T-zer0 was clickBOOMs last Amiga game, along with the port of
Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy (which
was probably done by the same team) it was their last product for
the Amiga at all. It was not the last commercial Amiga game (at
least Strip Fighter came later,
though I'm not sure about the exact business model of this title),
still it has end of an era
written all over it.
For many Amiga gamers, clickBOOM represented a dream: That in an era where the IBM PC and Windows had become dominant, you could still walk into a shop and buy an Amiga game, or at the very least get it per mail order. That in spite of the problems the platform encountered the tradition would continue. In retrospect, it is interesting to look at the three Amiga games that clickBOOM produced.
The first, Capital Punishment, was definitely a back-to-the-roots thing. In an era when many developers tried to emulate the first person shooters, so popular on the PC, on a platform that wasn't built for this kind of game, Capital Punishment did what the Amiga did best: moving large sprite in front of gorgeous scrolling backgrounds. Consequently, the game would run well on a standard, off-the-shelf Amiga, you were just required to have a sufficiently large harddrive.
The next game, Napalm: The Crimson Crisis, was a venture into unknown territory. While many had tried their hand at ego shooters, nobody had attempted to create a Command & Conquer-style RTS for the Amiga yet. The result, while generally well recieved, showed that the same problems applied here: Napalm would play well only on a high-end Amiga, the type only few had, but on the other hand it wouldn't run on a PPC.
With T-zer0, it was once again back to the roots. Side-scrolling shooters had always been standard fare on the Amiga. Indeed, so much standard fare that there is something anti-climatic about it, especially as T-zer0 is not as outstanding as a shoot-'em-up as Capital Punishment was outstanding as a fighter game. Nor does it run on as modest hardware, though it did offer the option to be played directly from CD.
Afterwards, clickBOOM moved on to other things. It was not the end of Amiga game development. There had been a significant drop between 1996 and 1997, there was an even more significant drop between 2000 and 2001. Since then, there are maybe one or two new games a year. The Amiga isn't dead, this website still gets a couple of hits from Amigas each month. But the dream, the dream has died.
