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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.'"
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
Where the hell is Turrican? And where is Wing Commander?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
I've built up so much character I have an alter-ego
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:
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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_(comp
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.
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.
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.
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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=973
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/ .
Channel Zilch: In Your Face From Outer Space!