Video Games: The People, Games, and Companies

After a year of continuous delays in publishing the software, CDC finally threw in the towel, returned the rights to the educational programs without getting anything out of it, and left the two partners with software that was now outdated, hard to publish, and with no other company interested. If nothing else, thanks to the advance, Johnston and Sharp had been able to lay the groundwork for their next project: an educational programming game inspired in part by RobotWar and Silas Warner’s Castle Wolfenstein and in part by Rocky’s Boots. The latter was an educational game developed by Warren Robinett and Leslie Grimm, published in 1982 by The Learning Company for the most widespread platforms—Apple II, CoCo, IBM PC, and Commodore 64—in which the goal was to build circuits with logic gates so that a robotic foot would literally kick objects of different colors and shapes, according to the instructions provided level by level: if properly programmed, the robotic foot kicked the right objects and earned points; otherwise, the player was penalized by subtracting the value of the wrong object.

Just as Robinett had drawn on his own game Adventure to build the graphical interface and the room-based gameplay in which the player tackled levels by navigating a maze of rooms (including a long tutorial), Johnston and Sharp initially thought of creating an adventure around the gameplay, in which the player had to move a robot using instructions similar to those of a programming language. Later, however, the idea evolved into a true puzzle game in which a robot had to explore increasingly complex levels with different objectives, generally achieved by collecting “good” objects (such as cups of coffee, floppy disks, fuel) and avoiding “bad” objects (bombs, traps, and various obstacles). At the core of the gameplay was to be the programming of the robot, to be done in a way similar to RobotWar, through a language akin to real ones, with the ability to create complex algorithms to perform actions based on circumstances.



Development of what would later be called Chipwits began on the 8-bit platforms that Johnston and Sharp had by then become so familiar with, but in January 1984—exactly one year after the Lisa fiasco—Apple released the Macintosh. It was a very powerful computer, driven by the same CPU as the Amiga, the Motorola 68000, and equipped with a graphical user interface and a high-resolution screen, albeit monochrome. In short, it was a very advanced machine, though by no means inexpensive, and it was precisely the Macintosh’s advanced graphics capabilities that convinced Johnston to change the original plan and go all-in on Apple’s new computer. The presence of a high-resolution graphical interface also made it possible to revolutionize the robot’s programming system, converting it from textual to graphical by using blocks with icons and arrows to create complex tree algorithms and instruct the robot to check its immediate surroundings, turn, move, and operate the gripper.

The project was anything but simple. The new Macintosh was not inexpensive and, at least initially, Apple had specified that the development platform for Macintosh software was the Lisa—an even more complex and costly machine. Discourse’s limited finances couldn’t support such an expense, but Sharp soon realized there was another possibility. A software house called Creative Solutions, Inc. (CSI) had released, as early as February 1984, a Macintosh version of the Forth language, which Sharp had grown familiar with thanks to numerous software porting jobs for third parties. Forth was a relatively niche language, but it had the interesting characteristic of being cross-platform, making it an excellent tool for companies like Discourse that needed to bring the same software to multiple platforms.

Johnston and Sharp didn’t lose heart: they acquired a Macintosh through the Apple Credit program—a sort of installment purchase—then sought Apple’s developer certification and began studying Inside Macintosh, the documentation provided directly by Apple. At the same time, they worked as fast as possible, aiming to have a product ready for the 1984 holiday season. There remained, however, at least one major obstacle to overcome: finding a company interested in their product.

Back in 1982, when Johnston and Sharp had programmed Mathonaut for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and IBM PC, they had done everything themselves and entrusted it to Control Data Publishing, the publishing arm of Control Data Corporation, which exited the market without capitalizing on the license, and the game was forgotten. The unfortunate episode left its mark on Discourse’s founders and made them very wary of the software market and publishers, with the result that for their next effort they decided not to go it alone but to turn to an agent.

Among the possible candidates, they came across one who won their trust thanks to his charisma and informal dress—flip-flops and a T-shirt—the complete opposite of the professionals they had dealt with up to that point. His name was Robert Jacob.

The path that led Jacob to his fateful meeting with Johnston and Sharp was quite peculiar. Although he had a running business in Chicago, in 1982 Robert and his wife Phyllis decided to move to California. They liquidated the company and headed to Los Angeles intending to decide on their next steps once they arrived. The opportunity came quickly: upon reaching their destination, Robert began frequenting the local library, which had a few computers with access to a BBS. Intrigued by the novelty, he decided to investigate, approached some young people using the terminals, and soon struck up a rapport, ending up sharing their passion for computers and video games.

It didn’t take long for Jacob to become an avid player—of both computer games and arcade games (particularly Donkey Kong)—and to purchase a VCS and a computer to connect to the BBS from home and get in touch with the developer community. Talking with them, he realized how inexperienced many novice developers—and a great many of the more seasoned ones—were when it came to entrepreneurship. In particular, he saw that their approach to game development was often naive and lacked the planning needed to create commercially viable games.

Jacob: “The industry was still in its infancy back then, and games looked pretty lousy. The graphics weren't very good. Most games were designed by programmers and didn't really have a strong mass market sensibility. I was a hardcore gamer myself, but I developed certain concepts for what I liked about games -- and I wasn't seeing them in the games that I bought. I was a fanatic arcade gamer, and I realized that there were certain things about the fun in arcade games that I wanted to bring to the home marketplace.”



According to Jacob, video game developers needed more than an agent to place their products: they needed someone who would help them identify the right features to implement in their products. For Jacob, who was a “movie buff,” the proper compass could only be the cinema, with spectacular action moments, fights to the bitter end, romantic encounters, and love stories.

However, computer graphics in those years were very limited, so at least initially Jacob and Phyllis had to focus on finding capable programmers with quality software and placing it with reliable publishers—exactly what Discourse needed.

In Sharp’s eyes, having been impressed by his informal appearance, Jacob was a professional who could sell—extremely diligent and proactive: “Bob Jacob in his enthusiastic style presented the program to publishers all over California and I became a regular at Federal Express every night shipping the latest versions out to him. [...] Bob had a sense of urgency about getting quickly. He used guilt, intimidation and every cheap motivational gimmick he could put over me to keep me glued to my Macintosh keyboard burning the night oil.”

What Sharp didn’t know was that Jacob’s diligence was also due to the fact that Discourse was one of his first clients. Nonetheless, the agent managed to secure a couple of publishing contracts for ChipWits: with Brainworks for the Macintosh and Apple II editions, while for the Commodore 64 version he succeeded in interesting a much more renowned publisher, Epyx. Among the three versions, the Macintosh one was by far the best, thanks to the higher resolution, the graphical interface, and the fact that the game was conceived to run on Apple’s new computer and only later ported—with obvious compromises—to the more humble 8-bit platforms.

Despite positive reviews and extensive coverage in the Macintosh press, ChipWits was not particularly successful on Apple’s platform, mainly due to its small user base—caused, among other things, by a much higher price compared to other computers of the time. Balance of Power, developed specifically for the Macintosh and released in the same period, faced the same problem. In both cases, Macintosh sales were quickly surpassed by those on other platforms—first and foremost the Commodore 64 and, for Balance of Power, the Atari ST and MS-DOS.

Thanks in part to ChipWits, Jacob was able to make a name for himself in the sector, get to know the major companies, and enter the orbit of the bigger players. By a stroke of luck, at the beginning of 1985 he got his hands on one of the Amiga prototypes that Commodore had built for developers and provided in advance to key partners to create the first wave of software.

Jacob: “I got a call from a company called Island Graphics that had a contract to develop three graphics programs for the Commodore Amiga. This company and Commodore had a falling out, so Island wanted to place the project elsewhere. I went up to see them and I had never seen an Amiga before. It was really cool. After seeing the Amiga I figured things were going to be different and I wanted to take a more direct approach to game development.”



For Jacob, the encounter with the Amiga was a pivotal moment. His aspiration was to make film-inspired games, but the computers of the time lacked the necessary resources and capabilities. The Amiga, on the other hand, had them—and that changed everything. Jacob decided to move closer to the world of video game development: instead of working as an agent to find publishers on behalf of others, he chose to look for clients for games he would have developed to order. He therefore founded Master Designer Software, choosing an ambitious name for a company with which he wanted to make games without having programmers or employees, relying instead on an external firm for development and a handful of collaborators.

The starting point was to land a publishing contract. He succeeded with Mindscape by promising to have as many as four Amiga games in the pipeline and to deliver the first in time for the 1986 holiday season. The next step was to find someone who would decide in detail what kind of game to make. Jacob already had some ideas in mind, but he had no intention of overseeing the game’s development personally. He therefore turned to an old contact he had made during his time as an agent, when he regularly visited the biggest publishers and best-known software houses in California.

Kellyn Beeck was a sales director at Epyx. Very active with the specialist press, he had long had the perfect recipe for making a game and had described it in detail. Drawing on his experience at Epyx and the games he had reviewed, Beeck’s advice to aspiring developers was a perfect checklist to avoid at least the most common reasons candidates were immediately rejected during evaluation: “Be original,” “Pick a popular computer,” “Write in assembly language,” as well as a pragmatic “Pick the right form,” which urged applicants to follow the selection procedures correctly.

In closing, Beeck emphasized: “Abracadajbra. Remember that a computer game is nothing more than an illusion. To make the illusion believable, you must convince the player that the world in your game is real. You can give your game great sound and graphics to enhance its believability, but you don't have to stop there. Give your game a personality. Make it seem intelligent. Breathe life into your game and the illusion will be complete.”

Jacob and Beeck had one very important thing in common: they were passionate about films. Jacob had decided to use movies as inspiration for making games, and Beeck—who was not entirely satisfied with his job and would have preferred to develop games—was a good candidate to handle the design of the titles Jacob had promised and needed to commission to third parties. In short, it was the opportunity of a lifetime for Beeck, and when Jacob offered him the position of director, he didn’t let it slip away.

Apart from the setting—always tied to the world of Hollywood films—and some basic ideas, Jacob had little in hand for the games he had promised. For the first one, the project he felt most optimistic about, a medieval, swashbuckling setting was chosen, and Jacob wanted to combine it with hybrid gameplay: partly directly influenced by Risk, and partly modified to include the typical situations of the cinematic genre in question—duels, battles, and sieges. Beyond that, Jacob still wasn’t quite sure where to go, also because he was treading an entirely new path, not only given his limited experience but for the video game industry as a whole.

Jacob: “I'm a pretty creative person and I'm a good sales guy. [...] I say ‘creative’ only because I did have certain things that I wanted to do with the games I was involved with. In terms of production methodology, yes, we would have story meetings, we would flowchart the game, we would come up with storyboards. The games we were doing were different to the other games people were doing at the time. They were a lot different. So we really had to figure out where we were going with the game. We weren't doing platform games, we were doing games that had storytelling and role-playing and action and this, that and the other thing. So if we didn't know where we were going it would be a disaster, so it forced us -- I think -- to a level of oversight that was rare at the time in the industry.”

After a series of meetings, discussions, and design documents drafted by Beeck, the swashbuckling game project slowly took shape. The first draft—centered on the legendary figure of Robin Hood—was quickly set aside and replaced by a setting loosely based on Walter Scott’s historical novel Ivanhoe, in which the clash between the Saxon populace and the Norman conquerors provided the groundwork for Risk-style strategy gameplay. Aside from the names of main characters—Saxon nobles and Norman overlords—and secondary figures—damsels in distress such as Lady Rebecca and Rowena—the common threads with the novel were few, since the new and final version of the game had far more in common with Hollywood cinema than with Scott’s story.

In his description of the “perfect” game, Beeck had advised aspiring developers to choose a good platform—“a popular computer”—but the one Jacob selected was anything but. In 1986, the Amiga was a computer people were talking about less and less, and few had purchased. The serious operating system stability issues present in Kickstart 1.0 had been partly resolved with version 1.1, released at the end of 1985, signaling to developers that the time had come to start creating software for the machine.

The Los Gatos team—where Miner’s original core had relocated—had not sat idle, pouring their energy into further improving the operating system and preparing a third updated version. They would gladly have worked on a budget version of the Amiga 1000 and were designing “Amiga Ranger,” an enhanced model, but Commodore’s management had other plans. 1985 had been a difficult year, and the Amiga launch had not yielded the expected results. New products like the C16 and Plus/4 had performed poorly, and Commodore decided to pull the plug. Even sales of the C128, while solid, fell short of expectations and—combined with sales data for the C64, which had peaked—suggested a decline and that the death of the 8-bit computer market was on the horizon.

Commodore’s new CEO, Thomas Rattigan—who succeeded Marshall Smith in February 1986—prescribed a remedy of cuts: canceling product lines, shelving prototypes, and laying off employees. The Los Gatos team was not spared by Rattigan’s new policy, as the site was among the most expensive: Amiga Ranger was canceled, staff was drastically reduced, and the office was ultimately closed, with the few remaining employees moved to Westchester. Deeply disappointed by Commodore’s decisions, Jay Miner and R.J. Mical chose to continue working on the Amiga only as outside consultants, not as employees.

The problems, however, were only beginning.

With the proper approvals and resources, the Los Gatos team believed they could deliver two new Amiga models by the second half of 1986. Ranger was canceled in favor of the Amiga 2000, developed in Westchester, while the budget version of the 1000 was assigned to Commodore’s German division. Both new models were supposed to be ready by late 1986, but repeated delays pushed the release date into the second half of the following year, and in the meantime—seeking to save money—the ill-advised decision was made to halt advertising for the Amiga 1000.

Miner:  “Commodore were convinced that their 500 and German made 2000 would be ready by September ’86. So why advertise the 1000 when there wouldn’t be any around soon? So an entire year was lost while there was no advertising and no PR for the Amiga, no push to sell 1000s. But IBM and Apple used that year to good advantage. They both have colour and sound and are even close to getting multitasking. I can ‘t tell you how angry it makes me feel to see how the Amiga was handled. The advertisements they did have were absolutely awful. Old men changing into babies and kids competing in race cars. It was ghastly. And then a full year with no ads at all. They lost dealers and worst of all they lost public awareness.”

1986 was therefore a difficult year for the Amiga as well: advertising was put on hold until the long-awaited release of the two new models, and sales were sluggish—a signal that led many developers to avoid investing in a powerful machine with a small installed base that could be abandoned at any moment. Among the few developers who believed in the Amiga, however, was Trip Hawkins with Electronic Arts.

Impressed by the capabilities of Miner’s computer, Hawkins even pushed for Apple to acquire the company. On his advice, Jobs made an offer, but it was soon outbid by Commodore. At the computer’s launch, Hawkins placed a strong bet on the platform, having his Electronic Artists quickly release ports of some of their most successful games, including One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird, The Seven Cities of Gold, and Archon. Some of the titles he commissioned for the Amiga were even marketed before the release of Kickstart version 1.1. Aside from Electronic Arts, few game developers had faith in Commodore’s machine, and the games that did appear were, more often than not, quick ports from 8-bit platforms that failed to take advantage of the Amiga’s markedly superior capabilities.

The Amiga, on the other hand, drew more attention from utility software developers. In particular, Dan Silva programmed Deluxe Paint specifically for the Amiga, making full use of its extraordinary graphics capabilities. The software—better known as DPaint—was published by Electronic Arts in November 1985 and received strong praise from the specialist press.

The Amiga’s persistent problem was its installed base, which remained small—a true niche in a market still dominated by the shrinking share of users on the aging Commodore 64, a minority of Apple II users, and a growing majority on IBM PCs and compatibles. The lack of advertising, the uncompetitive price of the Amiga 1000, and the shortage of software were significant obstacles that reduced its appeal, creating a vicious cycle that was difficult to break.

Nevertheless, Jacob was certain the Amiga was the right machine and, agreeing with Beeck on the importance of having a game with excellent visual and audio qualities, he set out to recruit a few specialists—his finances were, after all, limited—who were capable of realizing his vision. Two stood out above all the others: James D. Sachs and Jim Cuomo.

The first was a self-taught artist who had learned to program and draw on a Commodore 64. His independent, solitary studies culminated in the creation of a shooter called Saucer Attack!, which Sachs self-published and sold by mail, achieving decent sales thanks to its clean, realistic, and incredibly detailed graphics. Thanks to his developer status, Sachs had managed to get his hands on one of the Amiga units distributed to partners before the commercial release and immediately set to work. His drawings and his name were among the best known in the first wave of Amiga users, and Jacob decided he needed him to astonish the public, managing to get him to sign a contract that made him Art Director while remaining an external consultant, tasked with producing artwork and graphic material for the programmers who would make the game.

Jim Cuomo, on the other hand, was a musician—skilled on saxophone and clarinet—and a composer. His first experience with computers had occurred a couple of decades earlier, when he amused himself by having a computer play a few notes during computer science classes. He recorded them on magnetic tape and edited them into the desired order. He recalled this experiment in Europe in 1984, when he was asked to compose music for an MSX action game with a bullfighting theme, titled Ole!.

When he was contacted and hired by Jacob to write music for his game, he received few instructions and was informed only of the bare minimum he needed to proceed: the platform he would be working on, and the game’s medieval, chivalric theme. On this basis, Cuomo got to work and produced a large amount of music.

As the pieces of the puzzle slowly began to fit together—the gameplay written by Beeck, a great deal of music composed by Cuomo, and digital illustrations drawn by Shack—Jacob finally had the chance to experience firsthand the unreliability and uncertainties of the video game industry. Just as had happened to Johnson and Sharp—whom, incidentally, he had recruited to program The King of Chicago, one of the four games in production, a mix of action and adventure based on gangster films—all the projects were suddenly upended by the company to which he had entrusted the undertaking.

Jacob: “I was able to secure a distribution agreement with a company in Chicago called Mindscape for the US rights. In my agreement with Mindscape we said that we would have Defender of the Crown ready to distribute by October 15, 1986 and it really had to be ready to go. We thought we would make that date. A software developer in Salt Lake City called Sculptured Software, which later went on to do some pretty big things, they were the first developer of Defender of the Crown. Well, lo and behold, July 1st 1986 rolls around and those guys are like nowhere. I mean literally nowhere. It was a disaster and I was faced with a situation where I had to ship this game.”

Faced with the impending disaster, Jacob made a virtue of necessity and called together everyone he had met or come across during his two years in California who might be interested in coming on board in such a delicate situation. He started with John Cutter, a programmer who had cut his teeth at Gamestar, a company specializing in sports games like On-Track, which had been assigned to him when the lead developer suddenly left the company. Jacob’s choice was no accident, as Cutter had been out of work for six months after Gamestar was acquired by Activision, which was followed by the first round of staff cuts.



Cutter and Jacob had met a few months earlier, when the programmer had shown him a game prototype in the hope of attracting interest and getting back to making games on his own. Jacob had expressed great interest and made many promises, but then he disappeared and never got back in touch—until the day he found himself in trouble. Naturally, Cutter was skeptical—and even more so was his wife, who said Jacob had a reputation for being “a lot of talk but not a lot of action”—but he decided to visit the offices of Master Designer Software anyway to have a chat and see what the offer actually was.

Cutter: “They actually had an office which was nice and Bob led us into a little room, a little dark room, and took out a floppy disk and put it in an Amiga. I had not seen an Amiga up to that point. I put the floppy disk in and, after a few seconds, he turned the lights out and the defender of the crown title screen came up, you know with the light sweeping across those metallic letters. I had never seen anything like that before and I am not kidding. Within half a second my wife window over to me and whispered: ‘take that job.’”

With Cutter on board, Jacob was no longer alone. His first assignment for the new hire was to finalize the contract with Sculptured Software for Defender of the Crown and keep them under close supervision for the second of the four commissioned games, which would become S.D.I., another mix of action and adventure inspired by spy films. With that done, Cutter had to find a way to reuse the work already completed and Beeck’s design document to turn it into a game. Obviously, he couldn’t do everything by himself, so Jacob had to look for capable reinforcements who could start immediately.

He decided to approach Mical, who in the meantime had left Commodore and begun working on contract, and to make sure he didn’t miss the opportunity, Jacob put a very strong offer on the table. Mical accepted, and Jacob now had a specialist who knew the Amiga like few others, having contributed significantly to both the hardware design and the GUI programming. Given the extreme urgency—there were now just over three months left until the mid-October deadline—and the complexity of the task, Mical’s skills and experience were a crucial asset that could mean the difference between success and failure.

Cuomo’s music also had to be implemented in software, and doing so required knowledge of the Amiga’s peculiar hardware and how to program it. Jacob assigned the job to Bill Williams, who ended up being credited alongside Cuomo for the music as “orchestration.” Williams would later become the designer of the last of the four titles Jacob had promised Mindscape, Sinbad and the Throne of the Falcon, inspired by the series of films centered on the legendary Persian sailor and featuring an Arabian Nights setting.

Beeck’s original plan was very ambitious: there was a strategic layer more complex than Risk, with computer-controlled players (Norman factions that, if possible, avoided fighting each other and prioritized attacking the Saxons), resource gathering and spending to buy armies, build castles, and acquire siege engines. In parallel, Beeck had designed a series of arcade-style sequences rooted in the relevant cinematic genre: battles, sieges, raids with duels, and the inevitable jousting tournament.

It didn’t take long to realize that the remaining time was far too short for the material at hand and that, to meet the deadline, ambitions had to be scaled back and simplified. Despite the cuts, the closer October drew, the clearer it became that the product needed to be trimmed further to have any hope of hitting the schedule. Mical had to work at a pace he hadn’t anticipated when he took the contract—one of his first after leaving Commodore.

Mical: “That game [Defender of the Crown] has a chequered past with me, which is why I don’t mention it on my resumé. It didn’t have the best business outcome. There were some dicey players and I was a new contractor just cutting my teeth. I learned the hard way. I haven’t talked to any of those Cinemaware guys since.”



The stress, the fatigue, and the continual cuts left the programmer with a bad memory of the project—but he wasn’t the only one. Sachs’s work was also reduced considerably. To produce the volume of artwork initially called for in Beeck’s design document, the artist had worked at a furious pace and had even had to hire outside contractors at his own expense. Too late, the developers realized that there was neither enough floppy disk space for all that art nor time to implement the gameplay mechanics that would have used it. For the jousting tournament artwork alone, Sachs reported losing weeks to create graphics that ultimately went unused, and at the end of the project he found he had earned little for the total amount of work he had done.

To have the game ready by mid-October, several major cuts were necessary: the large-scale battles—originally meant to have greater strategic depth—were reduced to a static screen where the player could merely choose between two vague attack strategies; the catapult sequence and the tournaments were simplified, and the variety of sword-fighting scenarios was reduced. With these last-minute changes, the Amiga version of the game was finally completed and sent to print just in time for the Christmas season, followed later by ports for the Commodore 64, Atari ST, and many other contemporary computers and consoles.

Unsurprisingly, it was the Amiga version that made the biggest splash and earned extensive coverage in the specialized press. Many reviewers noted the lack of depth in the gameplay—built around carefully selected scenes conceived by Beeck and brought to life through Sachs’s technical mastery—but they couldn’t ignore how uniquely crafted the game was. From a purely technical perspective, Defender of the Crown was a jewel: unprecedented visuals paired with a soundtrack that perfectly complemented the cinematic quality of its imagery. Despite its simplicity—both in the resource management and battle phases and in the direct control of the player’s swordsman or knight—the Amiga version achieved remarkable success, selling around 20,000 copies within a few weeks, despite a modest installed base of only about 150,000 Amiga computers sold by the end of 1986.

The real success, however, came later, with the release of the ports for other platforms. Although technically inferior in graphics, sound, and loading times—and hampered by the fact that the interface had been designed around the Amiga’s mouse, which most other systems lacked—these later versions were released with minor improvements and the addition of gameplay elements that hadn’t made it into the original due to time constraints. The Atari ST version, for instance, was not only the closest to the Amiga version in terms of audiovisual quality but also the most complete, featuring animated battle scenes showing soldiers fighting. The Commodore 64 version, despite its long and frequent loading times, turned out to be the best-selling one, thanks to its pleasant graphics and overall completeness, comparable to the Atari ST edition.

Despite its numerous flaws and imperfections, Defender of the Crown was an extraordinary success. It launched Jacob’s company, established the name Cinemaware—originally intended as just one of several brands under Master Designer Software but soon so famous that Robert and Phyllis Jacob renamed their company after it—and propelled the careers of John Cutter, Kellyn Beeck, and many other contracted collaborators.

The most notable effect of Defender of the Crown was that it brought Amiga back into the spotlight, reviving interest in Miner’s machine at a difficult time when Commodore had paused marketing in anticipation of its new models: the Amiga 500 (a stripped-down version aimed at families and young users) and the Amiga 2000 (a high-end model for professionals and demanding hobbyists). After Defender of the Crown, the Amiga became synonymous with spectacular graphics and refined music—games so visually stunning they seemed to bridge the gap between gaming and cinema.



Most importantly, the Amiga—previously seen as a machine without a clear identity, straddling the line between an expensive home computer and a professional tool valued by musicians and small TV studios for its digital graphics capabilities—became universally recognized as a powerhouse for gaming. And this transformation came at exactly the right moment.

Defender of the Crown became the killer application Commodore needed to get back in the game. The success of Jacob and Beeck’s title paved the way for the release of the affordable Amiga 500—a compact, powerful, and relatively inexpensive computer that would go on to become the best-selling model in the entire Amiga line and Commodore’s flagship product throughout the late 1980s and into the early 1990s.