Speaking of AGA, why were so few AGA licensed conversions produced?

[ImmortalA1000]

I remember back then getting Mortal Kombat (those disk swaps were a pain!!) and wondering why there was never an AGA version of it. In fact most of the real big licenses never got an AGA version it felt like.

Ditto for some of the most praised OCS games like Cool Spot and Lionheart, never any AGA updates for A1200 owners.

[Reynolds]

I believe it happened because of the fall of Amiga's era. Heydays were mostly gone when AGA was released IMHO, so if we exchange this to financial decision-taking, it is kinda straightforward to leave 'em as is. Probably the great titles which came out (like Lionheart, as from your example) because the developer team was truly committed to the Amiga and they pushed their progress to set into the timeframe/budget agreed by publishers?

[Amigajay]

Poor AGA sales, pure and simple, 4-5m OCS owners vs 250-400k AGA owners.

[Gzegzolka]

Too little, too late, maybe if Comodore do not toy with products like A500plus or A600 and decide to straight release A1200 and CD32 one or two years earlier situation could be different. After 94 with no Commodore on computer market big companies stop developing their games and ports for Amiga, only some small dev studios and studios that were fans of Amiga stay. Small studios seen a place with no competition of big companies and decide to take their place, fan developers continue to make games even if they do not earn that much and some companies decide to release their games after 94 because their games were nearly finished. Lot of developers devide to cancel what they were working on, no matter how much advanced was their progress in development.

[alexh]

I think you're forgetting how "ad-hoc" the games industry was in 1991.

I would imagine they had lost

1) The programmers - they had moved to a different company or on a different project
2) The original assets - the source code, gfx, music tools, compilation scripts
3) The equipment

I only have one company to compare to but in 1991 they didn't use version control software. They didn't use a server / networked storage. They didn't use a hard drive. They used floppy disks and wrote dates on the labels. ##GOLD RC1##

AND you have to remember how BAD companies seemed to be at doing Arcade conversions. They didn't use software to convert the original arcade assets. It's not like they could change the number of colours from 16 or 32 to 256 in the conversion script. In many cases they employed people to re-draw the gfx looking at screen shots!

[TCD]

I'm more surprised that MK2 was still released for the Amiga. Would be great to see how many units of MK1 for the Amiga sold. Like others have said most likely there was no reason for Acclaim to think about an AGA version without a significant user base.

[ImmortalA1000]

Well I suppose they assumed A1200 would fail, same as most of the biggest developers assumed Jaguar would fail.

I know Magnetic Fields left the Amiga to move onto PC DOS (a rally game was first IIRC) and of course people like Reflections did some early PS1 games so clearly they got their name down for a 1993 PS1 dev kit and got on with that.

Maybe Commodore really didn't give the publishers and developers any sort of advance warning the 'secret' A1200 was coming and by the time it did they didn't care. Maybe there was bugger all support for developers, maybe Commodore did a terrible job courting publishers to support the new 256 colour chipset.

But it's worth remembering it took Commodore years to sell 1 million Amigas, not Amiga 500 units but Amigas in total.

It was just weird that games would come out and few of the big publishers were doing anything with AGA so you felt a bit let down as an early A1200 owner. Not quite as bad as CDTV vs the big publishers but still it didn't feel optimistic even in 1992.

At least in 1986 I could have played two awesome Amiga 1000 games and that machine was hard to find let alone the fact people couldn't afford it in most parts of the world as their next home computer. Felt like Amiga had already been abandoned. Like I said it was just a weird time thinking about it now. Great for non gaming stuff the machine now allowed me to do that I couldn't before though.

[TEG]

And there was the lack of effective copy protection systems for the Amiga. Consoles used cartridges and PC games were using CD-ROM which were not so easy to copy at the beginning if I remember well.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

people like Reflections did some early PS1 games so clearly they got their name down for a 1993 PS1 dev kit and got on with that.

Maybe Commodore really didn't give the publishers and developers any sort of advance warning the 'secret' A1200 was coming and by the time it did they didn't care. Maybe there was bugger all support for developers, maybe Commodore did a terrible job courting publishers to support the new 256 colour chipset.

But it's worth remembering it took Commodore years to sell 1 million Amigas, not Amiga 500 units but Amigas in total.

Reflections were doing Brian The Lion for the Amiga and CD32 upto until Aug/Sep 94, iirc they didn’t start PSX dev until late 94 and were pushed to get Destruction Derby to a playable state in around 6 months!

Again iirc from an Commodore interview, they asked devs and publishers what enhancements they wanted in an updated Amiga from a list, they said number one want was more memory, so most knew it was coming.

Yes it took a while to reach the first million, but don’t forget they sold over 1 million in 1991 alone, the A500 replacement sold just 44k in 1992 (partly due to the A500+/A600 debacle and not enough machines in the market before Christmas) but even so it struggled all through 1993 anyway.

[Megalomaniac]

The first thing to say is that A500 level technology hadn't reached its limits by the time the A1200 was released. Stardust, Elfmania, Brian the Lion, Mr. Nutz etc were all still to come.

Anyway, plenty of big names from other systems got A1200 enhanced versions or were A1200 only - Aladdin, Chaos Engine, Pinball Fantasies, Civilization, Sim City 2000, UFO, James Pond 3, Top Gear 2, Second Samurari, Lion King, Bloodnet. Not to mention all the Amiga originals it got exclusively or enhanced - SlamTilt, Super Stardust, Alien Breed 2, Banshee, Guardian, Roadkill, Xtreme Racing, Gloom.... And stuff that ran faster or with more features on a 1200 than a 500.

Certainly not all classics, but if you didn't have an A1200, you had reason to look jealously at almost any magazine from late 1993 onwards.

[jotd]

most "upgrades" were disappointing. A lot of platformers just got a parallax layer, and that's it (Zool, Fire & Ice - which seemed to get more colors on sprites, though -, Bubble and Squeak, Bubba n Stix ??, Oscar, Trolls, probably others I 'm forgetting).

James Pond 3 doesn't seem different from ECS version ... James Pond 2 was enhanced but I don't remember how.

Truth is I was so convinced that the AGA versions had more colors, just because, hey, the HAVE to add more colors. But no.

Exceptions existed, fortunately. People use to hate Chaos Engine AGA but I like it actually. Not the same thing for speedball CD32 but there are actually more colors and that's sweet. Same goes for Pinball Fantasies. Now I'm not so sure about other ECS->AGA upgrades (XP8 ouch...)

What I hated the most on AGA games were the intro screens with super-slow 16 milion colors fadein/out with pre-rendered shit 3 logos and all. Horrible.

[Megalomaniac]

James Pond 3 was a bad example, but the other you mention are all Amiga originals rather than conversions that the OP was looking for.

Bubble and Squeak looks a lot better, but annoyingly the later OCS version is more playable because of improved AI. Visually you can view it as a platfromer, but it (and Bubba ;N'' Stix) are very much puzzle based when you play them. Zool is a lot more colourful too (though, like Chaos Engine, not everyone thinks it looks better(

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by jotd

What I hated the most on AGA games were the intro screens with super-slow 16 milion colors fadein/out with pre-rendered shit 3 logos and all. Horrible.

Same here. I just wanted a pretty picture to look at while the game loaded, but they were trying to show us how clever they were at creating some shit 3D render and fading in 24 bit!

here's where the rot set in:-

Myst

The game was a critical and commercial success. Critics lauded the ability of the game to immerse players in its fictional world; it has since been considered one of the best video games ever made. Selling more than six million copies, Myst became the best-selling PC game until The Sims exceeded its sales in 2002...

Myst was generally praised by critics. Computer Gaming World assured its readers that the game was not like other CD-ROM games that were "high on glitz and low on substance...

Several publications did not agree with the positive reception of the story. Jeremy Parish of 1UP.com noted that while its lack of interaction and continual plot suited the game, Myst helped end the adventure game genre... In 1996 Next Generation called Myst "gaming's bleakest hour", saying the static graphics and purely trial-and-error puzzles epitomized poor game design. The magazine said its commercial success, which they owed chiefly to its popularity among non-gamers as a CD-ROM showcase, had led to many other games emulating its negative aspects.

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[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by jotd

most "upgrades" were disappointing.

This is not surprising. If it was already good on the A500 then what could you do to make it significantly better? A few more colors, higher frame rate, less disk swapping?

Ironically the games that could benefit most were the poor ones, that few people would be keen to see an improved version of. Outrun for example could have been done way better on the A1200 without much effort. But why would you? The mania was over, so I doubt you could sell enough copies to pay the licensing fees. All it would do is invite comparisons to the original stinky port.

To see how bad they were, look at this compilation. Even later ports to more modern consoles aren't that great.

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[logo]

It's not the only reason but a part of the community refused to follow and kept their OCS/ECS system.
AGA had haters among Amiga users. To my eyes most of their reasons were stupid or a lack of knowledge. However, they were a pretty large group and it didn't help AGA to be seen as the future by customers and developpers.

I was very unhappy with their behaviour and will never forget it. They committed a sort of suicide.

[Minuous]

There's still a lot of Amiga users like that unfortunately, just look how many of the recent games are for OCS instead of AGA :-(

[Gzegzolka]

Amiga community just like any other scene got it own "quirks", preferences that might seem not logic. Amiga was my first owned computer and back then when I was a kid I accepted that. Now when I am adult, when I have more experience with emulation of other systems and consoles I start to see how absurd those preferences might be sometimes.

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by logo

It's not the only reason but a part of the ommunity refused to follow and kept their OCS/ECS system.
AGA had haters among Amiga users. To my eyes most of their reasons were stupid or a lack of knowledge. However, they were a pretty large group and it didn't help AGA to be seen as the future by customers and developpers.

I was very unhappy with their behaviour and will never forget it. They committed a sort of suicide.

Not everybody had £400 to spend on a new system, a pretty high percentage of Amiga owners when the A1200 launched had spent that kind of money on an A500+ or A600 within the year as those were still selling well. If you'd bought a hard drive / accelerator / memory upgrade for an A500, buying an A1200 would mean selling those too. Not to mention a lot of your existing games.

Logically the A1200 was always going to get cheaper in time, and the software making full use of it would only come gradually. Commodore's death certainly shortened the A1200's life, and certainly shortened AGA's life in general. If Commodore had died in mid-1989 and it'd taken until late 1990 to get Amigas back into the shops, would we remember the Amiga? Who knows what might have been made for the A1200 in 1997 had Commodore lived longer? Did people who got an A500 for Christmas 1987 (or indeed people who chose the cheaper ST instead at that time) imagine that things like Elfmania and Stardust would be possible?

It is a shame the AGA userbase wasn't bigger, but there was more competition and times were tougher economically, and a non-AGA Amiga was still getting brilliant new games which didn't need anything more - if anything a hard drive was a better upgrade than replacing the entire machine, depending on what you liked.

[sokolovic]

On the contrary I feel like AGA was pretty well supported considering that it lasted less than 2 years under Commodore watch.
The game library is much (much !) better than its direct competitor the Atari Falcon 030. But you should define what big license is for you. Because Super Street Fighter 2 had an AGA relase, Aladdin, Lion King, Civilization, Lemmings 3, Jurassic Park, Sim City 2000, Theme Park also...) . These games were big licenses at that time (I'll even add Microcosm on that list).

The original Amiga wasn't either a priority machine before 1989 and was just beginning to be correctly exploited after the release of Shadow of the Beast (4 years after the A1000 release !). Most advanced games will be waiting another 3/4 years to be released (Can you imagine that Turrican 3 or Lionheart could run on a 1985 A1000 ? The margin of progression of OCS Amiga games is absolutely unprecedented IMHO, and I doesn't record a machine after the Amiga where there is such a gap between early years games and last years...)

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by TCD

I'm more surprised that MK2 was still released for the Amiga. Would be great to see how many units of MK1 for the Amiga sold. Like others have said most likely there was no reason for Acclaim to think about an AGA version without a significant user base.

Pretty well if i were to hazard a guess, didn’t MK2 sell 100k on the Amiga? If so it would be good to guesstimate at least 150-200k for MK considering the active market in 1993 was much bigger than at the end of 1994 after the news of Commodore, games sales probably reflected that, as you say it would be great to find out what the actual sales were.

Heck it was one of the first full price boxed games i bought (leaving school and losing my ‘contacts’ )