Alien Breed 3D

The first person shooter was from the beginning a PC genre, with a few notable exceptions. The most important are Marathon on the Macintosh and Alien Breed 3D on the Amiga.

Like Duke Nukem 3D, Alien Breed 3D was a 3D sequel to a successful series of 2D action games. There had been three Alien Breed games since 1991, two of which were ported to the PC.

Every first person shooter game of the era would be compared to DOOM, which it surpassed in some aspects, and did not reach in others. It had a true 3D engine, where you could walk directly above or under an area you'd just explored, instead of being constrained to a 2D map. It had reflective, refractive, noise dampening water. On the other hand, there were less weapons to choose from, and you could only save between levels.

Another drawback, the lack of an automap, was defended by designer Andy Clitheroe as deliberate. It is unrealistic, he said, would you map if you were running around shooting aliens?

The Amiga community was appreciative, but not enthusiastic. And indeed Alien Breed 3D is of ambivalent significance. It had proven that the Amiga was capable of running DOOM clones, yet it had proven just as clearly that it was not really built for it. The landscape of computer gaming was changing, and this change did not bode well for the—at least in Europe—hitherto rarely challenged market leader.

Reviews and Links

• No, it's not perfect, Jason Compton says, but it is pretty fun to play:

  It's not Doom. I'm not sure it's really captured the excitement Doom created when it was released. But it is a very playable and quite polished texture-mapped Doom-genre game with excusable flaws, a popular topic, and with promised enhancements to come…

• Nice job, Mr Clitheroe, Angus Manwaring says:

  The game was one of the first and arguably the best games produced by the Amiga backlash to the success of Doom on the PC. The Doom clone is clearly not something the Amiga was originally designed to handle, with it's ingenious bitplane system and it's hardware sprites unlike the PC's byte per pixel sytem, but Andy Clitheroe proved that, within certain limitations, the Amiga could compete in this area and deliver high quality entertainment in a stunningly realistic 3D environment.

• Team17 still have fairly good info about all their past games on their website.

Similar Games

The next year, there was a sequel under the title Alien Breed 3D II - The Killing Grounds. It was designed to make use of the power of faster Amigas, but the designers went a bit too far, and the game received devastating critiques.

There were a few other first person shooters on the Amiga, the German Gloom for example; but in general, they are considered inferior to Alien Breed 3D.