Yesterday was ANZAC day, where we honour and remember the soldiers from Australia and New Zealand who fought at Gallipoli in the First World War. On this patriotic occasion, we thought it’d be a good opportunity to spend the next couple of weeks looking back at some of the best games developed or co-developed in Australia and New Zealand, as well as taking a peek at what’s on the horizon.

In this week’s edition, we’ll look at our first batch of titles, including Melbourne House’s 1982 adaptation of The Hobbit, Ratbag’s dirt racer Powerslide and Interactive Binary Solutions’ Flight of the Amazon Queen.

The Best of Home Grown Development

While we may not be home to Super Mario Bros., Grand Theft Auto or Half-Life, Australia has a rich history of game development that spans almost thirty years. While many people think that game developers in Australia merely work on local sports titles or outsourced American kids’ licenses, some pretty damn fine original titles were created here, either on our own, or in association with other studios overseas. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be showcasing some of these titles, probably in no particular organisational order, because that’s how we roll.

Concerning Hobbits

What about second breakfast?

The earliest Australian development success story comes from Melbourne. In 1980, local publishers Alfred Milgrom and Naomi Besen founded a software division of their company Melbourne House named Beam Software. The developer’s first major success came in 1982 when they developed a text adventure game based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit for several popular home computer formats like the BBC Micro, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.

The Hobbit was leagues ahead of other interactive fiction games at the time. Each location in the game was accompanied by an image, though the loading process was prolonged by slow CPUs and tape-based technology. The Hobbit also featured a complex text-based physics system; objects (including characters) had a defined size, weight and solidity – objects could be put inside others, combined or broken. The game ran in real time; it would automatically input a “wait” command if you left the game without pausing, and characters had their own agendas, could carry items and fight other creatures, making their intentions difficult to predict. The combination of these features allowed The Hobbit to be played in many different ways, with every situation in the game having multiple solutions.

The most advanced and memorable feature of The Hobbit was its text parser, known as “Inglish”. At a time when most interactive fiction games featured simple verb-noun commands (“get item”, “attack enemy”), The Hobbit allowed players to communicate with the game in proper English, complete with pronouns, correct punctuation and adverbs. Players could accomplish several tasks with the one sentence, e.g. “Take the lamp and the rope out of the barrel”. A hit with players worldwide, Inglish featured in three more Lord of the Rings titles from Beam Software and Melbourne House, along with a Sherlock Holmes game. The Hobbit was the first successful Australian developed video game, going on to sell over a million units across eight formats.

Howzat!?

Overappealing is not penalised, but it is annoying

Australians love video games, but not quite as much as they love their sport. Of course, Australian sports are a tad obscure for the American and Japanese audiences, who the majority of video games where developed for in the 80s and 90s. After Beam Software branched out into console development in the late 80s, they developed a line of sports games with a local flavour for the NES, including Aussie Rules Footy and International Cricket. The best of these games came when they teamed up with Nintendo to release Super International Cricket for the Super Nintendo.

Admittedly, Super International Cricket isn’t a favourite of your test match loyalists. While it offers a test match mode, the game plays with a distinct one-day game focus; players can even march more than halfway up the pitch to slog the ball around the park. Super International Cricket featured a much greater variety of batting shots and bowling deliveries than its NES predecessor, and implemented new features like an appeal button. Of course, certain individuals loved to spam the appeal button in order to put their opponents off. The game wasn’t quite perfect; the omission of real player names and squad colours was a minor blemish, while the game’s collision detection and AI balance were somewhat suspect.

Super International Cricket also saw release on the PC, when Beam Software teamed up with Electronic Arts to produce Cricket ’96. Although essentially the same game at a basic gameplay level, Cricket ’96 featured richer graphics and commentary from Richie Benaud and Ian Botham. Beam’s last cricket games would come in the form of Cricket ’97 and Cricket ’97: Ashes Edition which took the game into 3D, and in the case of the latter, finally added in real player names.

A Cyberpunk Adventure

A regular Saturday morning occurrence

Beam Software teamed up with Data East in 1993 to produce an Action/RPG for the Super Nintendo based on the popular Shadowrun tabletop game by FASA. Beam’s game is one of three different Shadowrun games produced around the same time, but seems to be the one most popular with gamers from the era. Despite this popularity, Shadowrun had a dismal retail run at the time, due in part to poor distribution from publisher Data East, and tracking down a copy can be especially difficult, moreso if you want it in good condition.

Shadowrun for the SNES is loosely based off the novel Never Deal with a Dragon. It opens with your character, Jake Armitage, being murdered and taken to the morgue, where he rises from the dead. After escaping the morgue and meeting the Dog Spirit, a shaman, players have to investigate the circumstances surrounding Jake’s assassination and what caused him to survive in spite of being gunned down by hired goons.

Although a much more linear affair than Blue Sky’s Mega Drive game, Shadowrun for the SNES features a rich story and all of the trimmings one would expect from a story set in that universe. In typical RPG style, players earn karma, which they can use to enhance Jake’s various abilities and learn new skills and magic powers. One can also hire other shadowrunners to assist in their quest and act as bullet sponges. You even get to jack into cyberspace to kill rogue programs and hijack sensitive data. It’s a shame that nobody has made a Shadowrun game like this in the 15 years since.

Mudslide

In the future, auto-racing will decide government policy

Late Adelaide-based studio Ratbag Games is often remembered more for the fate which befell them at the hands of Midway than the games they produced. Arguably the most celebrated of the studio’s games was a PC-based racing game known as Powerslide.

Powerslide is set in a post-apocalyptic world where an environmental disaster has killed 98% of the world’s population. The remaining portion of humanity has decided that modding and racing cars is the best way to rebuild society, so they race their fancy machines over the remnants of civilisation. This makes for some pretty exciting tracks; desolate cityscapes, an abandoned mine, the remainders of a major dam and such, complete with all sorts of crazy jumps, steep hills, and (quite obviously) long and sharp turns which require players to perform fancy power slides.

Technology seemed to be Powerslide’s greatest asset. Ratbag built an in-house game engine called “The Difference Engine”, which could push 300,000 polygons a second at 60 frames per second. The engine also featured some pretty advanced physics models, which generally were not of great concern at the time. The game’s AI was also quite advanced, though many players felt the game gave them a little too much of an advantage in the game’s harder stages. While critically lauded and quite popular locally, Powerslide didn’t seem to gain traction with overseas audiences, and Ratbag could never seem to get the sequel off the ground.

Pulp Fiction

Magicians are a crazy bunch

At a time when the point and click adventure game genre was still strong, John Passfield and Steve Stamatiadis (who would later establish Australia’s largest developer, Krome Studios) of Interactive Binary Solutions lead development on Flight of the Amazon Queen, which sought to emulate the pulpy adventures featured in comic books of the 1940s.

You played as Joe King, a pilot for hire who owned the titular Amazon Queen. On a routine flying carrying famous movie star Faye Russel, Joe is forced to crash land the Amazon Queen into the thick of the Amazon Jungle. The pair get wrapped up in the scheme of a lederhosen company and its mad scientist owner which involves turning the native tribes into dinosaur warriors.

Flight of the Amazon Queen, like many popular adventure games of the time, had its tongue placed firmly in its cheek. The game took a lot of cues from the popular LucasArts adventures of the time, but had a personality all of its own. Production values were quite high given the small team that worked on the game – the PC version even featured voice overs from Penelope Keith and William Hootkins (better known as either Porkins from Star Wars or Eckhardt from Batman). Flight of the Amazon Queen has been released as freeware, and is now supported by ScummVM, allowing it to be played on a variety of modern formats (check it out in our File Library!).