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Early 1990s IBM PC Games that made Amiga owners jealous



This is a chronological list of early 1990s IBM PC games that may have made some Amiga owners jealous, either because the IBM PC games were not available on Amiga, came out on IBM PC before Amiga or were simply better on IBM PC than on Amiga. If nothing is added in parenthesis, that means the IBM PC game was not available on Amiga.

Bolded entries signify particularly notable releases in computer game history.

An appended asterisk (*) signifies that the IBM PC version is much better than the Amiga version.

Some IBM PC game-releases may have petrified Amigans in the early 1990s. Since it amuses me to do so, I have appended [petrifying] to such game-entries. I do not care if some readers cannot relate to that.

The IBM PC got some good ports of famous Amiga games; not enough to replace the Amiga across all genre, but perhaps enough to annoy Amigans even if a port came out one year later. Especially if such a port equaled or exceeded the Amiga original, which some actually did. In the late 80s many IBM PC versions of arcade-action games were quite weak in comparison to the Amiga versions (e.g., Arkanoid of 1987 and Speedball and Super Hang-On of 1988), but by the early 90s the pendulum began swinging the other way. And I have given reasons for that in my histories; but basically: VGA + 386DX + more RAM + soundcard + hard disk drive + massive market penetration = Win.


Every Sierra On-Line and LucasFilm adventure game was better on IBM PC than on Amiga. In addition, practically every cRPG and strategy game was better on IBM PC than on Amiga. That said, the Amiga hosted a few cRPGs that were unavailable on IBM PC, such as:


Naturally, every 3D game was better on IBM PC than Amiga by the late 80s. And those were only VGA 320x200. Now consider the square-pixel SVGA 640x480 games listed above...

cf. The first 3D flat-shaded computer games / The first 3D texture-mapped computer games.

And now consider the Roland MT-32 + Sound Blaster combo of 1993 versus Paula of 1985.

Note how every single game in that list is an IBM PC MS-DOS game, not a Windows game. IBM PC games did not need DirectX Windows to demolish Amiga games in the early 1990s; the Amiga was demolished before Windows 95 came out -- in the early 90s the vast majority of MS-DOS games were installed, configured and loaded via command-line; "user-friendly" mouse control was almost never employed by installation programs of the early 90s. 

The IBM PC even began to challenge the Amiga in what had traditionally been "Amiga genre." New genre were being invented on IBM PC, not on Amiga. Instead, Amiga developers mainly tried to refine or expand some old genre via the A1200 of 1992 (14 MHz 68020, 2 megs of RAM, AGA graphics), but such games were beaten out by the Genesis and SNES console games most of the time [1]. Thus was the Amiga losing the battle on two fronts.

If an Amigan purchased an IBM PC in 1993 in order to play Doom and such-like, they could still play some good ol' ST/Amiga games such as Gods, Xenon 2, Chaos Engine and Lotus on the IBM PC, even though such games were no longer in-vogue. In addition, the IBM PC got most of the English football games that were famous on the Amiga.

In the early 1990s the Amiga missed out on so many big-name games that it isn't even funny. This was a crushing defeat that made it hard not to jump ship because gamers go where the games are. And when the Amiga did get a big-name game or coinop conversion, the IBM PC version was often far superior to the Amiga one; Street Fighter 2 of 1992 and Mortal Kombat of 1993 are but two examples of many that could be given.

Of course, the Amiga held on in the early 1990s by virtue of its custom chipset and the aptitude of its Amiga-loyal assembly coders; mainly in scrolling shoot 'em ups, platform games and sprite-scaling and top-down racing games. But due to the raw processing power of the IBM PC coupled with the advent of VGA the writing was on the wall and the Amiga's days were numbered.

Indeed, even the Father of the Amiga effectively said that the Amiga's days were numbered. In 1988.

That said, the Amiga most certainly had a few great years. And many of us treasure the memories of those years; for many of us, they were the best years.

[1] It wasn't because A1200 hardware could not compete with Genesis/SNES hardware, it was because Amiga AGA developers could not compete with Genesis/SNES developers. As it pertains to computer games, Amiga AGA developers did not have enough time to exploit the A1200's capacities before the Amiga lost the two-front battle against the IBM PC and the new Sega and Nintendo consoles.
 
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