English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Shadow of The Beast, what a pile of crud on the Atari ST.

Megalomaniac · 19 October 2022, 09:06

Even before Beast was released, most of the really technically impressive Amiga games were Amiga exclusives developed with Amiga hardware in mind. People were already talking about the need for an ST version as well as holding back development. Not just US titles like Hybris and Sword of Sodan (now THAT has no gameplay....) either - while browsing an old issue of ACE online I saw a letter from an ST owner who bought Menace after seeing it on the Amiga and was disappointed with their version (seemingly released a few months later, judging by review dates). The Amiga couldn't match some of the dedicated arcade machines with multiple processors, but it could do a lot better than we usually saw with arcade conversions, especially from certain developers who preferred to do it fast rather than well (putting in 50% of the effort still meant 90% of the sales....).

As for the ST, it only sold about 2 million worldwide according to Wikipedia, compared with nearly 5 million for the Amiga, 4 million for the Atari 8-bit family and 3 million for the Amstrad CPC. Plus, a lot of those were mainly used for music, and I suspect that people moved on from it quicker than some of the others. The ST was only seen as cutting-edge for quite a short period of time - once the A500 was in the same price bracket, few chose Atari.

19 October 2022, 09:06	#35
Megalomaniac Registered User Join Date: Sep 2022 Location: Eastbourne Posts: 1,043	Even before Beast was released, most of the really technically impressive Amiga games were Amiga exclusives developed with Amiga hardware in mind. People were already talking about the need for an ST version as well as holding back development. Not just US titles like Hybris and Sword of Sodan (now THAT has no gameplay....) either - while browsing an old issue of ACE online I saw a letter from an ST owner who bought Menace after seeing it on the Amiga and was disappointed with their version (seemingly released a few months later, judging by review dates). The Amiga couldn't match some of the dedicated arcade machines with multiple processors, but it could do a lot better than we usually saw with arcade conversions, especially from certain developers who preferred to do it fast rather than well (putting in 50% of the effort still meant 90% of the sales....). As for the ST, it only sold about 2 million worldwide according to Wikipedia, compared with nearly 5 million for the Amiga, 4 million for the Atari 8-bit family and 3 million for the Amstrad CPC. Plus, a lot of those were mainly used for music, and I suspect that people moved on from it quicker than some of the others. The ST was only seen as cutting-edge for quite a short period of time - once the A500 was in the same price bracket, few chose Atari.