Author Topic: Never Been So Much Fun: The making of Cannon Fodder (Read 4260 times)

SysAdmin · « **on:** December 08, 2013, 12:00:57 AM »

20 years ago - nearly a decade before Medal Of Honor forced players to storm Omaha beach under merciless artillery fire, and a full 15 years before Call Of Duty ended a mission with everyone dying in the radioactive aftermath of a nuclear blast - one game taught a generation that war is, indeed, hell. If you were playing games in 1993 - especially if you were playing them on the Amiga, the concerned parents' 'educational' alternative to the SNES and Megadrive - you probably remember Cannon Fodder's 'Boot Hill' inter-mission screen, where tiny, brave, 16-bit civilians were waved through a door by a recruitment officer, only to (almost) inevitably reappear as gravestones dotting the surrounding landscape. It's hard to forget.

Finish this great article on the link below.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-12-04-never-been-so-much-fun-the-making-of-cannon-fodder

carvedeye · « **Reply #1 on:** December 08, 2013, 12:58:40 AM »

Great Read

klx300r · « **Reply #2 on:** December 08, 2013, 03:32:01 AM »

thanks for posting! one of my favourite top down games of all time

paul1981 · « **Reply #3 on:** December 08, 2013, 12:20:30 PM »

Nice read indeed. :pint:

Oldsmobile_Mike · « **Reply #4 on:** December 09, 2013, 05:19:06 PM »

Great article, thanks! Here on this side of the pond I'd never heard of Cannon Fodder until only a year or so ago, not that I've given it that much effort but I still can't get past level 5. Level 19 sounds like torture, haha!

VingtTrois · « **Reply #5 on:** December 10, 2013, 01:32:21 AM »

Yeah! :uzi: :destroy:

paul1981 · « **Reply #6 on:** December 10, 2013, 07:47:29 PM »

Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;754077

Great article, thanks! Here on this side of the pond I'd never heard of Cannon Fodder until only a year or so ago, not that I've given it that much effort but I still can't get past level 5. Level 19 sounds like torture, haha!

Best Amiga game ever and you'd not even heard of it until recently?

How can I put this... hmm...

OMFG!

Oldsmobile_Mike · « **Reply #7 on:** December 10, 2013, 08:47:14 PM »

Quote from: paul1981;754136

Best Amiga game ever and you'd not even heard of it until recently?

How can I put this... hmm...

OMFG!

The Commodore and Amiga market was completely different in North America in the '80s and early '90s. Just like I'll never understand you Europeans fondness for tape drives (never seen one), SCART (never seen it), or soccer, LOL. :mickeymouse:

Plaz · « **Reply #8 on:** December 10, 2013, 11:46:10 PM »

Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;754143

The Commodore and Amiga market was completely different in North America in the '80s and early '90s. Just like I'll never understand you Europeans fondness for tape drives (never seen one), SCART (never seen it), or soccer, LOL. :mickeymouse:

If you were running and Amiga, Cannon Fodder was still tops here too. You just must have been distracted by the latest wintel pentium box and X-Wing.

Plaz

Oldsmobile_Mike · « **Reply #9 on:** December 11, 2013, 01:03:33 AM »

More likely distracted by the SSI Gold Box series RPG's. Or lemme see... that was when I was in high school? Probably distracted by girls. Yup, that's the answer I'm going to go with. Girls. :banana:

Plaz · « **Reply #10 on:** December 11, 2013, 11:45:10 PM »

Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;754150

Probably distracted by girls. Yup, that's the answer I'm going to go with. Girls. :banana:

Way better than X-Wing... you're totally forgiven.

Plaz

Oldsmobile_Mike · « **Reply #11 on:** December 11, 2013, 11:58:43 PM »

Actually I didn't even own a PC until 2003. Was all Amiga, all the time, prior to that. Then all of my Amiga hard drives crashed simultaneously and I walked away from the darn things for almost 10 years, LOL. :destroy:

I had very few Amiga owning friends however and never saw an ad for Cannon Fodder in Amiga World, and that was my main source of Amiga news until I got on the Internet back in '95 (and mostly just hung out in comp.sys.amiga.hardware). Did they not advertise state-side or was I just oblivious for all these years? :p

Plaz · « **Reply #12 on:** December 12, 2013, 01:55:09 AM »

Quote from: Oldsmobile_Mike;754207

Did they not advertise state-side or was I just oblivious for all these years? :p

CBM generally seemed to have no idea how to advertise anyway (or maybe didn't want to), so CBM/Amiga developers got no help there. It was rare or non-existent to see Amiga related news in a regular PC mag or commercial. In the US, game and software info was out there. But we had to make the effort to track down Amiga related mags, frequent CBM/Ami related BBS's or go looking for newsgroups of the day. (Could barely call it the proto-internet in '93). I'm surprised if you missed it in AmigaWorld, pretty sure it would have been there.

So if you were in the US and didn't go hunting, Ami stuff didn't exist I guess. Weird part was everyone still fondly knew the CBM/C64 and you could still find some of that old stock at walmart or sears. But almost no one here knew about Amiga.

Plaz

Plaz · « **Reply #13 on:** December 12, 2013, 02:10:52 AM »

Well just did some searching here and don't see it was ever featured or advertised in Amiga World. Maybe Sensible didn't feel it was worth the trouble in the US. It did show up in and Amiga Action and Amiga Power, but those were import mags. You had to hang around one of the remaining Amiga computer stores to ever see one of those in the States if you weren't on their subscription list.

http://amr.abime.net/amr_search.php?search=cannon+fodder&mag_id=30&action=Find

Plaz

Furvert · « **Reply #14 on:** December 13, 2013, 07:48:34 AM »

Quote from: Plaz;754219

So if you were in the US and didn't go hunting, Ami stuff didn't exist I guess. Weird part was everyone still fondly knew the CBM/C64 and you could still find some of that old stock at walmart or sears. But almost no one here knew about Amiga.
Plaz

You could find them here in a few computer only stores, and some of those were made to stop selling Amiga when the A2000 came out by Apple. The last part is sadly very true. Yesterday I had the TW cable techs here to eventually swap out a modem. They knew of the C64, but not one had ever heard of Amiga... The old 20G Maxtor hard drive had just died so I couldn't boot my old and zooped up A1200

However, all three were just floored with the Pegasos II and MorphOS when I booted it up to make sure they hadn't deactivated my E-mail.