Difference between revisions of "Amiga games"

For many years, Space Harrier on the Amiga was the most accurate Western home port of the game available, even if the levels were originally split between two releases.

The Commodore Amiga was for a while the most powerful home computer on the market in the western world during the late 1980s, so Sega were quite happy to market some of their arcade titles for the system. As with other platforms, many Sega ports were handled by Activision and U.S. Gold with varying degrees of accuracy.

There were 32 Sega-branded Amiga games. Most Amiga games released under the Sega brand were ports of arcade titles running on Sega System 16, Super Scaler and System 24 hardware. More advanced games such as Thunder Blade and Power Drift would also see a release, but as the system could not scale sprites natively, these versions were often criticised for failing to provide the same experience found in arcades. Many Amiga games were held back as they were quickly ported from the less powerful Atari ST computer.

Work on Amiga games was dropped in the early 1990s for two reasons: Sega had seen their Sega Mega Drive console become a huge success (following their Sega Master System success in Europe), and the Amiga itself had become a dying platform after DOS releases of Doom (which had revolutionised computer games and was far too advanced for the Amiga's hardware). Furthermore though the Amiga had some ground in Europe and parts of North America, it was not available in smaller markets or Japan. Sega would not develop computer games again until the late 1990s, when Microsoft Windows was the platform of choice.

In addition, as both the Amiga and Mega Drive were popular in Europe, several European Amiga developers and publishers, most notably Psygnosis and Core Design, brought many Amiga games to the Mega Drive (and Mega CD), with varying degrees of success.