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GMR Leftovers: The Home Computer Era

For each issue of the Dutch games magazine called “GMR”:http://www.gmr-online.nl, I write a four-page special on the history of games. In every episode I try to find the real story of an era – for the October issue, I tackled the age of home computers. The article is mainly about the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, MSX, Amiga and Atari ST.

Unfortunately, a couple of research tidbits–intended as screenshots plus captions–didn’t make it into the magazine because of space constraints. So I decided to translate and publish them here.

“The Amiga game ‘Brataccas’ was Psygnosis’ debut. This British company would come to be known for its beautiful visuals (and somewhat lesser gameplay). In the nineties, Sony bought the studio, after which it produced ‘Wipeout’, among others.”

“‘Dizzy’, from 1985, was developed by the Oliver brothers, for the Amstrad CPC (shown here), among others. It was the first game published by Codemasters.”

“The, for that time, immensely expensive ‘King’s Quest’ was developed with IBM money, for the IBM PCjr. However, the PCjr flopped and ports to almost all platforms followed.”

“The German Factor 5 created its first game in 1988: ‘Katakis’ for the Amiga, a shooter in the style of ‘R-Type’. The company started out in Cologne, but later moved to California to be closer to publisher LucasArts.”

“‘Battle Isle’ was the first big success of the German developer/publisher Blue Byte, which later became famous with ‘The Settlers’ and was then acquired by Ubisoft. Battle Isle was based on ‘Nectaris’ (also known as ‘Military Madness’) for the PC Engine, which itself was a lot like Nintendo’s ‘Famicom Wars’.”

“The Commodore 1541 was the most popular disk drive for the Commodore 64. However, because of the high price, a lot of users had to make do with cassette tapes.”

“Motorola’s 68000 processor formed the core of both the Amiga and the Atari ST. This chip became a well-known entity in the games industry: among others, SNK’s Neo Geo, the Atari Jaguar and the Sega Mega Drive and Saturn used it.”