Revolutionary. The Complete Story of Defender of the Crown (1986, Amiga)
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- Опубликовано: 4 авг 2024
- Dive into the golden era of gaming with 'Defender of the Crown' on Commodore Amiga! This comprehensive retrospective explores the game's captivating story, turbulent development, and later conversions for the Commodore 64, PC/DOS, Atari ST, Macintosh 128K, and the Apple IIGS. I also talk about the forgotten 'Defender of the Crown II for the Amiga CD32 and Commodore CDRV.
Uncover the historical significance and gain insights into the evolution of this classic strategy game. Whether you're a fan of Cinemaware classics, retro gaming, or the 16-Bit era, this detailed look aims to be your go-to resource. Join me in rediscovering the full story behind 'Defender of the Crown' and explore its rich history in the world of classic strategy games!
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Contents:
00:00 Defender of the Crown
01:46 Strategic gameplay
06:05 Mini-games
06:33 Jousting
07:17 Swordplay
10:33 Sieging
12:36 Gaming in the 80s
15:08 Making of Defender of the Crown
16:09 Graphics
23:07 Programming
28:02 Sound
30:36 Conversions
34:48 Cinemaware
37:33 Defender of the Crown II
42:12 Bittersweet end
All rights, trademarks, and copyrighted content mentioned in this video belong to their respective owners. 'Defender of the Crown' is a registered trademark that may be owned by the successor company to Cinemaware. This video is created for educational and nostalgic purposes, providing commentary, critique, and analysis. No infringement of copyright is intended. 
Игры
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This game actually was the reason I got an Amiga!
A friend's brother in law was into computers and had an Amiga 1000. The animation of the title screen of this game, with the golden letters reflecting the light, was unlike anything my 12 y.o. eyes has ever seen on my C64. It was jaw-droppingly beautiful. As soon as I could afford it I got an Amiga 500.
Curiously enough, all the flaws mentioned in the review never registered with me at the time. Like the swordplay just mashing the mouse button - it's not like that was different from so many other popular games at the time, like Winter Games. And you kind of expected games to become boring rather quickly.
I never knew about the gruesome development history and about the high profile creators, and the incredible amount of work put into this game. I had a copy of Deluxe Paint back then, and the amount of week long pixel-peeping and talent still needed to create such graphics from scratch is just incredible.
Thanks for that dive into nostalgia and all the background info!
Thank you for this comment. This is exactly how I imagined people reacting to the game at the time. I think it got away with everything because of how stunning it was, but you raise another good point: old games could get boring fast. Defender of the Crown was really undercooked but it offered some variety that was a novelty. I wonder just how many Amigas this game sold in the 80s.
I remember playing this game as a child but didn't know the name of the game.
Been trying to work out what it was for years.
Even though I think I only played a demo, I still remember it ~30 years later.
Yea, that game really had amazing graphics.
I actually helped a team of Italian fan-translators figure out the graphics formats in a DOS clone of Defender of the Crown; a game called "King Arthur's Knights Of The Round Table" (shortened to "King Arthur's KORT", probably as pun on "Court"). It's basically the same concept, but with a rather painful case of programmer art.
Funny, 8 years or so of progress and Defender of the Crown still looks better than this game. Jim Sachs' graphics aged very well. Then again, King Arthur's KORT is one of those amateurish games of the 90s that were fun to its tiny audience. A lot of games like that were made in Poland (or should I say, most of them were like that in the 90s). A lot of heart was put into them though with varying results. Still, even objectivelly bad games gave some people good memories. I would play everything I could get my hands one. I probably don't remember half the games I've played in my life, because so many of them were either bad or just "meh".
@@BottomlessInventory Yea, especially compared to the original it was based on, it just looks hilariously bad. And it's not just the art, either; the help text was apparently created as images and resized to fit the UI later, and that resize mangled it and made it hard to read. And the quality of the few voice clips included in it was absolutely ear-destroying.
Funnily enough, since the Italian translators are a really dedicated bunch, the unofficial Italian translation turned out a lot more polished than the original.
@@Nyerguds I bet it was a hobby project. Some dude had a dream of making a game and pulled it off. It is an achievement, honestly, especially with how difficult it was to release a game commercially way back when. And apparently, the game had its fanbase despite being (?) shitty. I mean, DotC may have been terribly unpolished, but it had a budget and a team of talented people working on it. Those two games were in completely different leagues.
@@BottomlessInventory Yea, true. I think it was just made by one guy. And the Italians actually managed to contact him, and he declared his old game to be freeware, so that's nice :)
This was awesome! Great video and research! :D
Thanks! It was fun digging into the topic. So much history is connected to this particular game!
Blew my mind back in the day. I think this game is due for a remaster. An actual Amiga remaster. There are a lot of bugs and a few broken gameplay mechanics that later versions fixed. It also annoyed me that the amazing intro music sounds a bit broken because of disk loading.
I know right? The loading interference was annoying. But as for the remaster, I think DotC should be rebuilt from scratch. The graphics only need slight touching up but the programming is useless. The strategic and tactical gameplay should be rebuilt from scratch. The original code was written in basic-like language which is obviously limited when it comes to what you can do. Then again, it's very unlikely that such a remake will be made. If anything, someone could try to make a better clone.
there was a vga port for ibm clones i played that one before i played dotc on the amiga. it might ran under win 3.1. great vid!
I heard about it but wasn't it super rare and problematic?
Really played it a lot when it came out on the Amiga. The Amiga was definitely superior those days.
What was it like seeing those graphics and sound back in the day?
@@BottomlessInventory Jaw dropping and breath taking. Those were the days PCs had only green screens and beeping sounds. I still can't understand why everybody wanted a PC, it was no match for an Amiga. But then again, stupidity of Commodore management ensured it's death.
@@chrisminnoy3637 That's how I imagined it. As for the PC, I think the reason was that it was widely adopted in various business. So was Mac, I think. The Amiga was great for multimedia, games, and such, but apparently not enough people cared about that. They cared if the could take work home and such. At least, that's my theory based on what I've read and listened to over the years. I also like watching Computer Chronicles and similar shows from way back when.
And Commodore was a terribly run business like you said. Ingenious engineers, crappy management. I think when they shipped the AGA chipset, it became pretty obvious that Commodore wasn't going to repeat the technological breakthrough of the A1000 and the commercial success of the A500.
I got Defender of the Crown for my Amiga when it came out in 1986. Yes, the graphics were absolutely stunning. But we understood very well that the gameplay was quite primitive. There were better games on the Commodore 64 that comprised a variety of different gamestyles. But nothing could come close to the graphics of Defender of the Crown.
Interesting. I suspected the selling point of Defender of the Crown was precisely the wow effect, not actual gameplay which is completely bland. But it didn't have to be God knows what at that point in history, I believe. If you make enough of an audiovisual jump, people will forgive you a lot.
@@BottomlessInventory You're exactly right. The beautiful graphics made most people overlook the weak gameplay. I remember that computer magazines gave Defender of the Crown good reviews that - from a gameplay perspective - it didn't deserve.
The other thing that needs to be remembered is this: Defender of the Crown was crazily, crazily expensive in 1986. I lived in Ireland. Games for the Commodore 64 or Spectrum (the computers most kids had) cost anywhere between £5-£15. Games for the Amiga cost between £25-£30, which already seemed VERY expensive.
My mother paid £60 for Defender of the Crown.
I still cringe and feel guilty to this day when I think about it - because I pestered her and pestered her to get it for me (I didn't know it would cost that much!). If I'd known it would cost that much I would never have expected her to get it.
But my brother, my friends and I were seasoned gamers at this point! We knew damn well that the gameplay was poor in DOTC. It wasn't the first game to have great graphics and little gameplay: this was a well-known phenomenon amongst kids at the time. To the point that if a game had great graphics, kids would immediately become suspicious as to whether the game was any good.
So we knew damn well that Defender of the Crown was terrible value for money. But I never said that to my mother!
Can this play on Xbox one? If so does it just read the disc?
If you can get RetroArch to work on it, probably. I'm not really familiar with consoles. There is also a remake for the original Xbox, but I don't know how good or bad it is. Still, this one is more likely to work, I think.
@@BottomlessInventory yes, the original Xbox. Why what version are you talking about? I thought it looked different
@@BottomlessInventorythink there was one one on original XB Robin Hood defender of the crown, nowhere near as good as the original which is probably my favourite as a kid. Played on ST. There is a remake which has retained nearly everything and just massively polished the graphics. But original still looks best in my opinion.
I think gameplay wise, some people are being too harsh. Back in 1986, if you look at the competing products, there are none. IE: the goal wasn’t to make a good strategy game with great graphics but to make a great cinematic showcase with decent fun time. Think “action movie” versus dramatic movie.
Back in 1987 (when I played it), I enjoyed myself thoroughly playing the game. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s perfect, but it is serviceable to their intent. That said, if someone could do a remake with the C64 gameplay, everyone would win!
As for the cause of Cinemaware’s downfall, absolutely some of their decisions like TG16 support bit them in the ass. But they were already a leaking company and piracy on the amiga hurt them badly. People forget that compared to most companies, their games were not a 1-4 team affair but full teams going at it. So an amiga game had a different budget compared to many others so needed more $$$ to recoup to be profitable. They were for a while but never hit their internal milestones especially yes with their investment. A good example: TV Sports Basketball was available on the piracy boards about 4 days before launch. I talked to Bob Jacob right at that time, prior to TV sports Basketball’s launch and he was livid, freaked out about it. I understood the existence and reasons of piracy but man I wish they could at least give 1-2 weeks to the devs to at least make a buck :(
Psygnosis maybe had comparable budgets to them on some of their titles, and they made their own mistakes supporting the CD system early on (Microcosm/Novastorm) however they had the good fortune of backing the right system (Playstation) so we’re swallowed up by Sony and excelled as a result.
I agree to some extent about DotC being a "great cinematic showcase with decent fun time", but it just doesn't last for long. You'll realize how poor it is before you finish the game, and it's not possible to win this game without starting over at least once. But sure, graphics-wise, it must have been jaw-dropping back in the day. Like I said, I think you paid for the wow effect. But as a game, it was just too shallow to keep attracting players. Once you've played it, there is zero reason to come back to it, is all. It would have been better if it hadn't been so rushed, that's for sure. The Atari ST version was a lot better. It couldn't have been that difficult to port the gameplay part back to the Amiga for the 1991 re-release if they wanted to capitalize on the brand.
As for Cinemaware, you raise a valid point about them not being a mom's basement company. Still, sinking 700k into a console that is still a great unknown was a huge gamble. Especially that TurboGrafx-16 did not have a built-in CD-ROM, it was an expansion of some sort (like SEGA CD, I think). They simply picked their target systems pretty badly. You could trust in the Amiga and the Atari ST in the 80s, but by the early 90s it was more than clear that the PC was going nowhere and it was catching up in games. And then there were the 16-bit consoles which were much cheaper and had cool graphics and sound too. Well, I guess that's just the way it is.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to comment!
I had DOTC in 1986 for my Amiga. The gameplay was primitive and disappointing back then to my brother and myself. There were much better games on the Commodore 64 that combined different gameplay styles. So, at the, time, Defender of the Crown was a definite step backwards from the point of view of gameplay. BUT, the graphics were really very good - and that kind of made up for the weak gameplay - to a point.
On the other hand, it should be remembered that this game was VERY expensive at the time. Amiga games were already very expensive - but DOTC cost more than twice as much as that. It was, in fact, very poor value for money.
As a former conspirator. I condemn this 8-bit misrepresentation of our plot.