Great Giana Sisters Amiga Time Warp Productions 1988

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The Great Giana Sisters

Time Warp Productions of Germany released The Great Giana Sisters for Amiga in 1988. Great Giana Sisters is horizontally scrolling platform game and clone of Nintendo's Super Mario Bros.

Great Giana Sisters was followed up by Hard n Heavy of 1989.

In Great Giana Sisters players control Giana or Maria over 32 platforming stages of a dreamworld. As in SMB the sisters can run, jump, head-butt blocks and fire ricocheting projectiles. Also a per SMB, there are warps, secrets to discover, currency to collect and times and scores to beat.

Great Giana Sisters was the first scrolling platform game on Amiga to update at 50 FPS. On Amiga it was only v-shooters that were already updating at 50 FPS (starting in 1987).

Atari ST Great Giana Sisters is flip-screen because the ST was poor at horizontal scrolling.

While Great Giana Sisters looks like an Amiga public-domain game in stills, its precise controls, collision detection and 50 FPS scrolling and sprite-shifting mark it as a polished and professional game. In addition, its audio was composed by the best in the business. One nice graphical touch is how the diamonds and stars on the blocks are animated.

Speaking of which, the Atari ST and Amiga versions of Great Giana Sisters are conversions of the original C64 version of 1987 by Time Warp Productions, which was coded by Armin Gessert and composed by Chris Hülsbeck. Naturally, C64 Great Giana Sisters scrolls at 50 FPS. ST/Amiga Great Giana Sisters were programmed by Thomas Hertzler. Amiga Great Giana Sisters was composed by Thomas Lopatic whereas Jochen Hippel composed for the ST. Manfred Trenz drew the C64 and ST/Amiga versions.

Amiga Great Giana Sisters features no parallax scrolling, no super-scrolling and no color gradients. I suppose it would have been possible to add such in 1988, but we must bear in mind that Great Giana Sisters is a C64 game first and foremost, and the Amiga version is but a "hires" port thereof.

Amiga Great Giana Sisters was distributed by Rainbow Arts on 1x 3.5" 880kB DD diskette.

In conclusion, C64 Great Giana Sisters is historically significant because it proved that the C64 could technically match console platform games of Japanese origin, whereas Amiga Great Giana Sisters was historically significant because it was the first Amiga platform game to scroll at 50 FPS.

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