Why did Amiga get that bleeping bleep Moonwalker & NOT arcade port?

[ImmortalA1000]

Hmmm so I was watching a little video segment (in English) on some non-English retro gaming show about the PCW 1989 show and it had David Baxter showing the non-playable CES demo of the cutscenes on an Amiga 500.

Hmm well the music is horribly sequenced by a 5 year old with no talent (look mum I made a sample loop!) and the graphics for the animated cut scenes are more sinclair QL/Acorn 8bit dither-tastic than what people got out of the ST , which they'd look pathetic on even in 1985 on a 520ST to be quite frank. My first ever bit of pixel art on Neochrome in 1986 was better than that rubbish.

The biggest question though is why did US Gold make this crap game (with crap extras and crap hissy sample loops taken from an Amstrad dirt cheap tape deck I bet) instead of the actually quite interesting Sega arcade game.

WTF is going on? lol what was the reason we got this piece of dirt? 'too lazy to port the arcade game or find anybody with talent to develop it?'

edit: does anybody know where this non-playable demo with just these cut-scene animations for Moonwalker for the Amiga can be downloaded?

[Daedalus]

Doing quick, cheap, rubbish ports was pretty much US Gold's MO.

[rothers]

That game is hilarious. Proper shit game time.

The sample loop makes me laugh every time. Total cash grab.

[dreamkatcha]

Not specifically about the Amiga version, but that Slopey bloke from the Tubes spoke to two of the devs who worked on the game. Same design across the home computer platforms anyway.

Damien Scattergood says he's mostly happy with the end result.

[Marce]

moonwalker arcade is complex, and nobody knew how to code a game in such 3d perspective in such years
that is why there is no other ports of Moonwalker for computers or consoles

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by dreamkatcha

Not specifically about the Amiga version, but that Slopey bloke from the Tubes spoke to two of the devs who worked on the game. Same design across the home computer platforms anyway.

Damien Scattergood says he's was mostly happy with the end result.

"All of the original game was designed and coded up on the Amiga, so you think of the challenges we had on the Spectrum - they had 10 times more memory than we had - so an Amiga 512.. ah.. megabytes of RAM..."

My how times have changed. Only off by a factor of 1000, and today even that much would be considered puny!

[ZEUSDAZ]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

The biggest question though is why did US Gold make this crap game (with crap extras and crap hissy sample loops taken from an Amstrad dirt cheap tape deck I bet) instead of the actually quite interesting Sega arcade game.

WTF is going on? lol what was the reason we got this piece of dirt? 'too lazy to port the arcade game or find anybody with talent to develop it?'

BECAUSE IT'S U.S F*CKING GOLD!!!!!


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[Matt_H]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

The biggest question though is why did US Gold make this crap game (with crap extras and crap hissy sample loops taken from an Amstrad dirt cheap tape deck I bet) instead of the actually quite interesting Sega arcade game.

WTF is going on? lol what was the reason we got this piece of dirt? 'too lazy to port the arcade game or find anybody with talent to develop it?'

Part of the answer is that the arcade version of the game didn't exist at the time this was developed, so a conversion was literally impossible.


The other part is that sloppy, unimproved ports of 8-bit games were sadly common in the latter half of the 80s.

[PatmanQC]

[ Show youtube player ]

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

'too lazy to port the arcade game or find anybody with talent to develop it?'

It's not about laziness, it's about money.
They figured out that they will have similar sales with great and expensive port, and cheap and poorly executed port.
So, why would they pay more money?

Unfortunately, Moonwalker is not the only game that U.S. Gold have applied above logic.

[Megalomaniac]

d4rk3lf is probably right - when converting the really big arcade games or licensing the really big films, the quality of the conversion or the effort that went into designing and programming a licensed game (and, related but not always identical, the review scores) wasn't a big factor in how much it sold. Getting it finished on all formats at the same time to meet a (usually Christmas) deadline mattered much more, especially for the really big ones. Programmers weren't usually happy with the situation, but they had bills to pay, and a later but better game wouldn't see them earning more - or getting the next big commision.

[TCD]

"Kids will buy or ask their parents to buy this no matter what because of the IP" - every producer of a movie based licensed video game ever

[Tsak]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

It's not about laziness, it's about money.
They figured out that they will have similar sales with great and expensive port, and cheap and poorly executed port.
So, why would they pay more money?

Unfortunately, Moonwalker is not the only game that U.S. Gold have applied above logic.

I'm no sure this paints the full picture. I think it's more of a combination of low standards and ineptitude in addition to their buisness model. I sincerely doubt if the ratio of sales vs effort alone explains it completely, cause sales can multiply exponentially with quality and good marketing. As much as these games relied on their IP to sell, at the same time magazine scores and word of mouth also played a HUGE role in the industry. And development time was never that far between low and high tier titles, considering most productions back then had a 5 months to 2 years of dev cycle tops (on average) regardless of their quality.

So if I had to guess and put things into perspective these are the main reasons:

1) US gold (for all we can tell) indeed seems they had this specific buinsess model, mass vs quality and relying on well known IPs to get sales going. Bring as many games on the shelves, as fast as possible and to as many platforms as possible. This is comparable to the mobile industry today basically.

2) At the same time it needs to be also mentioned they were not developers but publishers, meaning that they had to rely on outside sources and labour to make their games. And finding the right people for the right job (and for the right cost) or even the right projects to fund plays a huge role in the equation.

3) As much as (nowadays) we tend to give a free pass to devs behind those games (and for good reasons), the actuall truth lies somewhere in between imho. Yes, many of those guys had to endure zero support and insufferable time constraints indeed, however there are other factors at play here as well. That is talent and experience (many people were just bedroom coders, not professional game devs), as well as circumstances, drive and aspiration. Devs, publishers and companies in this day and time, still produce crap games even when time, money or support is not a decisive factor. And vice versa, great titles still see the light of day even when made under insufferable conditions.

4) I sincerely doubt if they had 100% clarity in regards to the quality of their work and games. US gold had a clear background (and a fair amount of success) working on the 8-bit market, however the 16-bit market (and machines) were completely different beasts. While this is automatically a no-brainer to us today in retrospect, it wasn't so back then. Quality standards changed dramatically as the 16-bit era was coming to the masses and people's expectations changed dramatically as well. Slowly but steadily, the low complexity/simplistic gameplay, graphics and sound of 8-bit games was not enough for modern audiences and many companies and studios of the past struggled a lot to make this transition or even find success.

5) And finally (as much as it is fun to frame specific parties in a certain light) we also need to be fair. Despite a truck load of mishaps and crap games released by them, they still had various decent titles published. I already mentioned that in their 8-bit years they were considered quite successful, with many games getting great scores and reception. And later on, in between abysmal releases and obvious cash grabs like Moonwalker and Final Fight, they still had games like Cruise for a corpse, Another World, Flashback, Putty and James Pond published under their banner.

[gimbal]

To this day I am not convinced it is possible to complete the first level within the time limit, even if you have the luck of the saints.

[d4rk3lf]

@Tsak
Agreed with all your points.

I didn't wanted to say that everyone did it like that. After all, we had amazing Mortal Kombat port, and even more amazing Mortal Kombat 2 port, that worked on any amiga with 1MB Ram. We had Toki, Pang, Golden Axe, Silkworm.. etc... great ports for our beloved Amiga.

All I wanted to say is that I often see people write "laziness" for the bad ports, and I don't think laziness has anything to do with it... just money.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

@Tsak

All I wanted to say is that I often see people write "laziness" for the bad ports, and I don't think laziness has anything to do with it... just money.

Thank you. Finally some reasoning which does not go towards a need to shame people. There is just too much of that sourness lately.

[malko]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

[...] After all, we had amazing Mortal Kombat port, and even more amazing Mortal Kombat 2 port, that worked on any amiga with 1MB Ram. We had Toki, Pang, Golden Axe, Silkworm.. etc... great ports for our beloved Amiga. [...]

Most of the time not mentionned, but on the etc. list : https://hol.abime.net/984

[gimbal]

Ninja Warriors is an amazing port. Wish I'd actually like the game itself