#cinemaware

Dragons Breath (aka Dragon Lord)

'Crackout'

[NES] [GERMANY] [MAGAZINE] [1992]

"In the year 30XX, the mankind has exhausted all the metal resources on the Earth, so they had to travel into space in order to find more. They find a planet high in minerals, and they name it Selim. But soon they discover that there is someone watching, spying on them; it's some kind of alien race. These aliens find a hole in the humans' main computer and get inside it. The computer, programmed to self-destruct in case of a failure, starts its countdown. There is only one way to avoid self-destruction, which is entering a 14 digit code into the machine; but these digits are hidden in the walls of the corridors in the complex. Your mission is to find these letters and avoid self-destruction, aboard the "Red Warrior", and using your only weapon, an energy ball.

Defender Of The Crown (Cinemaware, 1986) Developed/Published by: Cinemaware Released: 11/1986 Completed: 22/01/2026 Completion: Finished it by conquering the invaders, but remained unmarried…

Defender Of The Crown is a game I’ve been eager to play, and I had a reason to boot it up a bit earlier than I intended, so I jumped at the chance. But of course, a problem immediately reared its head.

Which version to play?

The game is famous, really, as an Amiga game. If you’re not familiar with the story, video game agent Bob Jacobs saw a prototype Amiga in action, realised that the system provided a huge leap in the potential for video games, and went into business as Cinemaware1, with the explicit intention to create not merely Hollywood-inspired but Hollywood quality video games by (generally) making the graphics really fucking good. The first game to come from this was the Errol Flynn swashbuckler-inspired Defender Of the Crown.

As an “Amiga first” project, you think it would be easy to choose that version to play (after all, when I played through Pirates, I decided to play the C64 version, as it is Sid Meier’s preferred version.) But the Amiga version is not generally considered the best version to actually play because of its somewhat tortured development: originally intended to be developed by Sculptured Software, Cinemaware attempting a more “Hollywood” process than keeping everything in house, Sculptured ended up so behind on schedule–indeed, seemingly with nothing useful–that the game was handed off to a previous acquaintance, R.J. Mical, to crunch until the game was in a state it could be released.

(As usual, you can read all about this on The Digital Antiquarian. The guy’s a legend.)

Something I’ve always wondered about Cinemaware’s early releases is just how arbitrary their release dates were. It particularly stands out with Defender Of The Crown, the Amiga version of which–and I can speak from experience, now–is slight to the point of being unfinished, with apparently weeks of work from the artist, Jim Sachs, going unused. Considering the game would be improved for basically every other release, Jacobs couldn’t have let them spend a little more time on it?

That all said, no one can exactly agree which version of Defender Of The Crown to play. The Amiga version is the best looking, but the Atari ST version is somewhat close visually; versions on the Mac, PC, NES, even the humble CPC and C64 get design improvements. I was originally of a mind to play the Atari ST version, but I discovered that there’s a Defender Of The Crown II on CD32 that is, apparently, not a sequel but kind of an “ultimate” version of this era’s Defender Of The Crown, so I thought… well, I probably want to play that. And if I’m going to play that, I might as well just play the very original version so one day I can compare and contrast. After all, the whole selling point of the game originally was those graphics, so no point being short-changed there!

(As my mother would say, what a roundabout road for a shortcut.)

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