It was a little unexplored genre with you controlling the pinball directly (or marble in this case). Similar to the monkey balls of today, but way before their time.

Feel free to have a good time with monkey balls.

King of Chicago kicked ass!

[dtolman]

I spent hours and hours playing the ibm port on my dad's 8088 when I was a kid - loads of fun. Definitely one of the best of their titles.

Re:King of Chicago kicked ass!

[dougsha]

Fun fact about the IBM port - I didn't do the conversion, Cinemaware contracted it out to a company in Utah. My script was PG - I used the word "ass" and "damn" a few times. The UT company took all my horrible swearing out of the script. We made them put it all back in.

Thanks for the kind words about my old game.

Re:Influential AMIGA games? Uh, whatever.

[mdwh2]

By that logic, Doom wasn't an influential PC game, because it was ported to the Amiga...

Re:F18 Interceptor! (..yeah; and Backlash.)

[smellsofbikes]

My brother and I made a paper version of the codewheel that I still have around somewhere. It was *really* difficult to get working because it wasn't just a circular sliderule, it was more of three sheets of paper in a cylinder, sliding one-over-the-other, with holes cut out in specific places so we could see the data on the inner layers. I can't remember how he generated the material for it. It was all hand-written. But it worked.

Ah, Carrier Command

[Concern]

Carrier Command. Now that was an underrated gem. Not certain if it was an Amiga game first, though. There was certainly a (not as good looking) PC version, and I played both at various times.

Sad to say, I seem to recall some bugs in the Amiga version that weren't in the PC version. Your inventory would get screwed, and you'd have to restart your game to get it working right again. And on the PC you could send a set of walruses with a set of mantas way off on expeditions to capture other islands, as long as one of the mantas had a long-range communications pod, and one or two of the walruses had extra fuel... and you set all the fighters to go as slow as possible...

It was a pretty effective little strategy, almost too much so. But it seemed obvious the designers had intended to make it possible. Unfortunately I noticed on the Amiga a weird glitch would usually cause this not to work somehow.

By the way, there's a very long running fan project to remake the game on modern hardware, in OpenGL (here)... still kicking, from the looks of it. :)

There's also a modern remake in the early production phases at a small developer (here).

STe should have replaced the STFM

[Dogtanian]

I'm not sure if the Amiga's sound hardware could natively generate sound - it may have been sample playback or nothing. But then, with four independent channels of sampled sound, each with its own playback speed and volume, you're hardly going to complain. Eh, that rings a bell; and I don't suppose it really matters. It'd be trivial to generate the waveforms manually, store them in a small amount of memory and point the sound chip towards them.

things did improve with the STe. That had two channels of CPU-ignoring sample playback (left and right) That's an improvement, but hardly Amiga-beating.

Hardly any games ever used the improved abilities, of course. That's Atari's fault; on its launch (1989?), the STe was briefly sold in place of the STFM at the same price. Whether it was originally intended that it would replace the STFM or they just ran short of the latter, I don't know. But they then sold the STFM at its old price again, and charged more for the STe. It wasn't until mid-1991 that the STe properly replaced the STFM in the line-up, and the ST market was already seriously declining by then. In the meantime, people like me had bought the STFM because it was cheaper; and if we'd had more money, most of us would have bought Amigas, not ST-Es. Actually, I sold my STFM after just one year and got an Amiga instead.

If the STe had directly replaced (same price) the STFM when it came out, there would have been enough sold to make selling enhanced software worthwhile. It had some "nice" improvements, but nothing radical, the kind you'd expect as *standard* from a company that wanted to keep its market share.

And then there's the Atari Falcon030, which still urinates over the audio capabilities of many modern computers. Yeah; the Falcon came out around the same time as the A1200. I was considering replacing my A500, and although the Falcon had some rather impressive sounding specs for the price (better than the A1200), I didn't even consider it; it was clear that it was going to fail.

Why? Atari were crap and couldn't sell ****. Plus, it was essentially a next generation ST. The ST had already lost its position to the Amiga when that machine came down in price. And by this stage, the Amiga itself was starting to seriously lose ground to cheap PC clones. It would've taken a miracle for the Falcon to be a success in the face of this, and it just wasn't going to happen.

Re:STe should have replaced the STFM

[Ford Prefect]

Eh, that rings a bell; and I don't suppose it really matters. It'd be trivial to generate the waveforms manually, store them in a small amount of memory and point the sound chip towards them.

Yep, I've seen MOD files (and descendants) use tiny snippets of square waves, sine waves etc. as samples to build up 'chip tunes' - interestingly, they can still sound better than the ST's YM2149 coprolite...

If the STe had directly replaced (same price) the STFM when it came out, there would have been enough sold to make selling enhanced software worthwhile. It had some "nice" improvements, but nothing radical, the kind you'd expect as *standard* from a company that wanted to keep its market share.

Absolutely - Commodore, Atari and the like really needed to keep building new stuff instead of marginally improving on what came before. Giant head starts over the likes of Macs and PCs soon became increasingly irrelevant, with Soundblaster cards then SVGA then later 3DFX accelerators, etc. etc. etc. Trying to continue to sell the same hardware for half a decade or more was plain silly. PCs were ugly, but became the platform of choice for companies developing interesting new chipsets. (Commodore versus Atari? Now ATI versus NVIDIA, but they have marketing!)

It's perhaps fortunate that I could never afford a Falcon in my early teens - it really was a platform already on its way out, even before the total lack of marketing. The re-use of the same case from the STFM just made it painfully obvious.

It's all irrelevant now, and if anything it's taught me to give up on any kind of brand loyalty. Under my desk there's an AMD-plus-NVIDIA PC, booting Windows XP and Linux, and on my lap there's an Intel-plus-ATI MacBook Pro, booting MacOS X and Windows XP.

And on the desk?

My old 520STFM, on a visit from its resting place in a cupboard - it's what prompted my initial bout of nostalgia. ;-)

Re:STe should have replaced the STFM

[Dogtanian]

Absolutely - Commodore, Atari and the like really needed to keep building new stuff instead of marginally improving on what came before. To be fair, the 68000-based original Amiga technology (with minor enhancements) was still way ahead of the competition for a long time, until the late 80s at least. That says more about the strength of the original tech than it does about Commodore's investment. To retain that position, they should have had the true "next generation" machines out the door far earlier than they did. Ah well, who cares, it's all long past anyway...

The re-use of the same case from the STFM just made it painfully obvious. Actually, I kind of liked the "grey-keyed, rebadged ST" case of the Falcon; but then I always preferred the appearance of the ST to the Amiga. Whether this was a good move from the point-of-view of public perception is debatable, but I really doubt it would have succeeded either way.

The only game I've ever "played" on an Amiga

[Alzheimers]

Hack & Slash, an RPG door game for the CNet Amiga BBS system. One of my favorite online games of all time!

Worms taught me a hell of a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

Many moons ago when I was young and you were even younger, I had my very first PC and a copy of Worms. It came on a CDROM and featured lots of little FMV animations that were vaguely amusing the first time you saw them and grew more and more irritating every time you saw them. Being the curious fellow I was I wanted to see if there was a way I could stop them playing. Unfortunately, the game contained code to make sure you still had the CD so you couldn't copy it to your hard drive and lend the CD to your friend do he could do the same. In I went with a hex editor and had a poke around... After a few days of reading and learning, I managed to strip out both the protection and the playing of the FMV sequences. Flushed with my success, I hacked it even further, producing a version that ran off a single floppy (with only two levels) that I could take to school where the machines had no cdrom drives. It was then I decided that I might have a future in this computer stuff, and perhaps team17 would be interested in how I'd been able to make their game do things they didnt want it to do. I might be able to get a foot in the door with some work experience or something. So I got in touch with them and let them know I'd been able to get the game running from a single floppy disk and would like to get into programming. Their response to me was basically, "You're lying. That isn't possible. We only hire programmers who have a degree and you're just a schoolkid who couldn't possibly have done what you claim."

Ah well. Still, a very influential game on me.

hm...

[Wienaren]

Don't like parts of that list. I wouldn't call them "influencial" for most parts. The author lays to much weight on games released 1990 and later.

Defender of the Crown: Supercool gfx, crappy gameplay. Loaded for "Ah"s and "Oh"s only, never player longer than 10 mins.

Sensible Soccer: Wasn't Kick Off earlier?


Full agree with Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast, Cannon Fodder, however.

Artic Fox

[meosborne]

Artic Fox was the first thing I bought for my brand new, shiny Amiga 1000 back in '86. I went to a pawn shop and bought a boom box with aux input so I would have some stereo sound. Popped that floppy in and my brother and I amazed at the sound and graphics. It was great fun. I especially loved flying the missiles. :-)

Hired Guns (1993) - an FPS ahead of its time

[Anonymous Coward]

Back when everyone was making noise about Wolf 3D, I was playing Hired Guns on my A1200 and loving it. Although it wasn't smooth-scrolling, it had a lot more interesting gameplay, puzzles, cools levels (with actual Z-axis design), multiplayer, fucking cool guns and droids, and the most badass ambient sound effects to grace a game up to that time.
The game was ported to the PC, but it didn't come out as good as the original.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. My reply...

[Malkin]

I had a few responses like this, but you went the furthest to substantiate your points (which I appreciate), so I'll reply to yours. :)

I guess that I have a couple of issues with the whole idea of the article -- some of which I didn't bring up.

I'm in the game industry, and honestly, I can't think of anybody I currently know who has ever mentioned having owned an Amiga, and we DO geek out about the gear we had when we were younger. Most of the "Syndicate" fans I know were Mac owners, to be honest. I'm afraid that some of these games would have been far less influential, had they not been ported. Did the Japanese designers who were influenced by "Another World" play it on the Amiga, or did they play it on the Super Nintendo? Given that Amiga was selling slower than Macs in Japan, unless they were using an Amiga at work, they probably played it on another machine first.

(Ironically, I think that the Amiga software that most influenced the game industry was a tool! Many computer artists had a passionate love affair with "Deluxe Paint II" pretty much right up until that pesky "Photoshop" took over. Hardened art department veterans will still wax nostalgic if you speak those magic words anywhere near them. It did eventually get ported to the PC, but "Deluxe Paint II" was indisputably an Amiga program. You can tell, because the name "Amiga" always comes up in any conversation about it, today. The same cannot be said of "Lemmings.")

I'll be honest with you: I'm not sure being the first platform is the big deal you're making it out to be. I mean, seriously, "Grand Theft Auto" first appeared as an MS-DOS game. Yet, you would probably get some funny looks if you called it an "influential PC game." It was influential, yes, but the fact that it appeared first on the PC was kind of irrelevant to much of anything, including its influence.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking the Amiga. The machine was way the hell ahead of its time. It was a quantum leap ahead in graphics quality of anything else in the consumer market, at the time. My Dad more than once had to drag me away from Amigas at computer shows, because I was transfixed. But, as you rightly point out, good stuff comes at a price, and the Amiga just didn't move as many units as it needed to. I'd have to say that the Amiga's greatest influence was in showing us what was possible. Even if you never owned one, it convinced you that there was something better, and that it wasn't out of reach. It was the swift kick in the rump we needed to get to where we are today.

Re:Thanks for the thoughtful response. My reply...

[snuf23]

"I'm in the game industry, and honestly, I can't think of anybody I currently know who has ever mentioned having owned an Amiga"

Are you by any chance American? The Amiga (the A500 in particular) was more common as a game machine in the European market. The US install base was relatively small.
I owned an Amiga in the US from 87-94 and the majority of games were European in origin (like the Bullfrog stuff, Psygnosis or stuff like Another World). I had a number of friends who also gamed on Amigas. Prior to affordable VGA cards the Amiga was the best gaming computer available.

Re:Thanks for the thoughtful response. My reply...

[Malkin]

Ah, that's a really good point, snurf23. Yeah, I'm in the US!

Re:Thanks for the thoughtful response. My reply...

[ajs318]

(Ironically, I think that the Amiga software that most influenced the game industry was a tool! Many computer artists had a passionate love affair with "Deluxe Paint II" pretty much right up until that pesky "Photoshop" took over. Hardened art department veterans will still wax nostalgic if you speak those magic words anywhere near them.

Oh, yes! Deluxe Paint II (and later, DPaint III; DPaint IV added AGA support but managed to lose the plot a little) was the graphics editor. I still miss it. I think its influence definitely lives on in a few places -- more than one modern graphics editor still refers to a "file requester". And the use of the right-hand mouse button for "paint with background colour" lives on (except in the GIMP, unless there's a setting I missed).

I'll be honest with you: I'm not sure being the first platform is the big deal you're making it out to be.

It's a big deal alright, but only for as long as you're the only one. As soon as you've a serious competitor -- and no competitor will ever be taken seriously unless they overtake you -- it ceases to be a big deal and you're just playing catch-up.

I'd have to say that the Amiga's greatest influence was in showing us what was possible.

Yes, exactly.

Now, if you wanted a machine that was really and truly ahead of its time, think of the original CDTV. This was in 1991 or 1992, remember. It was essentially a pre-AGA A500 with a (read-only; home-recordable CD would be another 4-5 years down the line) CD-ROM drive. The only thing wrong with it was that it was something so new, so ahead of its time, that nobody really knew what it was for! It cost much more than a games console or a CD player; and it didn't come with the keyboard, mouse and floppy drive that would have made it recognisable as a computer. It had the "WOW!" factor, and everyone who saw it was blown away; but it also had the "I've lived without one of these for so long I'm not sure I really need one, and anyway what the bloody hell am I going to do with it when I've got it?" factor. Every part of CDTV -- 640x512x4096 colour graphics (actually the PC only got 480 lines at first), multi-channel DAC sound, GUI, CD-ROM drive, and so forth -- eventually made it into "mainstream" PCs; but it had to happen incrementally, not all at once.

It's like those bizarre "concept vehicles" you see at the MotorShow -- when someone introduces an outrageous new car with many new features. The best bits do eventually make it into mainstream production cars, but they inevitably end up looking nothing like the prototype.

Re:Influential AMIGA games? Uh, whatever.

[Malkin]

You're missing the point. "Doom" was best known as a PC game. But, would you call "Grand Theft Auto" an "influential PC game"? Probably not. It's just an "influential game." The fact that it was originally an MS-DOS game is kind of irrelevant.

Hired Guns anyone?

[DohnJoe]

I've mentioned this game before on slashdot I think. It was my first FPS experience and was immense fun to play with my brothers and sister. We even managed to play it with four people on one screen! But usually we would play it with two or three. One would use keyboard or joystick, the other two used mice. (We made something out of a cardboard box to separate the view of each player so you couldn't see what the others were doing).

It had great sound and music, good level design, great atmosphere(really scary in single player mode, you would walk around between these eggs and they would hatch after a while which made a disgusting sound, and suddenly you're face to face with a scary monster, we still mimick the sound these things made sometimes...) and great gameplay. You could pick up items from dead opponents, there were these blocks that you could move around to block
certain pathways or to cross a stream, you could use mines, sentry guns, grenades (so you weren't save just around the corner), elevators, teleporters...

ah, as you can hear, just a perfect game! Unfortunately I never finished the single player mode since we didn't have the copy protection code...

other noteworthy games I played on amiga:

Supercars I & II
Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge
F18/A Hornet
Turrican
Armageddon
Hunter
Stunt Car Racer
Wings of Fury
North and South

Re:Influential AMIGA games? Uh, whatever.

[mdwh2]

Nice try, but you can't switch from "exclusive" to "best known as".

If we're talking "best known as", then many of those games were best known as Amiga games, just as much as Doom was known as a PC game.

Re:Influential AMIGA games? Uh, whatever.

[Malkin]

I didn't switch from "exclusive" to "best known as." I was clarifying why "first" isn't necessarily that relevant. ajs318 brought up the same points you did, and we had a very good discussion about it. I recommend saving us both some time and joining the discussion over there, so neither of us have to rehash old counterpoints. ;)

Re:Influential AMIGA games? Uh, whatever.

[mdwh2]

Your comment that I originally replied to said that they weren't exclusive to the Amiga, and it was only after that that someone else brought up being first. So, they're not exclusive, and it's not that they were first, but many of them were best known as, just like Doom on the PC.

I also wonder if you're in the US, seeing your other comment that no one you know ever owned an Amiga? I'm in the UK, and just about every kid I knew in the early '90s had an Amiga. From a US-only perspective I can understand this article looking strange, but the Amiga was immensely more popular in Europe; it was rare to find anyone owning machines like Macs.