The most powerful gaming platform

The Amiga started out its life as a dedicated games machine, and even though it grew into a full computer very quickly, it never lost its gaming side. The machine's 4096-color palette, stereo sampled sound, and graphics acceleration chips made it a perfect gaming platform, and it didn't take long for game companies to start taking advantage of this power.

While the slow sales of the Amiga 1000 limited the number of games that developers were willing to make for the platform, when Commodore released the low-cost Amiga 500 in 1987, everything changed. Now the most powerful gaming computer was also one of the cheapest, and game companies jumped at the chance to showcase their talents on the Amiga.

Mind Walker (1986)

One of the first games ever released for the Amiga was a quirky gem called Mind Walker, written by Bill Williams and published by Commodore itself. Williams started his game design career on the Atari 800, writing classics like Necromancer and Alley Cat. His games were always unique, combining off-the-wall situations with innovative game play.

Mind Walker puts the gamer in the role of a physicist who has lost his mind. Instead of resorting to drugs or therapy, the protagonist of the game decided to send his split ego into the depths of his own brain. Your job is to navigate this surreal landscape and uncover paths leading to deeper and deeper levels, with the ultimate goal of finding the hidden key to save your sanity.

Your alter ego jumps around on brightly colored square platforms of varying height—fortunately, you can't fall off. If you reach the end of the screen it instantly loads the adjacent area. Floating gold balls try to zap you with deadly searchlights, but you can zap most of them with bolts of electricity that you direct with the deft skill of a Sith Lord. Over some squares hover strange pyramids that transform your avatar from a man into a red wizard, a flying bug-like alien, or a sexy seductress. Different forms are required to find different parts of the path, and keeping track of the whole operation requires careful consultation of the overhead map. If the character becomes hidden behind an overly-tall platform, the player can switch to one of four different views by hitting the letters N, S, E or W.



Mindwalker by Commodore.

Once the path is complete, the game shifts to a three-dimensional view of a psychedelic tunnel. The player has to grab a translucent green door with his disembodied hands, which leads to the final level in which the character fends off fuzzy-looking "bad thoughts" to find the next piece of his sanity.

The game has simple but evocative graphics that make good use of the Amiga's built-in hardware polygon drawing and area fills. Bill Williams had been a composer before he became a game designer, and the music he created for Mind Walker has an eerie, lyrical quality to it that fits perfectly with the game's theme. The game uses stereo pan effects to let the lightning bolts seem to sear across the room. Like the Amiga itself, Mind Walker was unusual and thought-provoking.

Another unusual thing about the game was that it not only fit neatly on a single floppy disk, but it also had no copy protection and could be run directly from the Amiga's Workbench GUI. Furthermore, the game was multitasking-friendly, so you could easily run other applications in the background. Few Amiga games in the future would retain these qualities. Game developers, eager to squeeze out every last bit of power from the computer, would bypass the operating system and access the hardware directly. This allowed later titles to be much more graphically impressive, but at the cost of multitasking capabilities.

Bill Williams would continue writing games up until 1992, when corporate interference on the Super Nintendo title Bart's Nightmare (he referred to it as "Bill's Nightmare") caused him to leave the industry altogether and pursue a second career as a Lutheran pastor, picking up a master's degree in theology along the way.

Defender of the Crown (1986)

Cinemaware was started by Robert and Phyllis Jacob in 1985. Their goal was to create games that had style and presentation that were evocative of movies. This was an ambitious goal back when most video games were simple shoot-em-up or maze-chasing affairs, but the advent of the Amiga gave the small company a chance to realize their dreams.

Defender of the Crown was their first title, and it showcased the power of the new platform. The scene: you are a Saxon baron of an English fiefdom in the Middle Ages, and the king has just been killed without a clear successor. You must fight other Saxons and Norman invaders to conquer England and become the new king.

The game was one of the first to feature gorgeous hand-painted loading screens to set up the action, and the game itself was just as beautiful. Each turn begins with a stylized birds-eye view of Britain. From this menu, the player can choose to attack a neighboring county, stage a raid on an enemy castle, stage a jousting tournament, or occasionally stage a daring rescue of a beautiful maiden. Robin Hood pops up from time to time as a non-player character who can be either an enemy or an ally.



Defender of the Crown by Cinemaware.

As in many games of its era, winning can be frustratingly difficult. In the raid screen, for example, you control a single fighter who must cut down enemy after enemy while his compatriots merely keep the rest of them away. Jousting is only slightly less difficult than the real thing, requiring a steady hand on the mouse to position your lance in the right position at the right moment. Winning a joust can gain your side honor points or even territory, depending on the initial stakes.

Defender of the Crown was an Amiga-only game at the outset, and was often used by dealers to showcase the platform to eager young gamers. Much of the credit for the game's success has to go to the game's artist, Jim Sachs. RJ Mical, who did some consulting work for the game, recalled his talent.

"Jim Sachs, what a god he is," marveled Mical. "Jim Sachs is amazing. These days everyone sees graphics like that because there are a lot of really good computer graphics artists now, but back then, 20 years ago, it was astonishing to have someone that good."

Because Cinemaware was a startup company running low on cash, and Defender was the first product, it was forced to release the game before it was completely finished. Later, ports of the game to the Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, IBM PC, and the Atari ST would fill out the missing parts, including a more substantial army attacking screen. The ports could not deliver the same sound and graphics quality of the Amiga version, however.

Cinemaware continued to publish innovative games until 1991, when over-extension and feature creep on the Cold War title SSI caused the company to declare bankruptcy. Two early employees of the company, Lars Fuhrken-Batista and Sean Vesce, got back together to create an updated version of the game called Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Windows PCs in 2003.