Amiga's most iconic game characters?

[Photon]

Fuzzy question. For personality you're looking at lots of dialog, and/or lots of expressiveness sharing that. For there to be enough of it to *really* say you've captured a lot of a personality you're looking at a fairly long story game. And Mario (and Sonic and many others) fall way short both in the dialog and expressiveness.

If this is the question, then a character like Roger Rabbit would be the answer. Or maybe any of the characters from movie conversions; this is what they aimed for, even if many movies are not very deep and the stories and characters become cartoony or Marvel(etc)-ey.

It becomes even fuzzier if you dismiss the above and go for "famous". Fame is bought and paid for with advertising money and preinstalled/shipped with "default software". Internet Explorer is iconic. Minesweeper is iconic. Mario/Sonic is iconic. I don't think any of those have stories or characters worth anything.

If Mario/Sonic is in the poll, to avoid a fuzzy poll it should be say, only about mascot-like characters that got a sequel (same or other platform shouldn't matter; it would only strengthen the iconicity, as in: "Mario was on arcade first, so NES Mario and sequels shouldn't count??") that you could print on a mug or a T-shirt and they would be recognized.

I think for this category it should be enough to see the character on a mug and go, "Hey, that's X! I played that on Amiga!".

And I think Amiga has some of those.
Lemmings, Worms, Beasts, Nebuli, Turricans, Gianas, and lots of previously mentioned ones.

[hitm4n]

Robocod ?
What about iconic charcters that aren't the protagonist.

The shopkeeper in Xenon 2 for example.

[CCRider]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Most iconic character.

(...)Superfrog ranks high on my list even if I'm not a big fan of the game.

I wouldn't even consider a character which, in the same game, has one graphical style for the intro animation/screen, and completely other ingame...

So much for visual identity.

[Zak]

Rick Dangerous

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by CCRider

I wouldn't even consider a character which, in the same game, has one graphical style for the intro animation/screen, and completely other ingame...

So much for visual identity.

As far as opinions go... well this is definitely one.

[dreadnought]

S'funny how in the Amiga world even a simplest of topics (and not entirely serious one to boot) can cause hair-splitting & bickering

That aside...

Originally Posted by TCD

The photographer from North & South.

Originally Posted by hitm4n

The shopkeeper in Xenon 2 for example.

...these guys get it. My initial list was only partially tongue-in-cheek - for me these secondary characters often made the games shine, added lasting impression, and influenced how I remember things.


As for more "official" one, I'd count:
1. Guybrush
2. Beast
3. Superfrog
4. James Pond
5. "Indy" Jones
6. Bren McGuire
7. Lemmings
8. Settlers/Cannon Fodders
9 ...?

Aside from #1, the ranking can be in any order really. And #7-8 definitely count for me, despite being mass entities.

[Megalomaniac]

Indy definitely doesn't count for me, as he's from films rather than games. Guybrush is debatable as his games were all released for the PC first - though I suspect globally the Amiga versions probably outsold the PC ones in the first year or two.

Fair point about the Settlers sprites being quite iconic - little touches like the 'yup' when you give them an instruction, the door-knocking to start the fights, and the animations of them at work, really help. I'm sure Blue Byte considered why Lemmings was so successful when developing it.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Guybrush is debatable as his games were all released for the PC first - though I suspect globally the Amiga versions probably outsold the PC ones in the first year or two.

This topic is about characters from games you could play on Amiga, not about all games ever made (like the BAFTA poll I linked to). I grew up with A500, it was my world back then and still my favouriet micro now - so it really does not matter what other platforms these games appeared on (at least for the purpose of this thread).

It's a free-for-all though, so if you want to set the bar unreasonably high and only count Amiga exclusives, you sure can - but methinks it could be a rather dull exercise.

[Geordie-Jedi]

There are so many to chose from

Superfrog - Superfrog
Cpt Reynolds - The Alien Breed series of games
James Pond - Esp James pond 2 and 3
Walker - (The mech from the game Walker........unsurprisingly)
Cool Coyote - Fire and Ice
Worms - Worms 1 & Worms TDC
Lemmings - All of the Lemmings games
Guybrush Threepwood - Monkey Island series of games
Chuck Rock - Chuck Rock 1 & 2
Zool - Zool 1 & 2
Lester Chaykin - Another World
Conrad. B. Hart - Flashback
Cmdr Jameson - Elite
Bren McGuire - Turrican series of games
Jools & Jops - Cannon Fodder

[Calabazam]

The Lotus Esprit and Elan SE.
Cars are as good as any character.

[Pyromania]

Of course I would have to say DiscreetFX's Hottie but unfortunately her game is still not out yet. It's still waiting for me to find a proper coder, graphics for the game are already done.

http://www.discreetfx.com/Hottie.html

http://www.discreetfx.com/HotEnoughToPlayWith.html

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by Calabazam

The Lotus Esprit and Elan SE.
Cars are as good as any character.

An interesting choice that, and Walker too. I wouldn't necessarily disagree, though maybe these should go into the The Most Iconic Vehicle list.

[DanScott]

Clutch Cable

[DisasterIncarna]

the knights from moonstone?, as soon as you see 1 you know exactly where they are from.

[alkis21]

Originally Posted by TCD

The photographer from North & South.

Face or butt?

[ExiE]

Ryan of Dreamweb
"Hero" of Future Wars
Artaban of Unreal

[Pyromania]

How about Captain Blood?

[tarr]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Bren McGuire AKA Turrican guy

This!

[TCD]

Originally Posted by alkis21

Face or butt?

Both!

[Fiery Phoenix]

To be fair Lemmings are the most instantly recognisable - a lot of people do associate them with the Amiga although it has been released on nearly every format known to man (as mentioned previously on page 1 of this thread)

Rick Dangerous, Turrican & James Pond all good choices as mentioned previously too. Maybe Prince of Persia, although falls into the Lemmings category of available on most formats and was not on the Amiga first either

Very hard for others, I will throw some out there but have been on other formats as well:

Kick Off 2 players
Rocket Ranger
Speedball 2 players
WizKid (not really a huge hit)