The story of edvella's playground: The Golden Era (1990-1995)
Admittedly, I may be recalling these years as the golden era simply because I was 16 at the time and like everyone else aged 16 I believed that I could do whatever I wanted. It's also true that most of my finished software was programmed at the time though.
So by mid 1990 we had an Amiga 500 in the family, 1992 embraced the Amiga 1200 and 1994 saw the arrival of the Amiga CD³². We at Pantera Designs really loved the machine. The Commodore Amiga gave power to the creative people and imagination was very nearly its limit. With this machine people had fun while doing usually unwieldy tasks. Too bad that Commodore ended up going bankrupt just when their graphical style started gaining popularity.
For me, shifting from 8 to 16-bit (and from cassette to disk) was slow at first, but after the initial hurdles, life went along pretty well. During this golden age, Pantera Designs had its most productive year (1992) and our titles kept getting bigger and better. Sadly, when it came up to games, the trend of going in all directions at the same time again resulted in few games being released by Pantera Designs for the Amiga.
Titles:
Genesis (1991) : Dipping our toes inside the Amiga waters with various experiments. A demo with a selection of art on disk 1 and music on disk 2.
Bohemian Rhapsody (1992) : A tribute to Freddie Mercury and a test on digitised music.
Digitised Maiden (1992) : A demo for Iron Maiden fans made up entirely of digitised parts, such as images and music.
Amiga Buster (1992) : Six issues of a disk magazine describing the state of the Amiga games market during 1992.
Creativity (1992) : A demo put together with images scanned from drawings by Henry Falzon and his stroke of genius. This demo tested the effect of simple screen shifting and background music while putting the focus onto the drawings themselves.
Kings of Rock (1993) : Another of the big Rock demos featuring great music from contemporary artists.
The First 7 Years (1994) : A demo to celebrate our first seven years with examples of what we had learned along the way.
Macbeth (1995) : A play-cum-adventure game with the player taking the role of the central character in what we called an Interactive Play. The text interface was combined with graphics and music and helped enact the scenes of this Shakespearean play. Also a good learning resource, as all the text from the book is included within the game and the player must endure all the challenges to finally die in a good old tragic ending.
Space Marauders (1995) : Space Invaders in a 90's coating mainly consisting of a plot, 3D rendered graphics, better sound and music, and a couple of other small improvements.
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