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.'"

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 [sodan.dk]

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 [cinemaware.com] Now can I had a flight stick for a Game Boy?

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.