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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. Or maybe even because the Amiga owner felt like the IBM PC should not have been graced with this or that "Amiga game". 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 [P] for Petrifying to such game-entries.

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, 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.

1990 IBM PC Games that made Amiga owners Jealous



Remember that 1989-91 constitutes the Amiga's heyday. But you can see the IBM PC becoming strong across more genre in 1990, not just in flight sims and the like. In 1990 the IBM PC was getting what would end up being some of the greatest games of all-time -- before the Amiga. And even when the Amiga versions of those games came out, the IBM PC version remained superior in almost all cases.


[1] 40 FPS screen-scrolling.
[2] The release of Xenon 2 on the IBM PC may have annoyed some Amigans; many Amigans (falsely) considered Xenon 2 to be "their Amiga game". And now the IBM PC gets Xenon 2, which has -- wait for it -- better screen-scrolling than the Amiga version (which was an Atari ST port).

1991 IBM PC Games that made Amiga owners Jealous



As good as they are, Gods and Speedball 2 ("ST/Amiga games") coming out on IBM PC are mere footnotes in comparison to Civilization and the technical marvel that is Falcon 3.0 -- an IBM PC-exclusive.
 

1992 IBM PC Games that made Amiga owners Jealous



There are just too many good IBM PC games in 1992. This is an insanely strong line-up:


1993 IBM PC Games that made Amiga owners Jealous



Somehow though, 1993 is stronger than 1992. And as this list makes plain, it wasn't just Doom that may have petrified Amigans.


1994 IBM PC Games that made Amiga owners Jealous



The Amiga had a snowball's chance in Hell of competing in 1994:


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:


But those games were based on oldhat flip-screen tech of Dungeon Master of 1987. And they pale in comparison to what was coming out on IBM PC from 1991-93.

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.


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 -- and yet, in the early 90s the vast majority of MS-DOS games were installed, configured and loaded via command-line; "user-friendly" mouse control was rarely employed by installation programs of the early 90s.

At this point, one should take a moment to reflect on the computer-literacy of the IBM PC user of the 1990s. Consider the command line along with config.sys, autoexec.bat, IRQ levels, DMA channels, memory managers, TSRs, disk-caching and disk-compression. And now contrast that with your average Steam and GoG fanboy of 2024.

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, Alien Breed, 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 cases in point. Note that this was not the fault of Amiga developers of big-name ports.


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, pixel-art graphicians and Paula composers; 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.

As of 2024, the AGA chipset of the Amiga 1200 and 4000 still remains largely untapped by developers; that is, as it pertains to Amiga games AGA was simply not exploited to the degree that the OCS/ECS chipsets of the A500, 1000 and 2000 were. To this day, we don't know how far the AGA chipset could have been pushed and what it was really capable of.

Go and look at something like The Chaos Engine of 1993. It runs from diskettes on 7 MHz M68K A500s with 1 meg of RAM. Now imagine AGA TCE designed, programmed, drawn and composed from the ground up for M68020 14 MHz A1200s with trapdoor RAM and hard disk drive.

cf.

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