Hawkeye is a side-scrolling shooter with some puzzle elements. Such games were common on the C64, just as later on the Amiga, but Hawkeye was especially polished, critics liked its glossy presentation with a movie-style intro. That it was released in the generally slow summer 1988 may have helped.
After the initial release on the Commodore 64 Hawkeye was ported to Amiga and Atari ST. In spite of the higher resolution of these platforms, the graphics were not redrawn and even lost the parallax scrolling. The ports pretty much bombed. On Lemon Amiga, Wandus goes into details why this happened:
development costs would have been prohibitive, I figure, had a design team decided to tailor the aural and visual delights to the Amiga. For one, I always found it pointless to have senseless consoles cover one third of the screen, the only purpose being the effortless placement of high scores, life energy and what not. This horrible looking work-around always seemed awfully pedestrian since the Amiga beautifully handled the arcade norm of intergrated game-stats. The colour palette was hardly considered, apparently, nor was the soundtrack punched up to four-channel stereo-sound, even though "xenon 2" proved how crucial a thundering aural environment was to the success of a game.
Soon after having delivered what is sometimes considered the greatest success story of the demoscene, The Boys Without Brains disbanded. Mario van Zeist (programming) and Arthur van Jole (graphics) moved on to the Amiga and formed the studio Euphoria. Jeroen Tel became the most sought-after musician on the C64 (he composed the music for the C64 version of Lemmings) and later moved on to other platforms, the music for Agony was his work as well.
