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
