Was the Atari ST to blame for badly ported games?

[jizmo]

After being absent from the platform for 20+ years, I recently took a dip at Atari ST game library, playing through Amiga games that I love – and whether Atari was to be blamed for bad Amiga games it's clear that Atari got even the worse end of this conversion stick.

It's not just that the games for Atari are stripped of many features Amiga version has like music and sound effects, but the lack of smooth scrolling makes many games unplayable mess; more often than not I was killed by the dodgy push scrolling putting me in front of enemies and obstacles that were impossible to anticipate.

The comparison also showed how much even a faint layer of polish makes in how crappy each game is perceived. With solid sfx/music and intros that animate nicely on Amiga I had been able to overlook many shortcomings in games, but on Atari those same shortcomings really sticked out like a sore thumb.

Games that rely more on the idea and less on the shiny surface work best for the two platforms – Push Over for example was almost as enjoyable on Atari than on Amiga.

[Megalomaniac]

Who can honestly say, if they were running a games publisher in the UK or France up to about 1990, that they would have wanted developers to lead with the Amiga version, rather than the ST one? The 520ST launched 2 years before the A500, as of mid-1988 there were 3 times as many STs as Amigas in the UK (according to issue 1 of ST/Amiga Format) so even if your average ST owner bought less games, you still sold twice as many on the ST. The ST was cheaper and/or came with more games than the A500 throughout its life, likewise the STe for most of its life (despite hardware that was much more equal with the A500), so it took time for the Amiga to become the more enticing buy for most people. ST Format outsold Amiga Format initially, despite more competition, anecdotally it seems like Christmas 1989 is when the Amiga market became bigger than the ST one in the UK (and maybe even later in France? Does anybody know more?). In the US Amigas and their games massively outsold the ST, but how big a cut did UK publishers get when a game was marketed in the US? The flipside is probably why US companies stopped doing Amiga (and ST) games while they still sold well in Europe - why bother when (eg) US Gold got a bigger cut than LucasArts?

Amiga originals didn't massively outsell ST ports (again, I'm especially thinking in the UK) until quite late. As an example, Menace was one of the first UK games to lead with the Amiga, the ST version was famously lazy and inferior-looking, yet did it sell significantly more on the Amiga than contemporary ST ports in the same genre such as Silkworm or R-Type, and did it significantly lose sales on the ST for being inferior to ST R-Type or Silkworm? Or Pacmania, which unusually was full-screen on the Amiga but windowed on the ST, did it do better than the ST-port arcade conversion of the time on the Amiga as a result? Most of us probably prefer Battle Squadron to Xenon 2, but I bet Xenon 2 sold more on the Amiga alone, even before you count the ST version. Amiga-only games simply had less market leverage, less fame, less promotional pull, even that late.

The two ST versions that stick out for me as vastly inferior to the Amiga originals are Robocod and Cannon Fodder, both of which are reliant on multidirectional scrolling, something the ST could not easily do. Maybe we missed out on great multiway scrolling games because of the ST? Even then though, if you play ST and Amiga versions of almost all 2D action games back-to-back, the Amiga version will usually be noticeably better, even if its just the music.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

The flipside is probably why US companies stopped doing Amiga (and ST) games while they still sold well in Europe - why bother when (eg) US Gold got a bigger cut than LucasArts?

Funnily enough Lucasfilm/LucasArts was more than happy that their games sold (relatively) well in Europe because in the US they had a hard time to cut into Sierra's market share. The decision to stop creating Amiga (and earlier ST) ports of their games was mainly due to the technology gap between the machines and the PC gettting bigger. That and the Amiga/ST versions not selling very well.

[jotd]

Bitmap brothers games don't count as visuals are almost identical and 16 colors (except AGA versions), because first developed on ST... Only the audio is probably better on the miggy.

I remember reading that they got Steve Tall on board of the Bitmaps because he had a trick for proper scrolling on the ST (for Gods).

[TCD]

Originally Posted by jotd

Only the audio is probably better on the miggy.

Probably yes

ST: [ Show youtube player ]
Amiga: [ Show youtube player ]

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by TCD

Probably yes

Although it could have been even better..

[ Show youtube player ]

[TCD]

CD audio is kinda defeating the point though.

[jizmo]

Originally Posted by TCD

CD audio is kinda defeating the point though.

No I mean the Amiga conversion has plenty of room for improvisation given that original CD quality samples were available.

But this is of course in hindsight. Back in 1989 Whittaker's arrangement was mind blowing.

[CCCP alert]

Originally Posted by sparhawk

When I read the retro magazines, they often say that the Amiga just received the same game ported from the Atari ST, so I wondered if the Amiga was not so optimally used as the C64 because the developers didn't go to the effort to write a port which makes better use of the hardware?

Why is that Atari's fault.

Like it or lump it the blame 100% lands on the publisher who either commissioned or accepted these naff 10-15% slower 'Amiga games' with their graphics 100% from the ST artist's efforts.

Just because pathetic engines that would never benefit from higher octane more expensive fuel existed you can't say "that Skoda engine is rubbish and why my car with low octane fuel is not doing 100bhp/litre" etc. That would be like blaming those engines for the oil companies not releasing high octane petrol for your car to reap the benefits in the country you lived in.

The blame lies with the developers who did that and the publishers who didn't tell them to GTFO. Nobody cared about the consumer, they knew the games could not be returned like E.T. for the 2600 in the USA and disk based games were easy enough to manufacture in low risk volumes and at very low prices.

Why would any of this problem be Atari's fault? You could just as easily have blamed Motorola for inventing the 68000 CPU which the ST could get by one for most gaming genres without the need for bespoke custom chips needed in the machine's design.

[AestheticDebris]

Yeah, I don't entirely think you can blame the ST.

The biggest issue was that the Amiga was a lot harder to program because of its parallel nature. And whilst the results could be better, they often (especially in the early days) weren't considered better enough to justify all the additional cost of an Amiga specific version. Quickly using the same code base and assets of the ST release would get you a workable title and it'd probably sell just as well to gamers who'd just moved from the Spectrum or C64.

[Retro1234]

^ Nail Head

[TCD]

Without the ST ports might have aimed more often for the custom chips, but between 1987 and 1989 those 'ST ports' were 90% of the games that were released for the Amiga. You can see that after Shadow of the Beast was released in late 1989 the shift towards making the Amiga version improved compared to the ST version became more of a priority (and charging extra for it).

Is the ST to blame for the quality of the early Amiga ports? Most likely. Would there have been much less ports in the early days? Most likely. Publishers certainly didn't mind selling more games even if they weren't 'high quality'

[Megalomaniac]

Depressingly a lot of companies charged more for the Amiga version even if it was identical to the ST one (without wanting to pick on any particular company, page 2 of https://archive.org/details/AmigaFor...ge/n1/mode/2up for a random example - I think 3 of these 4 were ST ports, yet still cost us a fiver more).

Did Amiga owners vote against ST ports with our wallets at the time? Did sales charts suggest that we preferred to buy Amiga originals to ST ports? I know its a hard comparison as most big name arcade conversions and movie licenses were ST ports whereas most original titles without that cachet behind them were Amiga originals by 1989, but if (say) Strider sold more than Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga alone (before considering the ST version), can publishers be blamed for still wanting the Amiga version to be done ASAP with no special effort? They had mouths to feed and shareholders to fund, whether we like it or not.

[saimon69]

can publishers be blamed for still wanting the Amiga version to be done ASAP with no special effort? They had mouths to feed and shareholders to fund, whether we like it or not.

Can please someone go back in time and give Henry Ford better lawyers so that will win against the Dodge Brothers? That sentence messed up constructive capitalism... and in a butterfly effect created crappy ST ports and impossible deadlines -_-

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Did sales charts suggest that we preferred to buy Amiga originals to ST ports?

Here a random sales chart from Germany (ASM 1/1990):


Here's the Amiga exclusive one:


SOTB is on place 5 of the overall (all systems) chart and place 4 on the Amiga only chart. So I would say there wasn't a strong preference for Amiga original games (at least in Germany in late 1989/early 1990).

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by jizmo

Both piracy and Atari ST may have contributed to the quality of Amiga games but neither are unanimously guilty here as there are multiple ripple effects (both positive and negative) with both.

Many other factors like small market size, audience expectations, publishers and their business models, one-man dev teams, nonexistent quality control, lack of knowhow, schedules etc all had similar contributing factors and ripple effects that ultimately led to early Amiga games library not being 100% stellar.

The ST software sales were a problem since the beginning. The publishers had to develop also on the Amiga to cut the losses, and in term of business model, UK programmers were pron to make the games first on Atari ST then port on the Amiga. It's not logical, because if they had been doing the dev first on Amiga with the best version, then a correct version was possible on Atari ST. The other way was a recipe for failure : crap or unambitious version on ST ported as it is on Amiga.

What they did was comparable as doing a game first on Megadrive in 64 colors, then port the game as it was on the Neogeo. NG users would never have accepted that (they would, only if the game was soupped up to use the tons of colors available on the console, the musics redone, and the program reworked.

There is a simple calculation to perform :

What happens you have the Atari ST on one side, the Amiga on the other,

With the ST being the last on the game market, with a game sold market share lower than the amount of machines sold, and on the other side the Amiga which had a higher market share than the ST, with more software sold ?

The answer is simple : it shows that the ST had a correct number of machines installed in Europe, but with very low software sales (read very high piracy), and the Amiga, with higher software sales and a higher machines base installed in Europe/USA (piracy too, but less in fact).

From there, the publishers canned the ST. In the facts, the piracy was much much bigger on ST than it was on the Amiga, all proportions kept.

You can then understand the next step : the ST getting no more softwares, removed from the hypermarkets, the ST loosing the battle.

[dlfrsilver]

Did Amiga owners vote against ST ports with our wallets at the time?

Yes they did. They even boycotted the ST ports, this forced the publishers to react.

Did sales charts suggest that we preferred to buy Amiga originals to ST ports?

They did. Amiga users bought more originals than ST users, that's a fact.

I know its a hard comparison as most big name arcade conversions and movie licenses were ST ports whereas most original titles without that cachet behind them were Amiga originals by 1989, but if (say) Strider sold more than Shadow of the Beast on the Amiga alone (before considering the ST version), can publishers be blamed for still wanting the Amiga version to be done ASAP with no special effort? They had mouths to feed and shareholders to fund, whether we like it or not.

Keep in mind that it's unrelated. The Amiga outsold the ST in every country in the world (the only country where the ST was king is France ). The publishers based themselves on the number of machines installed to determine what machine was to be the lead one. The problem here was between the publishers and the studios, PB wanted STD to work and start on the Amiga (big one), but the devs wanted the ST to be the lead, plus they ensured that the Game, even lead on Amiga was not to ambitious to be then backported on ST.

They had mouth and families to fed, but this did not stopped them to prefer the ST over the Amiga, but the market dictates.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

Yeah, I don't entirely think you can blame the ST.

The biggest issue was that the Amiga was a lot harder to program because of its parallel nature. And whilst the results could be better, they often (especially in the early days) weren't considered better enough to justify all the additional cost of an Amiga specific version. Quickly using the same code base and assets of the ST release would get you a workable title and it'd probably sell just as well to gamers who'd just moved from the Spectrum or C64.

For sure. But look at it this way : for Crackdown, ARC spent an injustified amount of time to develop the ST version, while they borked the Amiga version in 3 months. We heard too often that the other way around was no possible. This was all bullshit.

porting directly the games was an insult to the amiga users. This is why games released between 1985 and 1988 are very hard to find on Amiga. Users boycotted the titles released in those years because they were absolute 8 bits dressed as 16bits shit titles coming from the ST.

[dlfrsilver]

Originally Posted by TCD

Funnily enough Lucasfilm/LucasArts was more than happy that their games sold (relatively) well in Europe because in the US they had a hard time to cut into Sierra's market share. The decision to stop creating Amiga (and earlier ST) ports of their games was mainly due to the technology gap between the machines and the PC gettting bigger. That and the Amiga/ST versions not selling very well.

They sold lots and lots of Indy 3 and Indy 4 adventure, also Monkey 2.

Monkey 1 sold badly as i read. But honestly, there was another problem : The distributors like Ubi Soft were only selling small batches.

You can't buy what is not available or no more available.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by dlfrsilver

For sure. But look at it this way : for Crackdown, ARC spent an injustified amount of time to develop the ST version, while they borked the Amiga version in 3 months. We heard too often that the other way around was no possible. This was all bullshit.

It's much, much easier to write the game for the lesser system, get it working and then just bring that code over to the more powerful hardware. It doesn't end up with good usage of the Amiga hardware, but it got something out quick that made money.

If you've coded the original around the Amiga chipset, downgrading it to work on lesser ST hardware. So, annoying as it may be, it made business sense to target the ST first. Well at least until the Amiga user base got bigger and games had to start competing against Amiga specific titles for attention. Once Shadow of The Beast was out and making the Amiga look like a powerhouse compared to the ST, it stopped being viable to push ST ports because the punters knew better.