Thursday, April 12, 2007

Top 10 Most Influential Amiga Games

I have a soft spot in my heart for the Commodore Amiga.  It came out 22 years ago in 1985 and was way ahead of its time.  It had a GUI, ,stereo audio, hi-res color graphics, hardware-accelerated graphics, etc.  It had all this years before the PC.  I didn't jump to the PC until 1995 because it was only then that it had managed to surpass the Amiga.  It was the Amiga that first brought things like 3D rendering, digital video editing, and looped audio creation to the mainstream.


Given the great multimedia capabilities, the Amiga was also a great gaming computer.  Wired just published an article listing the top 10 most influence games on the Amiga.  I played most of these and enjoyed them.  Games listed include:



  1. Defender of the Crown - Amazing graphics for its time.  Spent a lot of time playing this one.

  2. Sensible Soccer

  3. Speedball 2

  4. Syndicate - actually the first SVGA game on the PC I was aware of

  5. Lemmings - really cool platformer.  Now available on the PSP.

  6. Pinball Dreams

  7. Cannon Fodder

  8. Shadow of the Beast - First arcade-quality side scroller on a PC.

  9. Another World - One of the first vector-based adventure games.

  10. Worms -didn't know this was an Amiga title.

To this list I would add:



  1. Blood Money - first arcade-quality side-scrolling shooter on a PC.

  2. F/A-18 Interceptor - first 3D, color flight simulator on a PC.  This game sold me on the Amiga.

  3. Battle Chess - Animated Chess.  The rook eating the queen was one of my favorite moves.

  4. Dungeon Master - Established the 3D dungeon genre in something other than wireframe graphics.  Ultima Underworld definitely followed this trend and arguably, titles like Wolfenstein did too.

4/13 Update - Added Dungeon Master to the list.  Definitely influential.

6 comments:

  1. Another one I'd recommend was The Pawn - a text adventure game but with gorgeous graphics (like paintings).
    Battle Chess was fantastic...I remember the rook vs. queen move very well (the rooks used to become very troll-like when they moved).
    I once contrived a realistically impossible move just to see what would happen (king kills queen) - the king took out a revolver and shot her. I almost choked laughing :-)
    As an aside, I think the Amiga taught a lot of programmers skills that would eventually prove very useful in Windows (since the technical issues confronting developers were quite similar to Win32)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Speedball was awesome, i thought it was better than speedball 2 - ice cream, ice cream... and although it wasn't just Amiga based - The secret of Monkey Island was a classic.

    ReplyDelete
  3. IIRC the king shoots the bishop; he bonks the queen over the head when she tries to stab him in the back.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I enjoyed a lot of those games on your list. I'd add these three:
    - Player Manager
    - Carrier Command
    - Midwinter
    All with flaws but all quite groundbreaking IMHO.

    ReplyDelete
  5. http://amigareviews.classicgaming.gamespy.com/amigaind.htm has lots listed.
    I certainly would suggest Elite. And maybe The Sentinel.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks for the link.
    Elite was a Commodore 64 game though wasn't it?  I mean, there was an Amiga version, but it was just a slight improvement on the C=64 version if memory serves me.
    I don't remember The Sentinel.

    ReplyDelete