"I was brought in on Leander right at the end of production just before it was due for release. The guys at Travellers Tales felt the existing title song lacked the kind of urgency they wanted with the intro sequence. I had a couple of days to write a new theme but I didn't have any access to the game code at the time. Instead they sent me a VHS video showing the intro and titles! As you can imagine, syncing an intro sequence by constantly rewinding and playing a tape was a challenge, but it got close enough in the end." -- Matt Simmonds, musician (Leander, Amiga)
Some of my favourite Amiga games were, Speedball 2, Apidya, Turrican 1,2 and 3, Project X, First Samurai, Chaos Engine, Kick Off 2, Gods, Lotus Turbo Challange, IK+, Pang, Moonstone, Shadow of the Beast 2, Wings of Fury, Sensible Soccer, Walker and Cannon Fodder oh and Lemmings oh and Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies.
Psygnosis: my absolute favourite games makers of all time, and the best thing to come out of Liverpool since George Harrison. Pure production values. Nobody did graphics like them. Top notch Gameplay too. Killing game show (best intro of the generation), all 3 beast games, and I remember one with an owl. Quality.
Sweet. Was talking more generally about psygnosis, but if u'd asked me who developed this game, I'd have said it was them, so thanks for the info. Here's hoping the 'beast' reboot hasn't been cancelled. Its been a while since I heard anything.
I love the aesthetic of this game. It's like a oriental mixed with ancient -but-not-too-ancient European style... or something. Either way, it's really unique.
oh my god dude the soundtrack for this is STUNNING. i've been freestyling over the main track for like 10 minutes lolol it's put together so well. they even went all out with the automation on the instruments, love that fake guitar strum effect etc
One of my favorites. I think this is one of the few Amiga games where the character is properly set in the middle of the screen. Most platforms back then, used to put the character to the side where it was walking, making it almost impossible to play the game. Turrican 2 is a perfect example.
One of my favourite Amiga 500 games and I played it today again. I will always love Amiga 500, even if it has stopped working in 1997, I'm thankful I have WinUAE.
Jon (the game creator) has a RUclips channel and he shares some coding secrets of his games and also in particular, prototype music for this game!! Gamehut I thibk was his account. Thanks for the upload, it's such a great game.
Still one of my favourite intro musics of all time! I got an amiga remix cd a few years back with a remix of this and it just didn't sound as good. I agree with Revenile, the C64 and Amiga era was what I was schooled in, and only started going console later. I'd have this one playing on looped intro in my room if a new friend was coming over and just watch their jaw drop! The Psygnosis 'moody' look made this even better, plus the amazing dragon cover art, and sleeve packaging.
Travellers Tales greatness. Beautiful design all around from the levels and of course classy visuals and obviously accomplished music. I much rather the Amiga version
That was due to the Amiga's sound limitations. It only had four channels which wasn't a lot compared to the Megadrive which had six sound channels, and the SNES which had eight. Most game developers had to choose between nice sounding music or sound effects, becasue having both would mean a compromise in the songs. Very sad that Commodore never updated the Audio system.
@@nebularain3338 which also explains Blood Money taking an identical approach, and Lemmings letting you choose between LIMITED SFX with music or FULL SFX. Xenon 2 tried to have both, but when there's intense action, part of the music is not playing
I always thought that the Amiga had a different pallete for the explosions/kill animations and the enemies. Surprised to see them using the same limited pallete in the Amiga version for both too. Thought that matching the colours to the environment was a limitation of the Atari ST Version. I thought the background raster effect only took up 1 colour out of the 32, and I'm surprised at how close the Atari ST version was apart from the amazing soundtrack being butchered and no blitter scrolling even on the STE/Mega. An amazing game, and by the looks of this Amiga vid, an amazing ST port too. (Shadow of the Beast on ST was shocking and came out only 6 months before Leander did if I remember right).
It takes a whole bit plane unless you redraw the whole screen each frame so it halves the colours to 16. That only covers 4 colours too ...... You can have 32 colours if the background parallax layer only has one colour I think?
One of my fave amiga games. Also, fun fact, didn't use hit boxes. everything was pixel perfect thanks to some clever hardware use which was pretty amazing for its day.
I guess it is a typo, but the description had my chuckle here: > The game does have sound effects too, but you can only have a choice of one playing at any time; *being the Amiga, you would naturally choose the Amiga.*
sorry to post again, but just realised, on the copy I have there is a primary piece of music that starts as the Psygnosis logo shows, and runs as the game loads (shows added memory screen so maybe this music is for extra memory?) A link to the music is here and it's a beautiful tune, I remember taking the disk out to let this awesome ambient piece loop! Other longplays include it but skip it, and yours doesn't seem to have it, I KNEW something was missing when I watched this! lol
This game also shaped my childhood in a way, growing up with an A500 meant I missed out on Zelda and such until later, but Psygnosis was what I grew up on and this game was my favorite out of them all (seriously that art style even today is amazing to look at.) Agony would be a close second and Beast 3 would probably hit the 3rd slot.
I found out only a couple years ago that Genesis got this game later as "The Legend of Galahad" and they added a cape to the sprite. Problem was their editing didn't do that great of a job and I seem to remember a few frames missing a few pixels on the sprite, that and the genesis sound chip sucks unless the music is made specifically for it. My dream is to see an HD remake of this game with all the art redone in a hand drawn style. I've also heard some great fan arrangements for the music.
I have found several Longplays of Leander on RUclips. All of them are with music. But I would wish one with the sound effects instead of the music. The sound of the game was not even too bad.
About the privacyprotection, i honestly think that is not a mangled version: rather we thought the game do a check on the bootblock and if different from the supposed checksum will take out the platform. Happened also in other games, among those Fire and Ice
Did you see the video on Game Hut where the programmer explained that? It was pretty brilliant. He had two separate copy protections. One obvious and basic, one advanced and hidden. If both copy protections were in place and the game was copied, a screen that discouraged pirating would pop up and the game wouldnt load. If the basic copy protection was defeated, but not the advanced, the game would play as normal until level four. So any pirate who playtested would think, "Ah ha, cracked it," crank out his copies, and have dissatisfied customers being sold essentially demo disks. The first successfully pirated copy came out years later and took ten disks to fit on.
I am a simple Amiga artist: I put a 1 billion colors gradient in the background, main character walk cycle has 2800 animation frames, enemies have none.
Looks fine, moves smoothly, sounds good but tends to feel a bit too repetitive on the long run. And the constantly respawning ennemies just add artificial difficulty to an already challenging quest. Btw anybody the Killing Game Show main sprite you have to face in the third world ?
It's more to do with the the limited number of sound channels available (4), which had to be shared for music and sound. It's very difficult to create great-sounding music AND have sfx; those that do often suffer from music being cut off when a sound effect cuts in on a specific channel. Ultimately, a lot of developers chose to have music OR sound effects, rather than both at once.
I've looked for this game for ages, and I don't understand, I had it on Atari, but the title was different, like some cheesy thing with "Storm" in it, and the intro music was the epic track starting at 35:00 IT WAS only the demo and I lived in France, so maybe that's why things were switched around.
I remembered that the game had also sound fx, why did you toggle em off (or maybe I don't remember)? :-| The Amiga version lacks some parallax (clouds, etc), but overall I prefer it over the Mega Drive counterpart, especially the colors that are darker and greyish here, also the main character is (all the time) pink-purple (which is a bit gayish) on the Mega Drive while on Amiga his outfit changes colors depending on the current stage screen palette. :)
Unfortunately in the Amiga version you could only choose between the music or the sound fx. I suppose this was due to the 4 channels limit on this machine.
Actually Leander's armor was his hitpoints. From highest to least it went Black, Gold, Silver, Blue, Green and Purple. It was the same in all worlds. The other thing was there was a red set of armor but it only shows when charging up a rune bomb, which killed you but cleared the screen too.
Io!Se a distanza di quattro anni stai cercando per caso la rom funzionante con piattaforma clicca qui www.oldgamesfinder.com/?m=2&q=MFM (non è un virus) cerca * [ADF] Leander (UK) (3 Disks) (1991) [Original] (Psygnosis) (MFM 'VERY' Long tracks).zip XD lol
Amiga just did it better...or should I say that some of the game designers really knew how to make a game that used the Amiga's abilities? Miss my Amiga.
In some aspects the Amiga was a little too far ahead of its time. SAdly, it got ignored, and also, the people in charge at Commodore didn't know how to market it (the joke is, had Commodore bought KFC, they'd advertise it as "nice taste warm dead bird")
Al82: Retrogaming & Computing yeah I can remember the megadrive version and it being renamed. So the sequel "Tigrander" never came about then, just wondered as it said in the ending of Leander to look out for it...shame it could have been great 👍
Sadly, another example of those Amiga games that had full-screen parallax scrolling at 50fps. The price was always flat, drab graphics, few colours, little or no background animation, bare, empty levels and only one enemy on screen at a time. Not the programmers' fault: the Amiga was just under-powered, unfortunately.
You longplayers are also big intro fans, because there's no one who would watch the intro 50 times, only you.. We all could have done better with the sound effects. The music is is terribly boring after a while. And no, not very good. Just good. For a while. It wouldn't have hurt to have another one for each level. Unfortunately, it was not revealed whether there are sound effects and what they are like. Otherwise, the graphics are very nice, the animation too, except the posture while jumping which always looks stupid. Almost in every game. Not to say about the big falls, which don't harm the character. The playability seems good, it's not too difficult. It wants to entertain you, not to upset. I'd say it's a real Amiga action game, except for the poor implementation of the audio part. I would give it 7 stars from ten. If there are sound effects possibly 9.
![Shadow of the Beast II Longplay (Amiga) [QHD]](/img/1.gif)
"I was brought in on Leander right at the end of production
just before it was due for release. The guys at Travellers
Tales felt the existing title song lacked the kind of urgency
they wanted with the intro sequence. I had a couple of days
to write a new theme but I didn't have any access to the
game code at the time. Instead they sent me a VHS video
showing the intro and titles! As you can imagine, syncing
an intro sequence by constantly rewinding and playing a
tape was a challenge, but it got close enough in the end."
-- Matt Simmonds, musician (Leander, Amiga)
Some of my favourite Amiga games were, Speedball 2, Apidya, Turrican 1,2 and 3, Project X, First Samurai, Chaos Engine, Kick Off 2, Gods, Lotus Turbo Challange, IK+, Pang, Moonstone, Shadow of the Beast 2, Wings of Fury, Sensible Soccer, Walker and Cannon Fodder oh and Lemmings oh and Pinball Dreams and Pinball Fantasies.
Psygnosis: my absolute favourite games makers of all time, and the best thing to come out of Liverpool since George Harrison. Pure production values. Nobody did graphics like them. Top notch Gameplay too. Killing game show (best intro of the generation), all 3 beast games, and I remember one with an owl. Quality.
This game was developed by Traveller's Tales, not by Psygnosis, but I still agree, Psygnosis had some of the best technology in video game industry.
Sweet. Was talking more generally about psygnosis, but if u'd asked me who developed this game, I'd have said it was them, so thanks for the info. Here's hoping the 'beast' reboot hasn't been cancelled. Its been a while since I heard anything.
+fever kane Always knew a Psygnosis game was going to be quality
Cuzjudd yeah. Crazy-good production values.
that game with the owl was called Agony
Some of the best music in the Amiga. The best has to be Turrican 2 though.
couldn't agree more. The music on this one stuck with me. For me, the best was probably 'Hostages' (Amiga version). Awesome music.
Turrican 2 was the very best.
I like Atari ST version of Turrican 2 OST.
Shadow of the beast 3 was my favourite soundtrack
That's a funny way to spell Savage
ruclips.net/video/vFYZNvKKWG4/видео.html
I love the aesthetic of this game. It's like a oriental mixed with ancient -but-not-too-ancient European style... or something. Either way, it's really unique.
oh my god dude the soundtrack for this is STUNNING. i've been freestyling over the main track for like 10 minutes lolol it's put together so well. they even went all out with the automation on the instruments, love that fake guitar strum effect etc
Oh and forgot to say, thank you SO MUCH AL82 for keeping the intro and start screen musics a full cycle in all your LPs, really appreciated!
Those Amiga platformers where you took a leap of faith every 3 screens...
Excellent game, great atmosphere, design, and loved that it runs at 50fps too.
One of my favorites. I think this is one of the few Amiga games where the character is properly set in the middle of the screen. Most platforms back then, used to put the character to the side where it was walking, making it almost impossible to play the game. Turrican 2 is a perfect example.
when the amiga did it's own thing we often got something beautiful and Leander was always good proof of that. The best version
One of my favourite Amiga 500 games and I played it today again. I will always love Amiga 500, even if it has stopped working in 1997, I'm thankful I have WinUAE.
Really diggin the aesthetic and character design of this game. This'd make a great remake in hd
Jon (the game creator) has a RUclips channel and he shares some coding secrets of his games and also in particular, prototype music for this game!! Gamehut I thibk was his account.
Thanks for the upload, it's such a great game.
Still one of my favourite intro musics of all time! I got an amiga remix cd a few years back with a remix of this and it just didn't sound as good. I agree with Revenile, the C64 and Amiga era was what I was schooled in, and only started going console later. I'd have this one playing on looped intro in my room if a new friend was coming over and just watch their jaw drop! The Psygnosis 'moody' look made this even better, plus the amazing dragon cover art, and sleeve packaging.
Travellers Tales greatness. Beautiful design all around from the levels and of course classy visuals and obviously accomplished music. I much rather the Amiga version
This game is just so very well designed. It was my favorite platformer back in the day.
The music in this game is really a masterpiece. Too bad that it could not play the also very nice SFX on top of it.
That was due to the Amiga's sound limitations. It only had four channels which wasn't a lot compared to the Megadrive which had six sound channels, and the SNES which had eight. Most game developers had to choose between nice sounding music or sound effects, becasue having both would mean a compromise in the songs. Very sad that Commodore never updated the Audio system.
@@nebularain3338 which also explains Blood Money taking an identical approach, and Lemmings letting you choose between LIMITED SFX with music or FULL SFX. Xenon 2 tried to have both, but when there's intense action, part of the music is not playing
I always thought that the Amiga had a different pallete for the explosions/kill animations and the enemies. Surprised to see them using the same limited pallete in the Amiga version for both too. Thought that matching the colours to the environment was a limitation of the Atari ST Version. I thought the background raster effect only took up 1 colour out of the 32, and I'm surprised at how close the Atari ST version was apart from the amazing soundtrack being butchered and no blitter scrolling even on the STE/Mega.
An amazing game, and by the looks of this Amiga vid, an amazing ST port too. (Shadow of the Beast on ST was shocking and came out only 6 months before Leander did if I remember right).
It takes a whole bit plane unless you redraw the whole screen each frame so it halves the colours to 16. That only covers 4 colours too ...... You can have 32 colours if the background parallax layer only has one colour I think?
One of my fave amiga games. Also, fun fact, didn't use hit boxes. everything was pixel perfect thanks to some clever hardware use which was pretty amazing for its day.
I guess it is a typo, but the description had my chuckle here:
> The game does have sound effects too, but you can only have a choice of one playing at any time; *being the Amiga, you would naturally choose the Amiga.*
sorry to post again, but just realised, on the copy I have there is a primary piece of music that starts as the Psygnosis logo shows, and runs as the game loads (shows added memory screen so maybe this music is for extra memory?) A link to the music is here and it's a beautiful tune, I remember taking the disk out to let this awesome ambient piece loop! Other longplays include it but skip it, and yours doesn't seem to have it, I KNEW something was missing when I watched this! lol
This game also shaped my childhood in a way, growing up with an A500 meant I missed out on Zelda and such until later, but Psygnosis was what I grew up on and this game was my favorite out of them all (seriously that art style even today is amazing to look at.) Agony would be a close second and Beast 3 would probably hit the 3rd slot.
GameHut brought me here!
ruclips.net/video/Qaq9vlfoGnA/видео.html
Enchanting world.
Great game. It's even better on the Mega Drive/Genesis where it's known as The Legend Of Galahad.
I found out only a couple years ago that Genesis got this game later as "The Legend of Galahad" and they added a cape to the sprite. Problem was their editing didn't do that great of a job and I seem to remember a few frames missing a few pixels on the sprite, that and the genesis sound chip sucks unless the music is made specifically for it. My dream is to see an HD remake of this game with all the art redone in a hand drawn style. I've also heard some great fan arrangements for the music.
I have found several Longplays of Leander on RUclips. All of them are with music. But I would wish one with the sound effects instead of the music. The sound of the game was not even too bad.
About the privacyprotection, i honestly think that is not a mangled version: rather we thought the game do a check on the bootblock and if different from the supposed checksum will take out the platform. Happened also in other games, among those Fire and Ice
Love the intro as well as the game. I well remember the anti crack system that didn't generate a piece of ground required to go ahead on the game
Did you see the video on Game Hut where the programmer explained that? It was pretty brilliant.
He had two separate copy protections. One obvious and basic, one advanced and hidden.
If both copy protections were in place and the game was copied, a screen that discouraged pirating would pop up and the game wouldnt load.
If the basic copy protection was defeated, but not the advanced, the game would play as normal until level four. So any pirate who playtested would think, "Ah ha, cracked it," crank out his copies, and have dissatisfied customers being sold essentially demo disks.
The first successfully pirated copy came out years later and took ten disks to fit on.
wow I never knew this game existed back then
this is a masterpiece...
I remember this game for sure, But I think it had a different name, also I'm sure it had sound effects and stuff when I played it on my Amiga..
PRESS FIRE TO START...!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That shop music! Also is this a different version? Because there should have been a beautiful pre-title scene music.
Can't wait for Leander 2 LOL still waiting.
I am a simple Amiga artist: I put a 1 billion colors gradient in the background, main character walk cycle has 2800 animation frames, enemies have none.
Awesome game, tons of fun. 😀
Shit I was that close to completing world 2 when I played this many moons ago haha
Well played sir
1:11:23 Aww man c'mon I wanted to see the Lemmings :(
totally missed the secret level!
A rotten shame the sequel "Tigrander" never got made
My favourite! Still have the box :O)
my beloved play in amiga
Looks fine, moves smoothly, sounds good but tends to feel a bit too repetitive on the long run. And the constantly respawning ennemies just add artificial difficulty to an already challenging quest. Btw anybody the Killing Game Show main sprite you have to face in the third world ?
I always loved this game, but it is so obviously unfinished. I guess deadlines were deadlines back then.
This game is Galahad in Sega Genesis !
This is traveller's tales' first game, right???
So there were no SFX or the Amiga cant handle SFX and music at the same time??
It's more to do with the the limited number of sound channels available (4), which had to be shared for music and sound. It's very difficult to create great-sounding music AND have sfx; those that do often suffer from music being cut off when a sound effect cuts in on a specific channel.
Ultimately, a lot of developers chose to have music OR sound effects, rather than both at once.
I've looked for this game for ages, and I don't understand, I had it on Atari, but the title was different, like some cheesy thing with "Storm" in it, and the intro music was the epic track starting at 35:00
IT WAS only the demo and I lived in France, so maybe that's why things were switched around.
I remembered that the game had also sound fx, why did you toggle em off (or maybe I don't remember)? :-|
The Amiga version lacks some parallax (clouds, etc), but overall I prefer it over the Mega Drive counterpart, especially the colors that are darker and greyish here, also the main character is (all the time) pink-purple (which is a bit gayish) on the Mega Drive while on Amiga his outfit changes colors depending on the current stage screen palette. :)
Unfortunately in the Amiga version you could only choose between the music or the sound fx. I suppose this was due to the 4 channels limit on this machine.
Actually Leander's armor was his hitpoints. From highest to least it went Black, Gold, Silver, Blue, Green and Purple. It was the same in all worlds. The other thing was there was a red set of armor but it only shows when charging up a rune bomb, which killed you but cleared the screen too.
Mais qu'est ce que la musique était tripante!
Leander a.k.a. The Legend of Galahad.
chi si ricorda il bug della piattaforma mancante nella versione pirata??? bel gioco
Io!Se a distanza di quattro anni stai cercando per caso la rom funzionante con piattaforma clicca qui www.oldgamesfinder.com/?m=2&q=MFM (non è un virus) cerca * [ADF] Leander (UK) (3 Disks) (1991) [Original] (Psygnosis) (MFM 'VERY' Long tracks).zip XD lol
LepGadio86 Lol grazie amico !!
TheAntirossi ma figurati ci mancherebbe! Condivi anche te se qualcuno cerca la Rom originale e funzionante!;)
Cool game!
No sound effects. Detracts from the game in a serious way
Amiga just did it better...or should I say that some of the game designers really knew how to make a game that used the Amiga's abilities? Miss my Amiga.
In some aspects the Amiga was a little too far ahead of its time. SAdly, it got ignored, and also, the people in charge at Commodore didn't know how to market it (the joke is, had Commodore bought KFC, they'd advertise it as "nice taste warm dead bird")
5:26 to start the game.
this game is just a re-skin of Prehistorik
Did a sequel ever come out to this classic? As I never saw it 🙅
Bat Fink No - there was no sequel. The game was ported to the Sega Mega Drive and renamed to The Legend of Galahad 😃
Al82: Retrogaming & Computing yeah I can remember the megadrive version and it being renamed.
So the sequel "Tigrander" never came about then, just wondered as it said in the ending of Leander to look out for it...shame it could have been great 👍
For a Amiga game this a ok platformer
Great game!
it isnt hard to guess how i found this game..
Good!!!
Press fire too start please , ? Yes it used too take 10mins too work out what fire was .. they made the best games
it's funny cause my name is leander
Really? how interesting
+Destens 2 No way man
Did you get stuck on Level 4?
Yeah, at 21:11 it's the copy protection platform ;)
That was the copy protection. You have to skip that level or load another version.
Leanders Bagel's.
Looks and sounds like SOTB2 + Arabian Nights
Same guy who did the music for this and SotB2.
😍Leander👍
snes style game, i love it
Why Can't Travellers Tales make a fun game? This is also on Mega Drive as Galahad and is equally pointless.
It's just a shame the game was so easy to beat.
In one Level i jumped there was no was Out for me. So i never Player IT Till the end.
A very lover looked game. its quite hard. Although the Amiga had some features which where better over all I think the Mega Drive version was better.
¿sega?
1:16:52 I recognise this guy...
And his big brother a few seconds later :D
Sadly, another example of those Amiga games that had full-screen parallax scrolling at 50fps. The price was always flat, drab graphics, few colours, little or no background animation, bare, empty levels and only one enemy on screen at a time. Not the programmers' fault: the Amiga was just under-powered, unfortunately.
You longplayers are also big intro fans, because there's no one who would watch the intro 50 times, only you..
We all could have done better with the sound effects. The music is is terribly boring after a while. And no, not very good. Just good. For a while. It wouldn't have hurt to have another one for each level. Unfortunately, it was not revealed whether there are sound effects and what they are like.
Otherwise, the graphics are very nice, the animation too, except the posture while jumping which always looks stupid. Almost in every game. Not to say about the big falls, which don't harm the character. The playability seems good, it's not too difficult. It wants to entertain you, not to upset. I'd say it's a real Amiga action game, except for the poor implementation of the audio part. I would give it 7 stars from ten. If there are sound effects possibly 9.
anime like
This remind me of the Last samurai by Ubisoft.
I think you might mean First Samurai by Vivid Image Design.
Guardandolo ora... è un gioco monotono e semplice
O.o
H ek that was boring