Alien Breed Amiga 1991 Team 17 Original Version

Alien Breed Original Version 1991

Inspired by the Alien film franchise of 1979-1992, Alien Breed is a top-down run and gun game developed by Team 17 for the Amiga in 1991.

Alien Breed is notable for its accurate controls, 2-player coop, responsive menu systems, 1½ megs of well-drawn graphics and difficult gameplay. Alien Breed also features intricate ambient sounds, digitized speech and dozens of sampled sounds (210K in total) as well as one of the best soundtracks on the Amiga, composed by Allister Brimble.

Alien Breed was programmed by Andreas Tadic and Peter Tuleby (both Swedes) in ASM-One assembler on two Amiga 3000s [1]. Alien Breed consists of 635K of source code. Alien Breed runs at 50 FPS in 32-color full PAL display mode. Alien Breed graphics were drawn by Rico Holmes.

The original Amiga version of Alien Breed consists of six levels of 8-way scrolling playfields with dimensions of 1x 1264x1440px and 5x 1920x1536px. Alien Breed features 8-way movement and 8-way firing of weapons.

The Amiga version of Alien Breed requires 1 meg of chip or fast RAM and was distributed on 3x 3.5" 880 kB diskettes.

Offering more of the same, Team 17 would later develop Alien Breed Special Edition (1992) and Alien Breed 2: The Horror Continues (1993).

Team 17's Alien Breed could have been influenced by Andrew Challis of Pandora's Into the Eagle's Nest of 1986-87. Kevin Parker's 1987 ZX Spectrum version is shown because it has the best viewport of the 8 bit versions:

Alien Breed is without a doubt the best top-down run and gun game on the Amiga.

• Alien Breed Manual: 8 pages
• Welcome to Intex Systems...
• Warning! Destruction imminent

Alien Breed IBM PC MS-DOS 1993

Audio Visual Magic Ltd. converted the 1992 Amiga version of Alien Breed Special Edition to IBM PC MS-DOS 5.0/6.0 in 1993. The IBM PC version of Alien Breed was programmed by Gavin Wade in 100% assembly language. Audio composed by Nigel Taylor; graphics drawn by Mark Smith, Chris Hare and Nik Love-Gittins.

The IBM PC version of Alien Breed requires an i80386DX-33 MHz CPU and 588,000 bytes of free conventional RAM. Alien Breed displays in 256-color VGA 320x200.

Alien Breed audio supports AdLib, Roland and Sound Blaster. Alien Breed employs up to 192K of EMS RAM for its sampled sound effects.

IBM PC Alien Breed consists of 18 levels and 750 screens.

• Alien Breed PC manual: 12 pages
• Alien Breed PC copy protection: Manual reference: page, row, column, code

The IBM PC version of Alien Breed was distributed on 1x 3.5" 1.44 MB HD diskette and extracts and installs via Team 17 Alien Breed Installation Setup and Audio Visual Magic Configuration Program by Adrian Youlden. The install size is 2 megs (128 files).

[1] ASM-One of 1991 by Rune-Gram Madsen aka Promax (later Price and Boushh).

cf.

• Run and Gun Computer Games
• Turrican Amiga Manfred Trenz 1990
• The Chaos Engine Amiga Bitmap Brothers 1993
• Abuse IBM PC MS-DOS 1996 Crack Dot Com
• History of Shoot 'em Ups 1976-2000

Indexes:

• Amiga Games Reviews (Index to all Amiga game reviews)
• Computer Game Reviews (Index to all computer game reviews)
• History of Computer Games (Master Index)