Alien Breed

Allister Brimble, who was sound engineer and composer for Alien Breed as he had been and would be for many more games, recalls:

Alien Breed was one of the first games to make use of a 1MB Amiga. Previous games had been limited by the standard 512K. Team 17 knew they could only produce Alien Breed for a 1MB machine and decided to take the risk, hopefully even persuading more users to upgrade.

Alien Breed was designed by Rico Holmes and programmed by Andreas Tadick. It was very much based on the arcade machine, Gauntlet, except with Aliens and graphics based on the film "Alien". You had to perform a series of tasks, whilst building up your weaponary in order to keep the Aliens at bay. Almost a 2d DOOM.

Rico Holmes did a great job with the graphics using the Amiga's colour palette to maximum effect. I wrote the music and sound effects and learnt a lot in the process. The Alien death sound effects were actually sampled newly born kittens, mutated on my sampler with an explosion added!

I had great fun playing Alien Breed, and even more fun when Alien Breed '92 was released. This was the same game engine but with greatly improved levels and missions. Later on, Alien Breed 2 and Tower Assault were launched, both of which were great and again improved on design and gameplay.

This is one of my all time favourites and deserves credit for being one of the first 1Meg only games.

Apart from being one of the first games for 1MB Amigas, Alien Breed was the start of a very successful series. FlashJesterPunk, the creator of the remake Alien Breed Obliteration, reminisces:

The original Alien Breed was basically an unlicensed computer game version of James Cameron's classic 80's sci-fi film 'Aliens'. The game featured space marines, a large multi-planetary corporation, Giger-esque aliens (including eggs and little critters that suspiciously resembled face-huggers), an arsenal heavy weaponry and a familiar background story about a research station that had ceased transmitting communication. The game perfectly captured the film's sense of claustrophobia and genuine fear through its clever map designs and high-quality atmospheric visual and audio effects. Most importantly though, and unlike many games of the same genre, although ammo was strictly limited the aliens spawned continuously—meaning that if you wanted to survive you had to stay on the move.

On its native platform, Alien Breed proved a very successful franchise. A year later it was re-released with new levels as Special Edition 92, and then there was a new game every year: 1993 Alien Breed II, which supported AGA, 1994 Tower Assault. 1995 the series went into the third dimension with Alien Breed 3D, not the first (Gloom was released earlier in the same year), but probably the best known FPS for the Amiga, which in turn saw a sequel in the following year.

Attempts to move to the PC were less successful. Team17 released a DOS version of Alien Breed (ported by Audio Visual Magic) in 1993, and Tower Assault on both platforms parallely. How well they sold I do not know, but they never reached the classic status they had on the Amiga.

Reviews

• Buy it and your Amiga will love you forever, Lee Fletcher recommends:

  Imagine for one moment you are a futuristic marine stationed on a command ship floating in deep space. Suddenly a message is broadcast over the warning system. You hear gunfire in the distance. Screams and strange alien noises echo around you. You prime your weapon and step through a door to meet them. Suddenly you're surrounded by unrecognisable creatures all running toward you, eager to taste your blood. You freeze. Panic sets in and you start spraying random gunfire in the hope of taking a few of them down before they reach you. As your ammo counter clicks to zero you relax, waiting for the inevitable to happen. Then "BANG BANG BANG!" The creatures explode one by one in a hail of limbs and entrails. You turn round to see your friend appear behind you in the doorway, his gun smoking. That is the kind of atmosphere that oozes out from this excellent game.

• A great gaming experience that all action fans will enjoy, Home of the Underdogs is sure:

  The last level, for instance, sees a power failure and a strict time limit with which to escape from the ship. The tension mounts as the auto-destruction system periodically announces how little time you have left. The corridors are pitch black, and all you can see are the glowing eyes of the aliens as they race to attack you and the explosions as you pepper them with whatever ammunition you have left. Then you see the red lights on the floor guiding you to your escape and you follow them to the lift, on your way out. This entire level is very well-designed, and your heart will pound as you race toward the exit at the end.