AMIGA UNRELEASED GAMES
The Golem :
A snipet of the Intro for an Unreleased Amiga game by Underground Software , an italian software house, called The Golem 1997.
The Amiga Magazines followed this game for a while but in the end it just vanished. The game never appeared. Its unknown if it was completed or not.
>Inferno :
Amiga CD32 – Rolling demo of Inferno by Ocean 1993.
>Archetype :
This video features footage from the unreleased Amiga version of the Alf Yngve game ARCHETYPE. Due to the limited nature of the Amiga version of SEUCK this game never saw a commercial release despite Alf doing a great job converting the C64 game onto the Amiga. As the Amiga game screen
took up a tiny amount of space on the screen (the rest of the screen was black).
>Fatal Noise :
A beat’em up by Digital Waves , both with unknown origins but well (almost) done .
It was featured in an Italian magazine preview but remained unreleased. However, thanks to Andrea Carboni we can now see how the game would have turned out. Note that there are still elements missing in this version but it is possible to try out different opponents in various scenes.
>And at last from the Amiga Lore :
Babylonian Twins
Babylonian Twins has a history quite different to most other Amiga games since it was developed in Iraq during a period of economic sanctions following the first Gulf War.
These practical difficulties however produced a really professional platformer which unfortunately could not find a publisher.
Last year, in 2008, English Amiga Board member viddi made us aware of videos of Babylonian Twins posted on YouTube by its creator. Since then there has been increased interest and the full game may yet appear on the Amiga or other platforms.
In the meantime the demo can be downloaded from Rabah Shihab’s website at http://babyloniantwins.com.
BEACH HEAD I & II
It’s surprising to find that Beach-Head I, II and Raid Over Moscow were in progress for the Amiga as they are closely associated with machines such as the Spectrum and C64. 8-bit conversions to the Amiga were of course common but there are probably a number of well-known games from other machines that weren’t completed.
It seems that most of the work on the three games was in the area of graphics and they do look neat. As Adrian Cummings mentions in the Q&A there was still much to do on the coding and the deal with the publisher fell through.
GORE
Long before Grand Theft Auto, DMA produced two games called Menace and Blood Money. Now the company was working on a horizontal beat-’em-up called Gore.
Gore was intended to be a technical tour de force and this is perhaps why it was unfinished. It’s notable that shortly afterwards DMA created Lemmings, a game which relied less on pushing the Amiga to the limits and more on excellent gameplay and new ideas.
Dave Jones and Tony Smith collaborated on Gore. Tony created the superbly distinctive graphics of Menace and Blood Money and answers our questions on his unfinished work.
Many thanks go to Mike Dailly of The Complete History of DMA Design for the use of the Gore screenshot.
Son Of Zeus
In this game based on Greek mythology the Umbilikos has been split into twelves pieces by Ares. According to a preview in the September 1991 issue of Zero magazine, Pallas Athena’s owl Bubo (the one in the 1981 Clash of the Titans film) is tasked with finding a hero to recover the pieces.
The hero, Herakles (Hercules), the son of Zeus can visit ten city locations across the ancient world in his quest; Pylos, Argos, Mycenae, Tiryns, Corinth, Delphi, Thebes, Athens, Chalcis, Pella and the Isle of the Dead.
The game was originally to have been released by an unnamed publisher before it found its way to Electronic Zoo. The programmer was Mick Tinker, who was involved with the Amiga BoXeR project which was an attempt to produce a more advanced classic Amiga. Brian van de Peer created the graphics and his son Tobias worked on the music and sound effects.
The April 1992 issue of Amiga Action featured a demo of Son of Zeus so it’s possible to get a good idea of the gameplay. In the demo, Herakles walks around an outdoor area which is viewed from a first person perspective.
The most striking aspect of Son of Zeus is Brian’s brilliant graphics. The giant spider in the demo, for example, is a large and hideous creature. Brian has kindly supplied Amiga Games That Weren’t with some more graphics from the game.
However, closing in on our hero are various mythical monsters, including giant spiders, harpies and gorgons. Once a monster is encountered the game switches to a side-on view and a beat-’em-up style of gameplay ensues.
X-Fighter
There were many ways of creating games on the Amiga, ranging from the ultra-easy Shoot-‘Em-Up Construction Kit to the rather more difficult assembler. Somewhere in between sat AMOS, the Amiga successor to the Atari STOS.
AMOS spawned a compiler which helped to speed up the otherwise interpreted code, an even easier version called Easy AMOS and a updated version called AMOS Professional. In due course AMOS was somewhat superseded by Blitz BASIC, a more powerful language.
In the PD and shareware scene AMOS was of course very popular and helped many a budding developer. Kwok Man was one such game creator and produced the obscure and probably long lost Mad Fighters I. The more advanced sequel Mad Fighters II, a Street Fighter II inspired beat-’em-up, was an A1200 only game and received good reviews in magazines; 5 out of 5 stars from Amiga Power and 86% in the The One. Both reviews omit the “II” but it seems clear that the reviews are of the sequel.
In 1995 Mad Fighters II became a commercial game in the form of X-Fighter CD32. The game was complete and was due to be published by the famous German company Thalion and review copies were sent out to the magazines. The reviews were positive with 70% in Amiga Format, 60% in Amiga Power, 85% in CU Amiga and 85% in The One.
In the end the publication of X-Fighter never went ahead. The game could have been improved graphically to match the slickness of games like Shadow Fighter and Elfmania but the gameplay is solid. Sadly Kwok doesn’t have the game anymore so the only way to recover the game now seems to be through the review copies, if any still exist.
However, a demo from The One is still available and can be downloaded from the link above. Kwok has also kindly allowed aGTW to offer Mad Fighters II A1200 for download.
FOOTAGE:
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