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The origin of Virus
Most Amiga fans know of the great David Braben game, Virus, on the Amiga, but most outside of the UK have never heard of the Acorn Archimedes, the 32 bit successor to the Acorn BBC Micro, and the system Virus was developed and first released on.
Because of the success of his BBC Micro game, Elite, Acorn asked Braben if he would work on something for the launch of the Archimedes system that would show off it's advanced 32 bit capabilities. He came up with the idea we now know as Virus. The initial idea was in the form of a demo called Lander which was included with every Acorn Archimedes sold as part of the welcome disk. I remember playing this for ages when my school received their first Archimedes A3000's and I was asked to help set them up. :)
After the Lander demo, Braben then continued development of the demo and it was eventually released on the Archimedes as Zarch. This was later ported to the Amiga and renamed Virus.
Another game using the same 3D engine, also developed on the Acorn Archimedes and involving David Braben was Conqueror. This is an arcade style tank game, with you controlling a 3D tank with some great controls allowing you movement with the tanks tracks just like a real tank, and also allowed you full movement of the gun turret at the same time. Moving over the 3D landscape looked great and your main objective was always to blow up the enemy tanks on each map. Destoying a tank and seeing it's turret blow off was always fun. Conqueror was also later ported to the Amiga under the same name. And if you haven't played it I highly recommend you do.
Here is a screenshot of the original Acorn Archimedes demo Lander, running in the Archimedes emulator RedSquirrel.
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We were forever getting in trouble being caught playing the lander demo during IT classes at school. It was fun but most people just used to fly and then mash the controls - inevitably ending in an out of control flip and crash.
