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1989 PC Games

This is a curated list of PC games that came out in 1989. The PC games are listed in alphabetical order. Both MS-DOS and Amiga games are included. I will expand on this list in the future.

Having given overviews of seven of the best 1990s years (cf. PC Games of 1990), this series of articles is now moving back into the glorious 1980s.

1989 was a very strong year for Amiga games and a strong year for Atari ST and IBM PC games as well. Take for example the following chronological enumeration:

Maxis Software's SimCity of February on PC is the seminal city-builder game. Also, SimCity displayed in EGA 640x350.
DMA's Design's Blood Money of May on Amiga took sprite animations to the next level.
Bullfrog's Populous of June on Amiga is the seminal god game.
Anco's Kick Off of June on Atari ST is the first true 16-bit English football game.
The Assembly Line's Xenon 2 of September on ST/Amiga took pixel art to the next level.
Dynamix's MechWarrior of September on PC featured articulated 3D mech-models.
MPS Labs' M1 Tank Platoon of October on PC is one of the best games of all-time.
Reflections' Shadow of the Beast of October became the Amiga's Killer App.
Cope-Com's Battle Squadron of November on Amiga became the best shooter on any Western home computer.
Papyrus Design's Indianapolis 500 of December on PC is the first 16-bit motorsport simulator.
MicroStyle's Stunt Car Racer of December on ST/Amiga broke new ground in vehicle physics.
Maelstrom's Midwinter of December on Atari ST was ground-breaking across the board.
SSG's Warlords of December on PC displayed in SVGA 640x400.
John O'Brien's Chase HQ on ZX Spectrum stands as one of the top-5 all-time coinop ports.
EA's Lakers versus Celtics became the first officially licensed NBA computer or video game.
Ocean Software's RoboCop became the biggest blockbuster game yet seen on 16-bit computers.

Ten of the above are of British origin whereas only five are of U.S. origin. And while British games of 1989 plateau higher than North American games, a few games of U.S. origin peak highest in terms of shelf-life due to their deep and engrossing gameplay; namely, SimCity, M1 and MechWarrior.

Not to be forgotten, the French also developed three aesthetically-striking 16-bit games in 1989; two of which were developed by Delphine.

In 1989 the Amiga hosted one dozen great arcade-action games whereas the PC only hosted a few. And when a certain game appeared on both Amiga and PC, the Amiga version was usually superior in terms of gameplay and audiovisuals. For example, Amiga Rock 'n Roll features 8-way super-scrolling in 32 from 4096 colors -- with hardware mouse cursor -- whereas PC Rock n' Roll is only flip-screen in 16 from 64 colors -- and only with keyboard or analogue joystick control, which is comparatively clunky.

The problem with action games on PC was that EGA was at its height and VGA was only emerging; that is, VGA had not yet been cost-reduced and chipset-consolidated by cloners. Moreover, many PC games of 1989 were coded with 16-bit i808x and i80286 CPUs of 1981-84 in mind rather than for the much more powerful 32-bit 386 CPUs of 1985-89. Such considerations adversely affected 3D draw-detail and the degree of 3D-model articulation even in the most advanced simulators of 1989, but what nevertheless made such simulators impressive was that 3D coders of 1989 employed every efficiency-enhancing trick in the book.

That said, in 1989 Tseng Labs released the mighty ET4000 VLSI video chipset, which became famous by 1990 for its exceptional memory management, high fidelity and lightning-fast screen-draw speed. The ET4000 benchmarked at 17x faster than the ET3000 of 1987.

The PC hosted the best flight sims, armor sims and vehicle sims of 1989. PC Stunt Car Racer is the only vehicle sim that does not match its ST/Amiga version. In addition, in 1989 no strategy game on ST/Amiga could compete with SimCity, Warlords or Red Storm Rising on PC.

The Atari ST flexed with several ST-firsts in 1989; namely, F29, Kick Off, Midwinter and CSB. And while Kick Off and Midwinter were of the highest order the Amiga stole the show with Battle Squadron, Blood Money, Datastorm and Shadow of the Beast, which were coinop-quality games with which the ST would struggle or never get whereas the Amiga would effortlessly host the ST-firsts in 1990.

The Commodore 64 of 1982 was still hosting great games in 1989. For example, in 1989 no fewer than six king-tier C64 shooters would contend with Amiga shooters. I will simply cite Retrograde and leave it at that.

It is disappointing that many poor coinop ports were released for PC, ST and Amiga in 1989. To be fair to the porters, they were working within limited time-frames and often without access to coinop schematics and ROM dumps. The best coinop ports of 1989 were:

Factor 5's R-Type on Amiga
Electric Dreams Software's R-Type on ZX Spectrum
Random Access' Silkworm on C64/Amiga
Banana Developments' Rambo 3 on PC
Banana Developments' Operation Wolf on PC
Ocean Software's Operation Thunderbolt on Amiga
Ocean Software's Chase HQ on ZX Spectrum
Choice's New Zealand Story on ST/Amiga

Shadow of the Beast owned audio and 2D graphics in 1989. On this front nothing came close. We are talking about 50 FPS 13-layer parallax hardware screen-scrolling, 128 on-screen colors, 220x150px hardware sprites and instrumentals sampled at 20 kHz. And while Beast's gameplay was average at best it nevertheless became the Amiga's Killer App and shifted many Amiga 500s for Commodore. In terms of audiovisuals the difference between pre- and post-Beast Amiga games is striking; that is, Shadow of the Beast raised production values and audiovisual expectations considerably. Take for example the Beast-like Unreal of 1990 and Agony of 1992 -- games that could only become caricatures of the Amiga originals when running on ST/PC.

Audio-wise on PC, the Roland MT-32 MIDI Synthesizer and AdLib Music Synthesizer gained more ground in 1989, but Creative Technology released Sound Blaster 1.0 in 1989 as well. Many games supported over one dozen audio chipsets. Even so, Paula Amiga audio of 1985 would contend with PC digital sound and MIDI music well into the early 90s.

***

In my estimation there are three contenders to the 1989 throne: SimCity of Feb. by Maxis, Populous of June by Bullfrog and M1 Tank of Oct. by MPS Labs.

SimCity and Populous were the most influential of the trio. SimCity led to many Sim-style games and Caesar of 1992 whereas Populous led directly to PowerMonger of 1990, Syndicate of 1993, Theme Park of 1994 (also a SimCity-like) and Dungeon Keeper of 1997.

In addition, both SimCity and Populous somewhat influenced Civ of 1991 and X-COM of 1994, which are also GOAT games.

A three-way draw could reasonably be declared for 1989, but there can only be one King. And since M1 Tank Platoon was technically astounding, professionally presented and of grognard-level, I crown M1 Tank Platoon the King of 1989.

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