The Chaos Engine Amiga Bitmap Brothers 1993

The Chaos Engine

The Bitmap Brothers released The Chaos Engine for the Amiga and the Atari ST in 1993. The Chaos Engine is a top-down run and gun game set in a steampunk world known as The World of Chaos. The Chaos Engine features single-player mode, 2-player coop and 8-way scrolling, movement and firing. In one-player mode the AI controls the other mercenary.

In assuming the role of mercenary the object of The Chaos Engine is to destroy the time-space Chaos Engine and free its inventor trapped within, Baron Fortesque.

Amiga Chaos Engine was designed by Eric Matthews and Simon Knight and was programmed by Stephen Cargill and Mike Montgomery. The splendid graphics of The Chaos Engine were drawn by Dan Malone. The Chaos Engine in-game audio was composed by Richard Joseph, and its titlescreen track was composed by Farook and Haroon Joi.

The Chaos Engine Features

• Select one hard-nailed mercenary from a pool of six
• The six ball-breakers: Mercenary, Brigand, Gentleman, Navvie, Thug and Preacher
• Each merc is constituted by four prime stats and up to four special abilities
• Each merc wields a unique ranged weapon (a firearm) with three abilities
• Cash is collected and spent on stats, weapon power-ups and special abilities
• Special Powers: Molotov, Bomb, Shot Burst, Dynamite and Map
• Single-player + AI merc or two-player coop
• Joystick and keyboard control
• 16 levels of play: Four worlds consisting of four rounds each
• 16-color 320x200 resolution (320x176 active drawspace)
• Top-down 8-way screen-scrolling playfield
• 8-way movement and firing
• Height-mapped terrain (verticality)
• Avenue of approach: stairways, bridges (chokepoints)
• Environmental hazards such as jets of steam
• Traps, puzzles and secret passageways
• Nodes must be activated in order to progresss: Node activated. Exit open. Level complete.
• Collectibles: Treasure (cash,), silver keys, gold keys, food, death token
• Password system
• End-of-round stat summaries for both mercs
• Digitized sound effects and speech
• Incredible in-game music; incredible titlescreen music
• 8 different monster types

The Amiga version of The Chaos Engine required 1 meg of RAM and was distributed on 2x 3.5" 880kB DD diskettes. It was not hard disk drive-installable.

Criticism of The Chaos Engine

• Sprite-shifting and screen-scrolling are not silky-smooth (but smooth enough, to be fair)
• Collision detection is slightly off
• Weapons lack firing sounds and mercs lack footstep sounds
• Sprite drop-shadows are not dark enough

That said, the controls, music, speech, pixel art and animations are utterly superb.

If The Chaos Engine was not created with the Atari ST in mind, it probably would have been technically better. But the Bitmap Brothers developed all of their games with the ST in mind, at least from Xenon of 1988 to The Chaos Engine of 1993.

All of the early Bitmap Brothers games could have been better if the Atari ST didn't exist. For example, The Chaos Engine could have displayed in 32-color full PAL display mode at 50 FPS (Alien Breed 1991).

The Chaos Engine IBM PC 1994

Scott Walsh of Wave Software ported the Amiga version of The Chaos Engine of 1993 to IBM PC MS-DOS in 1994. IBM PC MS-DOS Chaos Engine displays in 256-color VGA 320x200. In terms of framerate the PC version of The Chaos Engine is comparable to the ST/Amiga versions, but the original ST/Amiga color schemes are inarguably superior. And the Paula audio rendition cannot be beaten.

The PC version of Chaos Engine requires 590K of free conventional RAM (604,064 bytes). Chaos Engine PC audio supports Roland music and digitized sound via Sound Blaster.

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