From The Archives: Black Legend
It was a dark time for the Amiga but a company set up as the machine’s life entered extra time proved to be rather legendary with scores of games released – including a football title that looked ever so familiar…
An essential guide to the Amiga developer that liked to do things differently
According to Amiga Format in June 1993, fans of Commodore’s celebrated follow-up to the Commodore 64 had millions of reasons to be cheerful. The Amiga had sold 3.8 million units across Europe, including 1.5 million machines in the UK alone. Sales topped 700,000 in North America and 350,000 in Australia and New Zealand.
Perfect timing, then, for a new software publisher to emerge, you would imagine. Only the figures didn’t quite tell the full story. In April that same year, another magazine – Computer Gaming World – suggested the Amiga was “hardly mentioned, let alone seen” at the European Computer Trade Show in London. Yet here was Black Legend, hoping the appetite for Amiga gaming was still alive and well.
Black Legend had been founded in 1992 by a 20-year-old called Richard M Holmes who lived in
Switzerland. He was interested in the Amiga demo scene and began working with developers on a handful of games when Steven Bailey, from a games distribution company called Kompart, paid a visit and suggested a partnership.
It felt like a great match. Kompart had worked with top-name publishers such as Domark and Activision and it had distribution relationships spread across the continent from Russia to Scandinavia. Richard saw an ideal opportunity to push Black Legend’s games to a wide audience so, by August 1993, he joined Steve and his business partner, Duncan Lowthian as a joint, third director and Black Legend’s games were readied for launch.
“These were the early days of east European development and there were loads of talented programmers and artists emerging,” Richard says, of the post-soviet scene. “With Kompart, we had everything we needed in place, from production to distribution, PR and marketing so it was a case of doing the same work with Black Legend but with our own brand in place. It worked fine because we didn’t have to start from scratch.”
Black Legend decided early on that it would target the Amiga first and foremost while dabbling with other formats such as the PC. It had released four games before Christmas 1993 with the most memorable being Fatman: The Caped Consumer, for the Amiga and DOS – a gloriously juvenile collect-’em-up platformer with a burping main character created by
I/O Product in Hungary that had a beautiful animated intro and colourful in-game graphics.
This was joined by a poorly received compilation of Russian-based games called Moscow Nights for
PC, and Hyperion, a low-budget mouse-controlled game of ten missions for the Amiga developed by a Norwegian team called Offence Software. The latter was described by Amiga Power as “little more than a collection of ingenious 3D routines roughly formed into a game” but, with another compilation called Hungary For Fun (including Kid Pool and the puzzlers Logic and Zarcan), Black Legend was up and running.
By gambling on little-known enthusiasts such as Offence Software, Richard was unearthing and publishing talent from the vast pool of Amiga fanatics. Some of them worked part-time and needed to arrange time off their day jobs to finish a game, but Black Legend was helping to foster an alternative coding scene and it entered its second year with confidence.
Indeed, Richard had two games up his sleeve which he was confident would do well. One was the superb football management simulator, Tactical
Manager, developed for the Amiga, Atari ST and
PC by Camy Maertens of Talking Birds in Rayleigh, England. The other was Football Glory for the Amiga and DOS which hit the back of the net with reviewers who not only scored it highly but compared it favourably to Sensible Soccer.
Tactical Manager allowed up to 46 players to simultaneously compete to be as successful as they could and it reached number one in the UK game charts. Football Glory had a familiar top-down view complete with tiny sprites but its fluidity and speed was especially eye-catching and it added lots of fun quirks from grass that would scuff during a sliding tackle to overhead and heel kicks.
There was even action involving spectators as streakers took to the pitch and police officers chased hooligans who would chuck firecrackers and toilet paper. With different choices of pitch, zoomed replays, speech bubbles and different physics for the ball
depending on the surface played, it really did feel like a labour of love.
“Football Glory was all about creating a fun football game that was better than Microprose Soccer,” says Richard. “So we had the streakers and the injured people carried off on a stretcher and little celebration dances and things like that which meant every time you played, it was a game to remember – unless you were playing it all the time in which case it became an accepted part of the fun. I’d spent some time trying to find the right developers for it and came across Croteam. They did a damned good job.”
Croteam was – and still is – a games developer based in Zagreb, Croatia, and Football Glory was the studio’s first title. It originally created the game for the Amiga and followed up with a version for PC. Development, however, wasn’t easy. “We had this bizarre setup where I was living in London and they were working programming hours. So I would talk to them 24 hours a day, making some quick decisions for ten minutes every hour and then going back to sleep for 50 minutes,” Richard laughs. “It was a bit on the hectic side but it worked.”
Rather than follow it up, Black Legend sought to sample different genres. “Unfortunately, we felt we had done a football title and so we began to think of doing something else instead of constantly doing the same thing,” says Richard. “It meant that Football
Glory wouldn’t become like a fun FIFA and run on for years which, in hindsight, was maybe a mistake.”
The publisher satiated gamers instead with a host of games that included
Embryo, Tactical Manager Italia, Statix,
Crystal Dragon, Mega Motion and more. “During the development of these, we were posting floppy discs from one country to another, with us offering feedback and them showing their progress,” recalls Richard. “The couriers made a lot of money.”
Statix, developed by 7th Sign Production, was a compelling falling block, tile-matching puzzle game involving a seesaw which players tried to balance by avoiding an overload of either side. Mega Motion by Extend Design was another puzzler in a similar vein to E-motion that saw gamers using a mouse to move rotating balls towards an exit. Magnetic Fields’ Crystal Dragon was an RPG tasking players with reaching a magic crystal that would allow power over the universe before an evil sorcerer got his hands on it.
“Development teams would generally come to us with something in place and we’d work from there,” says Richard. “But I wish we had known at the time stuff that we learned later. Today, you would never release a game called ‘Embryo’, for instance, no matter what it was about [Black Legend’s Embryo was a 3D first-person shooter by Croatian developer Beyond Arts]. It would just be an expensive brand to create whereas Football Glory does what it says on the tin. Quite often we’d have developers turning up with things that needed a market and we had to get people to know about it, which wasn’t always easy.”
Luckily Black Legend had good relationships with the magazines (“I’m still friends with a bunch of the journalists and I haven’t been in games for quite a few years now,” Richard says). He’d allow the publications to carry demos of Black Legends games on their cover discs and he’d physically travel to showcase products. “It was a small industry and relationships were important,” he affirms. “So I’d drive to Bath to see the Future Publishing guys, then to Macclesfield for Europress and over to London for EMAP. In Germany, I’d be travelling to Munich and Cologne. Quite odd when I think back.”
Some of those games did incredibly well. While sales could be as low as 1,500 units, it would achieve 80,000 to 100,000 for its bestsellers. Even so, it was loathe to jump to console game development (the CD32 aside) because of the costs involved. “The 7th
Guest on CD-ROM in 1993 was enough of a concern because Virgin chucked a million at it,” Richard says. “The transition from floppy disc on the Amiga to CD on the PC and Playstation was a big scary transition for anybody, least of all us.”
Even so, 1995 proved as productive as previous years. Tactical Manager 2 was released, again developed by Talking Birds, while Poland-based Ego created the Doom-like shooter Behind The Iron Gate which was as close to id Software’s classic as the A500 was going to get – a tremendous feat given they’d never worked on a commercial release before. “Each level was monochromatic but it was a genuine
Doom-style game so while the guy with his Mac was playing Bungie’s first titles on a rig that cost a few grand, we were having equal fun playing on the Amiga,” says Jamie Barber, who began working at Black Legend as a tester before getting involved in marketing.
Parys Technografx created the isometric RPG Tower Of Souls and there was a great buzz around the racing game Wheelspin for the A1200 which Jamie recalls with fondness. “I took a call when all of the senior staff were out and I talked the developer through the process of submitting a game for Richard,” he says. “I came up with the name Wheelspin and I also persuaded the sales guy to approach Yokohama for some in-game advertising so this was before that scene had all kicked off.”
Certainly by now, Black Legend had gained a positive reputation. It published Sid Meier’s
Civilization for the AGA Amigas on behalf of Microprose and it released the superbly drawn trading sim Voyages Of Discovery by Software 2000. But although Black Legend had a grip on the Amiga market – “A couple of years later, I did some work on The Chaos Engine for The Bitmap Brothers and there wasn’t a huge difference between then, tech-wise,” Jamie says – the Playstation was dominating and the Amiga’s days looked numbered. Then again, it had been for a while.
Commodore had experienced a rocky couple of years due to problems with the A500+ and PC games sales were performing far better, seeing allegiances switch. The A1200 with its new AGA chipset was acclaimed but publishers were deserting the Amiga and not even the CD32 was able to save it. Little did anyone know at the time but the A4000T in 1994 would be the last Amiga produced.
As 1995 went on, it became ever more clear the market wasn’t what it was and the guys behind Kompart felt it was time to close Black Legends. It was, in some ways, a bit of a shock since, at the European Computer Trade Show in March 1995, which attracted a record number of visitors, Black Legend was proud to be showcasing a good number of games. That it was only joined by Team17 and Renegade in supporting the Amiga, however, was a sure sign of things to come.
“We had an office in Germany which lasted a little longer but that was it for us,” Richard says, of the moment one of the biggest late supporters of Amiga games disappeared from the scene. “It was a shame but when Commodore went bust, the whole market collapsed and it’s amazing how an installed user base becomes worthless in some situations.
“But we had great fun during three very intense yet special years and some of those games pushed the Amiga really hard. That was particularly satisfying because it’s still my all-time favourite machine.”
it was a shame but when commodore went bust, the whole market collapsed Richard M Holmes