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.'"

The top of the list in my mind...

[CaptainPatent]

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

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!

Let me be the one to say it

[Opportunist]

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

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.

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 [wikipedia.org]
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) [wikipedia.org]
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.

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: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.