Amiga Games Reviews (Index to Amiga game reviews).

The First REAL Amiga Game

By first REAL Amiga game, I am referring to the first game on the Amiga that tapped its custom chipset such that the game could not be mistaken for an ST or IBM PC game. In addition, I am referring to a game that was not just an upgrade-port or conversion-remake of an 8 bit original.

In Best Amiga Games I highlighted some games that are Amiga games. But which was the first Amiga game to clearly differentiate itself from ST and MS-DOS slop?

I'm not just talking about the Amiga's 32 from 4096 versus the ST's 16 from 512 or EGA's 16 from 64. That is just color palette.

If we are just talking about color palette, we can cite Cinemaware's Defender of the Crown of 1986:

Palette is certainly a factor, but it is only one factor. What I am talking about are Amiga games that feature all of the following:

Super-smooth hardware scrolling and sprite/bob-shifting
Big sprites, lots of sprites (and/or bobs)
Copper coprocessor and bit blitter employment
Precise controls and collision detection
Proper Paula audio
Palette exploitation (no. of on-screen colors)
Overall coinop-quality presentation, perfomance and playability

That is, an Amiga game that is unmistakably deemed to be so when it is seen, heard and played. An Amiga game that cannot appear on rival platforms without becoming a soulless husk of its original self. Veteran Amigans can ID real Amiga games from as little as an image or soundtrack fragment.

Also, the game in question must have good gameplay. DotC barely even features gameplay. Thus, discounted.

I am talking about the first game you played where you thought: "Yes! This is it. This is why I bought an Amiga."

Well, here is my answer.

The first real Amiga game was the 1988 shoot 'em up known as Hybris:

Coded by Martin Pederson in 1988, Hybris is the first real Amiga game that covers the above-enumerated criteria. [1] Yes, the ST and IBM PC could caricature its static graphics but NOT its scrolling, its sprite-shifting or its soundscape.

You know Hybris is an Amiga game as soon as you hit the fire button and watch that projectile glide over a smoothly-scrolling playfield before hiting its target with a meaty boom.

At any rate, Hybris was the first game that made many of us happy to have an Amiga. We were playing this arcade-quality shooter before the PC Engine and Sega Genesis even came out. And Hybris was followed up by Battle Squadron and Silkworm of 1989, both of which came out in the same year as Shadow of the Beast.

But while Shadow of the Beast defined Amiga-game audio-visuals of the high-production kind, it did not have gameplay on par with Hybris, Battle Squadron or Silkworm. However, Beast has the most distinctly Amigan audio-visuals of any Amiga game in existence.

After those four games Amigans were graced with the two best Turrican games and SWIV from 1990-92.

Therefore, 1988-92 marks the point of real-deal Amiga gaming. 1988-92 was the Golden Age of Amiga Gaming. We do not need to cite other great Amiga games to support our argument that 1988-92 was prime-time for the Amiga.

But consider as well:

The A500 was selling well and ST and 8 bit ports were fewer
The Amiga games-catalogue was growing rapidly across most genre
The IBM PC did not yet completely dominate (no Doom)
The "16 bit" games-machine aka console did not yet dominate

1988-1992 was a good time to be an Amigan. And 1989-90 was the apex. After the Amiga there would never again be a microcomputer that could carve out territory between PC and console.

A lot was lost. And not much has been gained. And this argument is supported by my History of Computer Games; the only balanced history of computer games on the internet.

Sword of Sodan Amiga 1988

[1]

Elaboration

For those who cannot, for whatever reason, accept my criteria, I have covered other early Amiga games in Best Amiga Games. To be clear, I am not saying that there are no examples of good Amiga games that predate Hybris, but such do not bang Amiga hardware hard; they could quite as easily have appeared on an ST or an IBM PC -- and often did. But if Hybris was to have been ported to ST/PC back in the day, you would have been able to tell in one second flat that you were playing an inferior port. And if Hybris had been originally coded for ST/PC back in 1988, it would not have played, looked or sounded as good. Of that you can be certain. Because the Amiga was its own thing, it was different, unique. No microcomputer in history ever had that much soul.

One may also wonder why it took so long (3 years) for Amiga games like Hybris of 1988 to come out. I mean, the Amiga 1000 came out in 1985, right? What took so long? Well, think about it. It takes time for coders to understand the Amiga's custom chipset. Awareness and market-penetration of a cutting-edge computer took time in 1985.

But that aside, the A500 with 512K RAM came out in 1987. Before that, there was only the A1000 with 256K RAM (expandable to 512K). And while there is a big difference between 256K and, say, the Commodore 64's 64K, we should bear in mind that Amiga games ran in higher resolutions, in more colors and with generally more instruction "overhead", which consumes more RAM (e.g., bitmapped versus character-mapped). In essence, therefore, the first Amiga game-coders did not have as much RAM to work with as one might expect.

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