[laffer]

I've noticed some veteran adventure game developers post here, it would be very interesting to get an answer to this.
I'm wondering why Sierras' Amiga ports were so terribly bad. This became especially noticable once they started porting the 256 color games to the Amiga.. because now they had to modify the graphics for the 32 color palette of the Amiga.

I'd like to point out that I'm a huge Sierra fan.. have been since I played the first Larry game back in '88.. the old Sierra was my absolute favorite developer.

But as I said.. a lot of the Amiga ports were complete rubbish.
They would take ages to load, require tons of floppy swapping (to the extent where I think they listed a harddrive as a system requirement), they did a completely horrible job at converting the graphics to 32 colors, the sound was rather bad, they ran very slowly (to the point of being almost unplayable).. just really, really bad!

Kings Quest 6 is an exception, I was very surprised when I played that game.. but it was ported by another company, Revolution I think.

Anyway, was the Amiga market for these games so tiny that they didn't bother to put any effort into it?

This is why, back when I had an Amiga, Lucasarts was my favourite developer. Their ports were in a completely different league than the Sierra ones. They ran fine, had great music, very nicely ported graphics, not by far as much disk swapping, shorter loading times.. they were tons and tons better.

This is the reason I bought a PC btw.. so I could play the Sierra games the way they were meant to be played and not these absurdly bad ports. And ever since, Sierra has been my favourite developer. Such a shame what happened to them

It would be very interesting to hear from an ex-Sierra employee about this.. but if anyone else knows anything, feel free to post!

Here is an example of what I mean (I recorded a longplay of Space Quest IV for the Amiga - however, I increased the processor speed in the emulator in order to play at acceptable speed.. so you won't notice the extreme slowness here) -

Part 1/7 (introduction)
Part 2/7
Part 3/7
Part 4/7
Part 5/7
Part 6/7
Part 7/7

[alkis21]

You basically answered your own question. LucasArts proved that 32 color conversions could still look great (other companies too; I'm thinking of Flight of the Amazon Queen & Simon the Sorcerer), so it wasn't a question of whether they *could* do it; they simply lost faith in the Amiga too soon. They also never bothered to release AGA (Amiga 1200 exclusive) versions when so many people owned a powerful machine and a hard disk.

Space Quest IV is an excellent example by the way, I still own the original box and I remember my utter disappointment. I could deal with the bad graphics but I couldn't stand how slow it was, and I did have a hard disk (still do, by the way; my Amiga 1200 is fully operational).

[laffer]

Yeah.. I wonder why they gave up on the Amiga, though.. was the market too small? Lucasarts did pretty well on the Amiga, I'd think?

Would be very interesting to hear some insight if anyone has any information about how these games were ported.. how long it took, how well they were tested, if they realized just how bad these ports were.. etc, etc.

[ozzie]

Afaik LucasArts stopped supporting the Amiga with Day of the Tentacle because of the software piracy. There was more on the Amiga than on the PC apparently. It was one reason at least why the Amiga had a less lucrative market.

[laffer]

Oh, so it was because of software piracy they didn't release later games on the Amiga?

I thought it was because their games became too big and demanding to be run on an Amiga 500 and the Amiga 1200 market was much smaller.. but that's just an idea I had, I really have no idea.

I know there was quite a bit of software piracy on the Amiga, though.. I remember reading in a Shadow of the Beast manual that they were considering not creating more games for the Amiga due to piracy.. and rather move to consoles.

Maybe software piracy is why Sierra put no effort into their ports, then?

[CrimsonBlue]

Nah, I think they were just lazy. The Amiga was still in its golden years when Police Quest 3 came out, and Sierra also released Willy Beamish, Heart of China and Rise of the Dragon, which were all great ports, imo. Although I guess they're not really in-house Sierra titles. I seem to remember than Sierra was very early to announce their departure from the Amiga platform. Only the "pure" Sierra games, like the quest series and Larry, were of actually bad quality. And considering how many games they were making at that time, they probably didn't have time to properly work on the Amiga versions. Dynamix games and also the Coktel games were all decent ports on the Amiga.