A history of the Amiga, part 7: Game on!

By Jeremy Reimer | Published: May 12, 2008 - 11:51PM CT

The most powerful gaming platform


The Amiga started out its life as a dedicated games machine, and even though it grew into a full computer very quickly, it never lost its gaming side. The machine's 4096-color palette, stereo sampled sound, and graphics acceleration chips made it a perfect gaming platform, and it didn't take long for game companies to start taking advantage of this power.

While the slow sales of the Amiga 1000 limited the number of games that developers were willing to make for the platform, when Commodore released the low-cost Amiga 500 in 1987, everything changed. Now the most powerful gaming computer was also one of the cheapest, and game companies jumped at the chance to showcase their talents on the Amiga.
Mind Walker (1986)

One of the first games ever released for the Amiga was a quirky gem called Mind Walker, written by Bill Williams and published by Commodore itself. Williams started his game design career on the Atari 800, writing classics like Necromancer and Alley Cat. His games were always unique, combining off-the-wall situations with innovative game play.

Mind Walker puts the gamer in the role of a physicist who has lost his mind. Instead of resorting to drugs or therapy, the protagonist of the game decided to send his split ego into the depths of his own brain. Your job is to navigate this surreal landscape and uncover paths leading to deeper and deeper levels, with the ultimate goal of finding the hidden key to save your sanity.

Your alter ego jumps around on brightly colored square platforms of varying height—fortunately, you can't fall off. If you reach the end of the screen it instantly loads the adjacent area. Floating gold balls try to zap you with deadly searchlights, but you can zap most of them with bolts of electricity that you direct with the deft skill of a Sith Lord. Over some squares hover strange pyramids that transform your avatar from a man into a red wizard, a flying bug-like alien, or a sexy seductress. Different forms are required to find different parts of the path, and keeping track of the whole operation requires careful consultation of the overhead map. If the character becomes hidden behind an overly-tall platform, the player can switch to one of four different views by hitting the letters N, S, E or W.

Once the path is complete, the game shifts to a three-dimensional view of a psychedelic tunnel. The player has to grab a translucent green door with his disembodied hands, which leads to the final level in which the character fends off fuzzy-looking "bad thoughts" to find the next piece of his sanity.

The game has simple but evocative graphics that make good use of the Amiga's built-in hardware polygon drawing and area fills. Bill Williams had been a composer before he became a game designer, and the music he created for Mind Walker has an eerie, lyrical quality to it that fits perfectly with the game's theme. The game uses stereo pan effects to let the lightning bolts seem to sear across the room. Like the Amiga itself, Mind Walker was unusual and thought-provoking.

Another unusual thing about the game was that it not only fit neatly on a single floppy disk, but it also had no copy protection and could be run directly from the Amiga's Workbench GUI. Furthermore, the game was multitasking-friendly, so you could easily run other applications in the background. Few Amiga games in the future would retain these qualities. Game developers, eager to squeeze out every last bit of power from the computer, would bypass the operating system and access the hardware directly. This allowed later titles to be much more graphically impressive, but at the cost of multitasking capabilities.

Bill Williams would continue writing games up until 1992, when corporate interference on the Super Nintendo title Bart's Nightmare (he referred to it as "Bill's Nightmare") caused him to leave the industry altogether and pursue a second career as a Lutheran pastor, picking up a master's degree in theology along the way.

Defender of the Crown (1986)

Cinemaware was started by Robert and Phyllis Jacob in 1985. Their goal was to create games that had style and presentation that were evocative of movies. This was an ambitious goal back when most video games were simple shoot-em-up or maze-chasing affairs, but the advent of the Amiga gave the small company a chance to realize their dreams.

Defender of the Crown was their first title, and it showcased the power of the new platform. The scene: you are a Saxon baron of an English fiefdom in the Middle Ages, and the king has just been killed without a clear successor. You must fight other Saxons and Norman invaders to conquer England and become the new king.

The game was one of the first to feature gorgeous hand-painted loading screens to set up the action, and the game itself was just as beautiful. Each turn begins with a stylized birds-eye view of Britain. From this menu, the player can choose to attack a neighboring county, stage a raid on an enemy castle, stage a jousting tournament, or occasionally stage a daring rescue of a beautiful maiden. Robin Hood pops up from time to time as a non-player character who can be either an enemy or an ally.

As in many games of its era, winning can be frustratingly difficult. In the raid screen, for example, you control a single fighter who must cut down enemy after enemy while his compatriots merely keep the rest of them away. Jousting is only slightly less difficult than the real thing, requiring a steady hand on the mouse to position your lance in the right position at the right moment. Winning a joust can gain your side honor points or even territory, depending on the initial stakes.

Defender of the Crown was an Amiga-only game at the outset, and was often used by dealers to showcase the platform to eager young gamers. Much of the credit for the game's success has to go to the game's artist, Jim Sachs. RJ Mical, who did some consulting work for the game, recalled his talent.

"Jim Sachs, what a god he is," marveled Mical. "Jim Sachs is amazing. These days everyone sees graphics like that because there are a lot of really good computer graphics artists now, but back then, 20 years ago, it was astonishing to have someone that good."

Because Cinemaware was a startup company running low on cash, and Defender was the first product, it was forced to release the game before it was completely finished. Later, ports of the game to the Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, IBM PC, and the Atari ST would fill out the missing parts, including a more substantial army attacking screen. The ports could not deliver the same sound and graphics quality of the Amiga version, however.

Cinemaware continued to publish innovative games until 1991, when over-extension and feature creep on the Cold War title SSI caused the company to declare bankruptcy. Two early employees of the company, Lars Fuhrken-Batista and Sean Vesce, got back together to create an updated version of the game called Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Windows PCs in 2003.







Stephen

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* Origin: -:- Dragon's Lair BBS -:- telnet: bbs.vk3heg.net (39:901/280)

A history of the Amiga, part 7: Game on!

By Jeremy Reimer | Published: May 12, 2008 - 11:51PM CT
RPGs come to the Amiga

Faery Tale (1986)

Faery Tale is one of those games that everyone who played it remembers. An fantasy role-playing game by MicroIllusions that featured a top-down view, Faery Tale resembles classics like the original Legend of Zelda and the Ultima series, and contains a surprising amount of depth.

The game starts out by introducing the main characters via a virtual story book that slowly flips its pages. Three brothers, Julian, Philip, and Kevin have grown up in the small hamlet of Tambry in the land of Holm and are eager to explore the wider world. Julian, the bravest of the three, sets out first. The world, as in many RPGs, is inexplicably full of bandits, monsters, and undead creatures like skeletons. They often attack in groups that can easily overwhelm the player's character, especially with his initial armament of a small dagger. The action takes place in real-time, without turns or pauses, and surviving the game's early stages can be difficult.


If Julian dies, a small fairy will resurrect him, but after a number of deaths he becomes a ghost. The player is now transferred to Philip, who can talk to Julian's ghost and recover items from his body. If Philip fails, the quest is taken up by Kevin, who is the player's last hope. Fortunately, the game can be saved at any time.

Characters have various statistics that can be improved with time and training, as in many RPGs. Bravery reflects the player's strength, and Vitality his hit points (which go up at a slower pace as Bravery rises). There are also Kindness points that are required to talk with certain non-player characters. Unlike many role-playing games, Faery Tale lets the player attack innocent non-player characters, although because they then stay dead this is rarely a good idea. The player must also make sure he has packed enough food for his long journey, as hunger will slowly drain his Vitality.

Objects on the ground can be picked up, and treasure obtained can be traded in for better weapons at the local shop. When the weapon is equipped, it is immediately visible on the player's character. Some items are magical, such as the Bird Totem that gives the player a birds-eye view of the map. There are colored keys to open certain locked doors, potions to restore health, and even trinkets to momentarily stop time in the heat of battle.

The game world is staggeringly large, and contains many surprises and twists, such as a giant turtle that the player can use to transport himself across the water. Later, to save the king's daughter from a horrible fate, the player must tame and fly a golden swan across an otherwise-impassable mountain range.

Despite having a fairly pedestrian fantasy plot (the player must accumulate five golden statues in order to open a portal to the Astral World and defeat the evil Necromancer) the game is still memorable more than twenty years later. I talked to my friend Domenico DiTomaso, and he recalled spending two happy months playing cooperatively with a friend to complete the game. "You could go anywhere," he said, marveling at the free-form game play that allowed the player to wander through the entire world without hitting a loading screen. "Just remember," he told me, "make sure you make a map when you enter the Dragon's Cave!"
Dungeon Master (1988)

Dungeon Master actually made its debut on the hated Atari ST platform a year before it was released for the Amiga. Because of this, the graphic quality was somewhat less than the Amiga was capable of producing, but the 3D first-person view made this dungeon crawl stand out from its competition. Although the graphics were largely unchanged in the port, the Amiga version did make good use of the custom sound chips. The stereo sound made monster noises seem to "pop out" in three dimensions, an important clue when enemies could sneak up on the player from all directions. This advantage actually helped to sell Amiga 500s over Atari STs.

Dungeon Master was inspired by the crude three-dimensional graphics found on the Ultima series of games whenever the player entered a dungeon. By placing the entire game in that setting, the designers at FTL Games could concentrate on improving the 3D graphics and game play experience.

The game started out at the entrance to the dungeon, with only one direction of movement possible: go inside! In the first level, the disembodied player wandered around a "Hall of Champions" consisting of many different portraits of heroes hanging on the walls. Moving up close to a portrait caused the character to magically appear as part of your party: you could have up to four characters in total. Unlike other dungeon crawls, there was no other character creation process: you took the pre-defined adventurers as they were. When you were ready, you took the stairs down...

All the action could be controlled with the mouse, from turning and moving to picking up objects. Clicking on an object moved it into an empty hand of the currently-selected character;you had to open an inventory screen to move the object into a backpack. Excess inventory could be thrown with the right mouse button, and it would sail forward across the dungeon. There were many puzzles, hidden levers, and secret doors to unlock. Clues could sometimes be found in notes that were scattered around the top levels of the dungeon.

Combat took place in real-time, with the player required to manually switch between characters to take a swing or cast a spell at a monster. The spell casting system was quite innovative: for example, to cast a fireball, the player mixed a fire symbol with a wing symbol. If one of your characters died (this happened to me early on when falling through a trap door) you could pick up their bones and carry them around to a rebirth chamber.

There were 14 levels in total in Dungeon Master, and completing the last level involved slaying a demon master named Chaos, who looked like a cross between Darth Vader and Amadeus. Chaos could not be killed with normal weapons, and had to be trapped in a magical cage before he could be dispatched. There was a plot line hinted at in the game, and detailed in the manual, which was written by Nancy Holder, a novelist who has since written books for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, and Smallville.

Dungeon Master inspired a ream of copycats, such as Eye of the Beholder and Captive. It was the primary inspiration for the groundbreaking 3D masterpiece Ultima Underworld.





Stephen

--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5
* Origin: -:- Dragon's Lair BBS -:- telnet: bbs.vk3heg.net (39:901/280)

A history of the Amiga, part 7: Game on!

By Jeremy Reimer | Published: May 12, 2008 - 11:51PM CT
Vertical scrollers, too
Xenon II (1989)

Xenon II was a sequel to the popular, vertical-scrolling shoot-em-up game written by a company of Amiga fans called The Bitmap Brothers. Sequels were good to the Bitmap Brothers; the company's second version of its futuristic arena handball game Speedball was a huge commercial success and is remembered fondly to this day.

Before the advent of 3D shooters, one of the most popular types of game was the 2D scrolling shoot-em-up, a game usually set in space where the player controlled a single ship that was pitted against an endless fleet of oncoming enemy craft who couldn't shoot very quickly. The first arcade games had limited processing power and usually set the player against a simple backdrop of stars. Later games had more detailed backgrounds that could become obstacles all by themselves.

Xenon II's backgrounds and enemies were largely inspired by the arcade megahit R-Type, which set the player against a strange and somewhat disgusting array of space-faring worms and other ugly-looking creatures. Xenon II had space worms and giant space trilobites to go along with the more standard-looking enemy space ships. Unlike R-Type, which scrolled from right to left, Xenon II kept the scrolling old-school and vertical. One difference: the player could scroll backwards for a short distance in a pinch.

At the end of each level, the player had the opportunity to visit a shop, tended by a cranky old alien. He would give some advice about each power-up available for purchase, but if you pestered him for too long, he would snark back: "What, do you want me to play the game for you too?"

Xenon II didn't contain any brilliant innovations or redefine the 2D scrolling shooter genre, but it did show that the Amiga was capable of delivering arcade-like experiences at home.
Shadow of the Beast (1989)

While most of the Amiga games up until this time had been superior to ports on other computers, there still wasn't a game that conclusively blew away the competition and left no doubt about which was the superior game platform.

That is, until Psygnosis released Shadow of the Beast. A side-scrolling platform game in the vein of Super Mario Bros., Shadow of the Beast pushed the Amiga graphics chipset to its limits.

Back before 3D graphics technology, side-scrollers would often use a technique called parallax scrolling, where images in the background scrolled more slowly than those in the foreground to give the illusion of movement in a large world. Few consoles at the time had the power to scroll backgrounds at all (Super Mario had static backgrounds) but some arcade games would have two or maybe three levels of parallax scrolling. Shadow of the Beast had up to twelve.

The enemies were no slouches either. Unlike the tiny sprites of other side-scrollers, monsters in Shadow of the Beast could fill up to half the screen.

Shadow of the Beast had an intriguing back-story. The game's protagonist was a man named Aabron who was kidnapped as a child by the evil beast lord Maletoth, and twisted through evil magic into a horrific man-beast to serve his new master. When this creature witnesses a man being executed, he remembers the man as his human father and his childhood memories come flooding back to him. Escaping from Maletoth, he is determined to seek his revenge.

Finishing the game's 12 levels was a frustratingly difficult task. The Beast, while powerful in his own right, seemed to be constantly on the edge of death. Not only were there other monsters to deal with, but the Beast also faced an endless barrage of deadly spike traps that rose from the ground, flying squadrons of spiked balls, and even giant floating eyes. The Beast started with 12 units of health, and each touch of an enemy would reduce his reserve by one. If it fell to zero, the game was over.

The graphics weren't the only part of the game that stood out. "What I remember foremost about Shadow of the Beast is the music," said Amiga owner Narendar Ghangas. "The game had a foreboding sense of atmosphere throughout and the moody strings really suited the dark nature of the game. I remember being totally captivated by the synthesized music—it was haunting."

While some panned Shadow of the Beast for putting graphical eye-candy over depth of game play, the game itself was a commercial success, and was later ported to platforms such as the Sega Genesis (minus much of the color palette and several layers of parallax scrolling). It also spawned two sequels, the last of which could only be found on the Amiga.
Lemmings (1991)

If there was a single game that could represent the Amiga experience, it would have to be Lemmings. Released by Psygnosis in 1991, it was quirky, fun, and addictive. Players controlled a large number of colorfully-clad, green-haired lemmings, who needed help getting from the start to the end of each level.

Without the user's assistance, the poor lemmings would usually walk straight off a cliff to their doom. Fortunately, the player could, with a click of the mouse, give certain key lemmings specific "jobs". One important job was the "halt" lemming, who stood with hands outstretched and flicked his head back and forth, causing any lemmings to reverse their direction when they ran into him. An umbrella-wielding lemming would sail softly down to the ground instead of falling to his death. There was even a suicidal lemming option, who would count down from five to zero, squeak "Oh no!" and then explode. Sometimes this sacrifice was necessary, other times it was just fun.

Other lemmings could be tasked as diggers, or to build ramps to help the rest of the group reach inaccessible locations. Having all these options would make completing any level a trivial exercise, but there was a catch: each level gave the player a limited number of jobs to hand out, and not all jobs were available on all levels. If the user got really frustrated, there was always the "nuclear" option: setting all lemmings to count down from five all at once. The resulting chorus of "oh no"s and subsequent total destruction was strangely cathartic.

Lemmings was incredibly popular, and the game became a symbol of sorts for the Amiga community. Gail Wellington, the director of Commodore Advanced Technical Support (CATS), once arranged for a whole group of Commodore employees to dress up as lemmings for a trade show. They had the whole thing covered: the purple outfits, the green hair, the appropriate stances, an umbrella, and even balloons filled with confetti for the inevitable "Oh No!" finale. They worried a bit about this last part: what would the people who had to clean up think of such a stunt? It turned out that their fears were unfounded: the cleaning staff was more than happy to tidy up the mess after being so thoroughly entertained.

While Lemmings was ported to other platforms, most notably the IBM PC, the Amiga version had superior sound and even some game play options that weren't available anywhere else: two players could play at once with each using a mouse, thanks to the Amiga's unique ability to have two rodents connected at the same time.

In 2007, Sony released a new version of Lemmings to its PlayStation Portable (PSP) system. With multiple ports to choose from, they decided on the Amiga code base as the basis for the game. Now a whole new generation could experience the delights of pushing little green-haired creatures around.

Tune in for our next installment, when we'll look at the lives of some of the most popular Amiga game developers, such as Team 17, Psygnosis, and the Bitmap Brothers.






Stephen

--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5
* Origin: -:- Dragon's Lair BBS -:- telnet: bbs.vk3heg.net (39:901/280)