HUNTER - GTA eat yer heart out.

[KingTutt]

Once upon a time, when 80s computing reached its pinnacle in the form of the Amiga, and PCs were still running on monochrom/cga/ega monitors with pc speaker. There came a game on Amiga, which shook the gaming community to its core. It screamed ambition in every direction, had the brashness of a sublime all in one simulator and the groundbreaking finesse of your best first or third person shooter, yet it came well before its time...

That game ladies and gentlemen was HUNTER. And it came by, long before Doom was even a glimmer in John Carmacks eye... long before Grand Theft Auto was even concievably possible. But yes, someone.. somewhere was ambitious enough.. brash enough to test the 3d waters at a time when 3D was a pipedream at best. And it was done best on our beloved miggy.

Its seems a travesty to the 3d gaming world, that it was not properly recognised for its merits and was instead cast away into the murky depths of has been titles. Why was Doom and GTA given all the glory, when this beast had the same groundbreaking claims as Elite was to the whole Space sim phenomenon.

Well I don't know the answer to this, except that maybe HUNTER suffered from having a smaller audience and therefore remained obscure, while Doom basked in the x86 limelight many years later.

All I have to say is that this game should be in the top 10 games that should be recreated with a new gfx engine for the A1/OS4 platform. It must be resurrected and given a new lease on life - preferably using OpenGL 2.0 hardware acceleration.

In a time when First person cookie cutter titles, litter the market. We are in desperate need of a title that binds good original game concepts to wonderfully executed playability.

For those of you not lucky enough to have experienced this Amiga gem, i'll break it down for you....
 
Basically this game allowed for a person to have the type of freedom that GTA wished it could give. You could literally take command of an assortment of vehicles, ranging from cars, jeeps, vans, trucks, tanks? bikes, windsurfers, boats, guntotting patrolships, to even the odd helicopter. On foot a person could shoot at the local fauna, lol! which included rabbits and seagulls and even other ppl. You could also swim ashore to nearby islands, and not drown like GTA would have it.

All in all, this was arguably the better games available on amiga at the time. I'm surprised it was never mentioned before. I strongly believe that a remake of this with upto date OpenGL 2.0 gfx would give casual gamers a compelling enough reason to try gaming on the new Amiga.

A penny for your thoughts

[KingTutt]

Back in August 1991, the x86 PC does have VGA/MCGA and Adlib sound cards btw...
The VGA standard was released somewhere in 1987.

Funny how very few ppl could afford it at the time. Many games also didn't really take full advantage of those features all at once, it was a gradual adoption. The point here is that Amiga had enjoyed color and stereo sound since 85. Its beside the point to be pedantic and state that joe bloggs had VGA and adlib sound when 90% of the market still got by on less h/w for many many years.

Note that DOOM's predecessor i.e. Wolfenstein 3-D (released in 05 May 1992). A game with texture mapped bad guys and walls.

I won't argue on that point. But seriously HUNTER wasn't a bad effort. Considering the period and the overall goal of that title. Personally, I think it achieved quite alot. I don't recall Doom or Wolfenstein allowing you access to a plethora of vehicles or the unending expanses that gave the user an inherent feeling of freedom.

Hunter's graphic presentation level may not be the first e.g. "Midwinter 1", "Falcon 1", FA/18 Interceptor, "Stunt Car racer" and 'etc' .

Hmmmm....gfx presentation aside, none of those games achieved the goals set out by HUNTER. I do concede that Stunt Car Racer was revolutionary, in the sense that it achieved something new. Alot of the flight simulators were old hat by 91. But something like HUNTER was overambitious to say the least.

Was there a similar graphic presentation as DOOM** during this time?

**Near brain dead FPS multi-level texture mapped 3D game (with multi-player connectivity i.e. “Deathmatch” parties).

No there wasn't. I guess the closest things were the light gun games, like Operation Thunderbolt or the like. However, your getting caught up on the processes of achieving 3d immersiveness and not the end result. HUNTER was quite adequate for the gameplay if offered.

A game that promotes being ‘bad’ with reasonable amount of graphic detail…

I do recall playing Carmageddon, years before GTA3 (arguably the first 3d rendered of the series) and it offered me loads more opportunities to be 'bad' and with a very good level of detail, especially when h/w accelerated.

From what I recall, Elite was one of the first filled 3D polygon game for the personal computer market.

A valid point. I wasn't contesting that Elite wasn't revolutionary, only that HUNTER was well underrated, and possibly due to a smaller target market.

[KingTutt]

Thanks, you guys. I was beginning to think I was the only poor bastard who actually thought HUNTER was something special and deserved some merit for being ahead of its time.

Anyway.. Cheerio chaps, continue on with the adulation of this once, terrific title.

[KingTutt]

Calen wrote:

Only ~3 million Amigas was ever sold, such numbers is pittance compared IBM's PS/2 sales.

Indeed, and how many of those above machines would have been sold without the millions upon millions of $ put into its advertising every year?, i'd go as far to say that the PS2 has had more money put into it's advertising in 1 year than the Amiga as ever had since it was concieved, easily.

But yeah we can't compare there sales, but we can sorta have a nice stab at the actual figures of Amigas sold, and its alot more than 3 million,  if you double it  you will prolly be alot closer.

Actually it was more like 7 million according to the Amiga inc website. And for many years after CBM went under, the numbers hovered in the low millions.

If you look at XBOX, with its multi-billion dollar advertising campaign, its quite a feat that the number of amigas were about the same with the number of XBOXs in the market today. And all that without one decent pro-amiga, commodore ad.