I think one of the reasons it aged well because it's a 2D game and the controls are very tight and responsive. Some low-poly 3D games aged very poorly, like Alone in the Dark.
I had another world on the Atari St and it was so mesmerising, at first it looks like a highly polished animated story then you realise you can actually play it. Easily one of my favourite ST games and so groundbreaking
Yep same. Commented to this to give the Atari st some love. Yes I know the Amiga was the popular choice.... But the Atari ST could stand on its ground. I still remember the music apps like cubase on it.
Same!! This was the only game I ever remember my parents being interested in when I was a kid, and we all work together to figure out how to finish it. One of my most cherished gaming memories for sure.
tbh I thought it was originally an ST game, so given the lack of blitter and less cpu time available due to the samples it would be interesting to see how easily it was converted to the ST.. Plus I've just about reached amiga saturation after all these years.
Great developer could do magic on the ST. Unfortunately to many didn't care. Funny that a lot of the best developers on the ST was from France. Both machines are fantastic in their own fields.
I remember a long time ago an interview of Eric Chahi and the fact he developed the game alone, for 2 years. My parents were astonished at the time that a game could take so long to develop, and started to take the media seriously.
@@casedistorted LOL. I've been there brother! I'm too old to find women my age who respect video games. I was born in 1972 and in elementary school through high school I was considered a geek, a nerd and it wasn't cool. Even in college (I studied Computer Science but dropped out) all the girls I dated were NOT into games they didn't like Street Fighter II etc etc. The world is a different place now guys AND girls play video games and the geek world is considered cool. I was born a few decades too early LOLOLOL. Not really but you get what I mean. I feel your pain brother! Good luck!
The thing I admire the most of Another World is how Chahi didn't only show he was a great programmer, but also a great artist. He had an incredible eye for composition here.
It was hugely significant, but the actual gameplay did not live up to the cutscenes. Kicking ineffectually at those damned ground slugs was not that fun. And the actual level design didn't really take advantage of the polygon renderer to work that differently from any sprite + tile platformer.
@@guaposneeze The intro and the graphics were truly out of this world, but the gameplay was meh. Back then, I preferred to play Worms and Cannon Fodder :-)
I am so impressed of what they were able to create in the 80s and 90s. Game creators of today only have economic, creative and talent limitations. Programmers of yesteryear had the same limitations and they were forced to use those and push them into technology as advanced as our current clock radios.
That's one of the reasons that I really enjoy console hardware because it's cool to see developers try to squeeze and optimize for a game to look good on a system that is using hardware that was outdated when it was released. I am specifically thinking of God of War and Spider Man on the PS4 although there are many others.
Rest assure that developers on big 3D engines are also optimizing a lot. This is even more impressive then what they did back in the day. That said there are also hundreds of developers working on these engines instead of small development teams back in the day
@@FuZZbaLLbee We are in the middle ware age, the engines are optimised but not all the devs know how to use them in the best way. The unity games that Digital Foundry have spotted with in correct frame pacing thanks to a default option, one change to fix the frame pacing. I hope unity has changed that one default option.
I always see these types of comments and every time I do, I cringe, because this isn't even true. Optimization is still extremely important and developers still need to be very careful with hardware limitations, probably almost even more so now with how complex games are getting. One only need to look at Cyberpunk 2077 for what happens when you let the scope of your limitations for what hardware you're developing for get out of hand without proper optimization. This isn't some lost art. You can cherry pick examples of games running terribly in the past and games with technical wizardry just like you can do today. Think the Witcher 3 or even Doom ports to Nintendo Switch vs the dumpster fire of Balan Wonderland. You can find cool optimizations and technical wizardry in any era and I think it's a disservice to both modern and classic games to come out and just say, "They don't make em like they used to.", when that's not even true.
This game was so cool and ambitious, the 2D polygon style is strikingly unique and its cinematic style without any dialogue or hud elements still sets it apart from many other games today.
Thumbs up before I've even watched it. The intro to Another World was a thing to behold back in the day. I couldn't believe they got all of that animation and the game on one disk. EDIT: My brain cells are failing me, it was indeed across two disks on the Amiga.
Although I swear the intro scene was on one floppy and to play the game you had to switch to the next floppy.... At least that how it was on the Atari ST.....
'Another World' never ceases to amaze me even to this day. This and 'Flashback'. The rotoscoped animations and beautifully storyboarded cinematic cutscenes were very fluid and mindblowing considering the hardware that it was made on. And all of it was fully rendered in-engine and in real-time too! None of those pre-rendered FMV rubbish. There was just no other game like it at the time. It was quite literally, 'Out Of This World'.
I struggled with it. We had a higher tolerance for dificulty levels back then but most games had enough in the interface and documentation to guide you through. Not with this game. For me it fell between two stools. Not really an adventure game but not an action game either. I replayed it after I completed Flashback and I was a bit more appreciative second time round. Thanks to MVG for this detailed breakdown. I had no idea of it's underlying brilliance.
Flashback bores me to tears these days but it was my favorite game for a long time back in the day. I actually beat the game at some point and I almost never finish anything
What a great way to start 2022. MVG talking about my favourite game. I can see how this game didn't age that well, particularly the controls. But it completely changed my perception of what a game could be.
@@xeostube I'm fine with how it plays because I grew up with it and still play it regularly. But no doubt the newer version could do with a control redesign.
5:00 man, I remember seeing 3D graphics like that at the time and how much it blew my mind. You were looking at the start of an absolute *game changer* and you knew it. Only time I've had that feeling since was trying modern VR for the first time.
Pretty nice story. I was impressed by this game when I played it in the 90'. In France, I remember talking with my friends in high school about the AGNUS / FAT AGNUS chipset that made that game possible... without knowing anything about it, except its funny name. Souvenirs, souvenirs !!!
I have to say, when I was little and played this game, it was one of the few games that impressed me on the Amiga 500, and even to today I still do. Sometimes I miss those times and would love to go back, these days you no longer see big changes in games, and at times it feels like except for limitation on polygons, developers no longer have to really optimize to the maximum like how it was done in the past.
Amazing what he did with so little. I'm more impressed by how his original could be even more compressed to lesser machines. I spent many hours over many rentals trying to beat this when it came out on the Super Nintendo.
I'm a long-time developer working on large scale integrated applications, but the engineer in me is still in awe of the early generation game programmers. I would say 99.5% of the working devs out there now would be unable to solve some of the problems these guys (and girls?) came up against.
This game blew my 12 year old mind on the SNES. One of the few games I rented over and over. The graphics were amazing, and something I had never seen. But the atmosphere is something I'll never forget.
Had a copy of the French version on my Amiga. But only had that later on. First played it on the Megadrive, had been seeing it in magazines for the year before. I remember me and a friend heading out and picking this up day one! It blew us away. It still does in a way :)
The Amiga version was the best version. According to the wiki, it had the best sound and most crisp graphics, while both it and the Atari ST had an extra sound effect of the protagonist yelling if they used the rope swing without the beast chasing them.
I actually had that Amiga version of Dragon's Lair and also Space Ace. I never actually made it past the first screen, but I was blown away by their graphics, I also loved to simply look at their boxes and manuals. I didn't play much Amiga back then as I relied too much on my dad to start up games that used too many disks, but I freaking loved that thing, it's a shame my dad had to sell it because we were strapped on money, but he still kept most of the games and floppies, so at least they're nice for display purposes.
This was the glory days of the Amiga, and this game was one of the best ones ever made on the system for sure. When it comes to the fluent animations and gameplay, i think this game belongs in a trio of sorts. First one was Prince of Persia, then Another World and lastly Flashback. Those three games stood out when it came to this kind of aesthetics. And they are all great games that i played for countless hours.
Awesome video as always MVG! One of the top Amiga Games of all time and one of the top games games of all-time. I am loving our cameo with the genlocks. That was a great shoot and the genlock is what I used my Amiga for most back in the day. -- AmigaBill
I remember playing this on the PCs we had when I was in sixth form, but I first saw it running on the Amiga and it really was a glimpse of the future. That it still holds up today says a lot.
My Husband and I still say "Matoomba" and pat each other's shoulder just like the first guy who helps Lester after he swings the cage and drops. We think that world means "Friend". I never did beat this game, but have a lot of great memories trying.
Great stuff, Amiga programming was challenging and fun ! So many graphics and audio tricks with the dedicated hardware. The Amiga ran some pretty high end non-game software too - I worked on a computational algebra system used by uni researchers and folks like the NSA - the Amiga was the lowest spec system it worked on, the highest end was a Cray YMP !
This game on the Amiga 500 was mind blowing BITD! It had so many disk swaps though. You literally only played 50% of the time. The rest of the time was loading and disk swaps. I started playing a little bit of the SEGA CD version and it sure feels close to what I remember on the A500.
Was the third game I bought for the Nintendo Switch. And FINALY played through it. Loved it in the 90s, do love it nowadays! Awesome episode, Mr MVG :)
I remember playing this game's USA release (titled "Out of This World") as a 90s kid on our PC. It had a really cool feel unlike other games, like it was achieving something technically amazing even compared to Doom/Duke3D.
That's because many of them are American, and they seem to think that the entire world cut their teeth in the 80s on the NES, SNES and Mega Drive, the poor, misguided fools.
Me alegra que le hayas dedicado un video a esta verdadera obra maestra, aún al día de hoy sigo escuchando de vez en cuando la música de los créditos finales.
This game is a true masterpiece. I remember the first time I played when I was a kid. That game blew my mind. For the first time a game got my emotions just like a movie, it was special and wonderful.
Of all the "classic versions", the PC version of Another World is the best one because it was actually complete. It features one more level that couldn't be made in time for the Amiga and ST releases. People have back ported it to the Amiga though, but only recently.
PC ports were a bit of a gold mine in this regard. If you remade Another World in the 21st century, it wouldn't be half as relevant and would absolutely lose the particulars that made it appealing. But reiterate it a handful of years after release, and what you have in short is the opportunity to idealize it without losing anything. So there's actually a pretty good number of games that started life on Amiga but saw their finest representation on PC. This is certainly not a knock on the Amiga, as PC was absolutely not equipped to match Amiga perfectly contemporaneously. But for someone like myself, who likes reliving old classics and doesn't mind seeing them spruced up, like I said, it's a gold mine.
It wasn't due to "couldn't be made in time", he created the extra level due to reviewers being negative that the game was to short and it was created before the DOS port was released so they could add it to that port.
Bollocks. An adept player could get through the game in 20mins, so the publisher wanted an extra level to extend its game time. It took Eric two years to write but you really think he didn't have enough time to complete the Amiga version? Laughable
Thanks for this. One of my personal favorite games. A prime example of immersive atmosphere and telling a game's story with no understandable dialogue, no interface clutter, and a very striking art style.
I bought this game when I was 9 and it scared the heck out of me. The first few screens.. the tentacles in the pool got me, and somehow I soldiered on until a slug killed me. And then the beast... I ran to my mum telling her we had to return the game hahaha. Yes I suppose I had a sheltered upbringing early on, I purchased it a few years later and finished it - awesome game.
Man, looking at that intro even now looks amazing and well beyond its time. In fact, with the retro styles that are popular in modern games, this game seems to have aged incredibly well. Highly underrated.
Never played it. Loved my Amiga! Many years later it’s amazing to get these “behind the scenes” technical looks at what hard to be done to make these games work. Love the channel MVG!
Really cool, I remember seeing it when I was a kid, never knew what it was called, the premise is probably what made Half-Life to become what it is also. Thanks for the video as always
I played atari St version mainly but i did try the Snes version and noticed there's an extra part to that game, where you run jump across a pit and hang onto some (not sure what its called) cloth thing :D
The Jaguar version of this game is crazy impressive, both as a port of the game and a representation of what was possible on the hardware (it had the resourced to have it run the higher quality anniversary edition assets).
Yeah you can find a livestream Rebecca Heinemann did where she talked about the process of porting Another World to the SNES. She was basically blocked from using any sort of special chips or FastROM to cut on costs. Highly recommend watching it if you're a fan of Another World
Im glad this game still is talked about 30 years later. Its atmosphere is just perfectly captured in that cool cinematic opening. And I agree that the Amiga version was the complete package. The music and sfx in have an unique flavor on that machine.
This is still incredible and was sensational when it released. I played it and finished it when it came out, but it was really hard with the clunky controls and no hints as to what to do. But I loved it and still do. Played it on PS4 when it got available there and smiled through the whole experience 😀 Thank you for giving more insight to this game MVG!
Developers now: you need a quad-core CPU, an RTX 3060 at least, 8GB of RAm and 100GB of SSD(you can do on HDD if you want loading screens to last 30 min) to play our game made using Unity.
You make a very solid point, but there would be... well... fewer games on the market if every developer had to create their own ridiculously sophisticated game engine from scratch in assembly language
@@rorychivers8769 I made the comment mostly as a joke, but my point is, nowadays the developers that do the "impossible" possible on modern hardware are getting rarer by the day, it is rare to see some coding that "wow" people, like for example quake's fast inverse sqrt. Not only on game dev, my main criticism nowadays is how bloated web became because of soydevs.
@@rdxdt Sorry, I wasn't trying to be patronizing, I do actually miss the time when games developers really did know how the machines worked on a deep and profound level. It's just sort of different now, those guys don't actually make games any more, they just make the engines that other people make the games out of. So you don't get a particular game that blows your mind with its technology, you things like the unreal 5 tech demo, or you get research paper demos or things like that. Then you wait for years for it to actually filter into a game and you're already sort of jaded. Games have lost the power to mesmerize you with their awesomeness, even though they are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than they used to be. Weird irony, heh
Off-the shelf hardware is just so cheap nowadays. I work in the professional IT industry and when I started out I was designing ASICs. Back then (late 90s) you needed a dedicated chip to do something that a modern CPU will barely break sweat over. It does make a huge difference to what can be produced because things are done in high-level languages using APIs which reduce the need for debugging or developing optimised routines. The cost of course is the resulting code is far from optimised and the system requirements are high, but do-able.
I LOVED this game growing up. Was an essential part of any Amiga owners game collection. I was blown away by how good it looks and I think it still looks good even now.
If you're thinking about trying this out, be aware that it is VERY trial-and-error based. It will kill you mercilessly, until you work out the exact right sequence of actions to take. (You can see the Dragon's Lair influence there.) That's why I'd recommend a modern version of the game: newer editions include more checkpoints. This makes it substantially easier, by reducing time spent re-doing the same screens over and over.
Nothing is wrong with that. Back in the days the games were like this, one mistake and you had to go back and repeat until you succeeded. Often you could enter codes to get you back to the start of the level. In flashback there were special savepoint boots you could use, but forget about saving state at your will like it is today. To feel the spirit of a game I always recommend to check original and let it practice perseverance in you rather then fast finish
5:26 "Chahi would make clever use of the co-proccessor found on the Amiga, known as the blitter." No, the co-processor was known as Agnus. The blitter was just one of its components, and not even the main one.
Truly fascinating! I actually rented and played it on both the SNES and Genesis, but I was never able to finish it. All I do know is that it was like nothing I ever played before it. Happy 30th anniversary, Another World!
You right,it was really art,and the fact that it doesn't fix in any category of games and doesn't give any explanation or dialogue,makes you feel you've entered in a movie. Really exiting,one of the last and biggest emotion before the damned kill gates pc
Great history class you gave us. I've always looked at Another World on many places and never actually care, but this video got me interested into trying it
Hadn't heard of this game before, it's insane how far ahead of it's time it was. Show it to someone like me and they'd mistake it for a stylized indie game made in recent years, the fact it had animations and details this smooth all the way back when many console games at that time were trying their hardest to be comparable to the then brand new Sonic1 or MarioWorld, and Doom hadn't even been created yet. This game definitely deserves to be in the hall of greats in terms of technical legends, I'm suprised I haven't heard of it before.
I remember the first I played another world. I had an Amiga 500 at the time and I was completely absorbed by the game. My mind would capture the graphics and atmosphere and I would leave the game to do other things completely day dreaming about what I had experienced in the game. Great memories. Thank you for bringing us excellent content as always.
Another world keeps amazing me till this day... It is out of this world! Seen several documentaries and hearing Eric Chahi explain how he did this is just phenomenal.
Another World absolutely blew me away when I first got it on my Amiga 500. I just remember that, in a world full of sprite based games, it was completely different, and properly jaw dropping at the time.
This was the first computer game I played that got me stoked about computer games. Played point and click, Wolfenstein, apogee, and puzzle games. This game was a gem. Eric Chahi was beyond brilliant and every bit of this game was a masterpiece. The cinemas, the meager hardware requirements, the puzzles. Everything legendary. Heart of the alien and flashback was nice, but this was a magnum opus.
I remember playing "Another World" for the first time on my friend's Amiga, thinking that it looks like something transported back through time from a not so near future! Especially since in '91 I owned a 286 PC with a Hercules graphic card and a monochrome, yellow and black monitor, on which I played games like "Barbarian", "Test Drive" and "North and South".
I remember the demo for this game was on our 286. It could only manage a few frames a second. The demo was the intro and the first chapter, right up until you run into the hunter while escaping the beast. I played it over and over. The atmosphere was like nothing I'd had played before.
I played this as a kid and I could never finish it from how difficult it was for my brain back then. Only finished it once the 15th anniversary edition came out. Love love love this game endlessly.
I played this game quite a lot on my Amiga back and the day, and man was it epic. Just the intro cutscene was enough to blow most people's minds back then. No one, but those with an Amiga, had anything remotely close to those kinds of graphics and sound on a home computer or even console in the early 90s. Took a while to figure out and finally win it, and you never do get your character to make it back to our time / planet, but it was still a blast.
I played this back in the SNES and was completely blown away. A buddy and i we're obsessed with it. Great times playing this game. Later discovered Flashback on Sega Genesis
One of the best games, from any era. And holy hell it was a technical masterpiece and you knew it as soon as you saw the opening. The art still evokes what it did then.
I remember when my friend told me about this game and it's opening sequence. I was listening in silent and amazed and I asked, and this all happens inside the game?! This was really amazing experience in my childhood.
I played the DOS release of this game, and my reaction was similar -- that was my first time recognizing video games as a medium for "art" even though I could appreciate the "artwork" as a component of other games. I was blown away and I still regard this as one of the best-designed games I've ever played.
This game is as groundbreaking today as it was then. This was a watershed moment in video game history. And the amazing part is it has that timeless feel to it, you could pick up and enjoy this game today I'm so glad I lived through moments like this.
This was a great intro - thank you for sharing this. As a teenage programmer back in the Amiga days I was blown away by how the game seemed to draw so much, given my own limited attempts at animating polygons. I had nearly forgotten about it, 30 years later... but to finally have some insight as to how he was using backbuffers now makes total sense and removes another question buried in my mind's stack of "how the hell was this optimized enough to work" miscellany.
Hands down, a true classic, was one of the lucky kid around the block back in the day to have an Amiga 1000, this was were I experienced this master piece of a game. There was no internet or guides back in the day, but as a very young lad, I completed this game.
Great to be back in 2022. Please Enjoy!
Certified amiga moment
Happy New Year MVG! Thanks so much for all the amazing videos last year! 😁
you can get a nice new pc version on g.o.g.com Another World 20th anniversary ;-)
Happy New Year! Thank you for the content!
Proof MVG has come from the future
That low poly aesthetic aged really well
I think one of the reasons it aged well because it's a 2D game and the controls are very tight and responsive. Some low-poly 3D games aged very poorly, like Alone in the Dark.
I was blown away by the demo for this game back in the day.
@@Daniel15au Like just abut everything in the N64 (to me the worst offender), Jaguar and a lot on the Game Cube.
Due in part to the amazing rotoscoping
No kidding...
Back in the day this looked like a game from the future, i can't describe how beautiful and different from anything else it was.
I had another world on the Atari St and it was so mesmerising, at first it looks like a highly polished animated story then you realise you can actually play it. Easily one of my favourite ST games and so groundbreaking
Yep same. Commented to this to give the Atari st some love. Yes I know the Amiga was the popular choice.... But the Atari ST could stand on its ground.
I still remember the music apps like cubase on it.
Same!! This was the only game I ever remember my parents being interested in when I was a kid, and we all work together to figure out how to finish it. One of my most cherished gaming memories for sure.
tbh I thought it was originally an ST game, so given the lack of blitter and less cpu time available due to the samples it would be interesting to see how easily it was converted to the ST.. Plus I've just about reached amiga saturation after all these years.
Great developer could do magic on the ST. Unfortunately to many didn't care. Funny that a lot of the best developers on the ST was from France. Both machines are fantastic in their own fields.
@@jajabinx35 yep, and the Atari ST did it without a blitter chip too
I remember a long time ago an interview of Eric Chahi and the fact he developed the game alone, for 2 years. My parents were astonished at the time that a game could take so long to develop, and started to take the media seriously.
Too bad my wife still doesn't take it seriously lol
@@casedistorted LOL. I've been there brother! I'm too old to find women my age who respect video games. I was born in 1972 and in elementary school through high school I was considered a geek, a nerd and it wasn't cool. Even in college (I studied Computer Science but dropped out) all the girls I dated were NOT into games they didn't like Street Fighter II etc etc. The world is a different place now guys AND girls play video games and the geek world is considered cool. I was born a few decades too early LOLOLOL. Not really but you get what I mean. I feel your pain brother! Good luck!
The thing I admire the most of Another World is how Chahi didn't only show he was a great programmer, but also a great artist. He had an incredible eye for composition here.
Nice video 👍 I also recommend the video > *Echa Ekranu* 👍
Another World is an absolute masterpiece!
It truly is.
It was hugely significant, but the actual gameplay did not live up to the cutscenes. Kicking ineffectually at those damned ground slugs was not that fun. And the actual level design didn't really take advantage of the polygon renderer to work that differently from any sprite + tile platformer.
It blew my mind, still does.
@@guaposneeze The intro and the graphics were truly out of this world, but the gameplay was meh. Back then, I preferred to play Worms and Cannon Fodder :-)
Was also way more scary than anything now days other than Amnesia. Another world had serious atmosphere!
I am so impressed of what they were able to create in the 80s and 90s. Game creators of today only have economic, creative and talent limitations. Programmers of yesteryear had the same limitations and they were forced to use those and push them into technology as advanced as our current clock radios.
That's one of the reasons that I really enjoy console hardware because it's cool to see developers try to squeeze and optimize for a game to look good on a system that is using hardware that was outdated when it was released. I am specifically thinking of God of War and Spider Man on the PS4 although there are many others.
Rest assure that developers on big 3D engines are also optimizing a lot. This is even more impressive then what they did back in the day. That said there are also hundreds of developers working on these engines instead of small development teams back in the day
@@kingjoe3rd I'd put the switch and games like Metroid Dread high up on the list of optimized modern games on limited hardware, akin to the old days!
@@FuZZbaLLbee We are in the middle ware age, the engines are optimised but not all the devs know how to use them in the best way.
The unity games that Digital Foundry have spotted with in correct frame pacing thanks to a default option, one change to fix the frame pacing. I hope unity has changed that one default option.
I always see these types of comments and every time I do, I cringe, because this isn't even true. Optimization is still extremely important and developers still need to be very careful with hardware limitations, probably almost even more so now with how complex games are getting. One only need to look at Cyberpunk 2077 for what happens when you let the scope of your limitations for what hardware you're developing for get out of hand without proper optimization. This isn't some lost art. You can cherry pick examples of games running terribly in the past and games with technical wizardry just like you can do today. Think the Witcher 3 or even Doom ports to Nintendo Switch vs the dumpster fire of Balan Wonderland. You can find cool optimizations and technical wizardry in any era and I think it's a disservice to both modern and classic games to come out and just say, "They don't make em like they used to.", when that's not even true.
It was amazing seeing these cinematics on the SNES back in the day. It seemed impossible but there it was.
I learned about the game a few years ago. I bought it for SNES and my mind was blown at what I was seeing on my super nintendo
@@Palendrome Yeah.. All I can remember back in the day on the SNES Version was no Butt Crack in the swimming pool scene. Tut, Tut Big N... LOL...
This game was so cool and ambitious, the 2D polygon style is strikingly unique and its cinematic style without any dialogue or hud elements still sets it apart from many other games today.
Thumbs up before I've even watched it.
The intro to Another World was a thing to behold back in the day. I couldn't believe they got all of that animation and the game on one disk.
EDIT: My brain cells are failing me, it was indeed across two disks on the Amiga.
Why do you thumb up before you watch the video? In what way does that help Dimitris make good videos?
Although I swear the intro scene was on one floppy and to play the game you had to switch to the next floppy.... At least that how it was on the Atari ST.....
@@jajabinx35 At the time that intro was worth the loading time.:)
MVG always means quality. It is one of those few channels that I can say that about.
"Thumbs up before I've even watched it." simp
/s
'Another World' never ceases to amaze me even to this day. This and 'Flashback'. The rotoscoped animations and beautifully storyboarded cinematic cutscenes were very fluid and mindblowing considering the hardware that it was made on. And all of it was fully rendered in-engine and in real-time too! None of those pre-rendered FMV rubbish. There was just no other game like it at the time. It was quite literally, 'Out Of This World'.
I struggled with it. We had a higher tolerance for dificulty levels back then but most games had enough in the interface and documentation to guide you through. Not with this game. For me it fell between two stools. Not really an adventure game but not an action game either. I replayed it after I completed Flashback and I was a bit more appreciative second time round. Thanks to MVG for this detailed breakdown. I had no idea of it's underlying brilliance.
Flashback bores me to tears these days but it was my favorite game for a long time back in the day. I actually beat the game at some point and I almost never finish anything
I just wanna say that the framebuffer trick is really smart, I'll use this in my games. Thank you for bringing it up.
One of my favorite DOS games (Didn't own an Amiga back in the day). Still playing it today! Nice video! Thank you
Have you finished it? Hehe
@@nizm0man at that time took me a week I think 😂😂😂😂
Still so stylish today. Only completed this last year as I was terrible at it on the Amiga when it came out.
What a great way to start 2022. MVG talking about my favourite game.
I can see how this game didn't age that well, particularly the controls. But it completely changed my perception of what a game could be.
agree totally. Looks so good, so stylish.. Could be a modern game with a minimal aesthetic. But damn it plays so poorly.
@@xeostube I'm fine with how it plays because I grew up with it and still play it regularly. But no doubt the newer version could do with a control redesign.
5:00 man, I remember seeing 3D graphics like that at the time and how much it blew my mind. You were looking at the start of an absolute *game changer* and you knew it. Only time I've had that feeling since was trying modern VR for the first time.
This is my favourite game of all time! It was surreal playing this in the early 90s
Pretty nice story. I was impressed by this game when I played it in the 90'. In France, I remember talking with my friends in high school about the AGNUS / FAT AGNUS chipset that made that game possible... without knowing anything about it, except its funny name. Souvenirs, souvenirs !!!
The game worked mostly the same on PC and ST though
I have to say, when I was little and played this game, it was one of the few games that impressed me on the Amiga 500, and even to today I still do. Sometimes I miss those times and would love to go back, these days you no longer see big changes in games, and at times it feels like except for limitation on polygons, developers no longer have to really optimize to the maximum like how it was done in the past.
@Neb6 Only a handful I recognize so yes you can say so indeed :p should try these.
Stunning art style that would still absolutely stand out today, fascinating what emerges from limitations!
Amazing what he did with so little. I'm more impressed by how his original could be even more compressed to lesser machines. I spent many hours over many rentals trying to beat this when it came out on the Super Nintendo.
I'm a long-time developer working on large scale integrated applications, but the engineer in me is still in awe of the early generation game programmers. I would say 99.5% of the working devs out there now would be unable to solve some of the problems these guys (and girls?) came up against.
This game blew my 12 year old mind on the SNES. One of the few games I rented over and over. The graphics were amazing, and something I had never seen. But the atmosphere is something I'll never forget.
That port was done by Rebecca Heineman, and she was not allowed to use ANY special mappers or enhancement chips because Interplay was so cheap!
Had a copy of the French version on my Amiga. But only had that later on. First played it on the Megadrive, had been seeing it in magazines for the year before. I remember me and a friend heading out and picking this up day one!
It blew us away.
It still does in a way :)
The Amiga version was the best version. According to the wiki, it had the best sound and most crisp graphics, while both it and the Atari ST had an extra sound effect of the protagonist yelling if they used the rope swing without the beast chasing them.
@@primalconvoy Interesting, never knew that! I've been missing out all these years!
Absolute classic, although I knew it as "Out of This World". It's hard to find a game that was so atmospheric, absolute masterclass in game design.
I actually had that Amiga version of Dragon's Lair and also Space Ace. I never actually made it past the first screen, but I was blown away by their graphics, I also loved to simply look at their boxes and manuals. I didn't play much Amiga back then as I relied too much on my dad to start up games that used too many disks, but I freaking loved that thing, it's a shame my dad had to sell it because we were strapped on money, but he still kept most of the games and floppies, so at least they're nice for display purposes.
It's amazing how people can program this kind of stuff back in the day.
This was the glory days of the Amiga, and this game was one of the best ones ever made on the system for sure. When it comes to the fluent animations and gameplay, i think this game belongs in a trio of sorts. First one was Prince of Persia, then Another World and lastly Flashback. Those three games stood out when it came to this kind of aesthetics. And they are all great games that i played for countless hours.
Awesome video as always MVG! One of the top Amiga Games of all time and one of the top games games of all-time. I am loving our cameo with the genlocks. That was a great shoot and the genlock is what I used my Amiga for most back in the day. -- AmigaBill
I remember playing this on the PCs we had when I was in sixth form, but I first saw it running on the Amiga and it really was a glimpse of the future. That it still holds up today says a lot.
Dude Another World looks like one of those retro likes you see every indy studio making today and it just looks so modern .
My Husband and I still say "Matoomba" and pat each other's shoulder just like the first guy who helps Lester after he swings the cage and drops. We think that world means "Friend". I never did beat this game, but have a lot of great memories trying.
I thought it was more "My-tso-rooba" which roughly translates to "Why stand around talking when we should be trying to escape!"
Hahah i thought it was Mar-krooobah
Paul Frank Monkey Your Profile Pic 😂😂🤣🤣
@@GameBoyyearsago HAHAHA
@@mrballs8091 😂😂😂😂
Great stuff, Amiga programming was challenging and fun ! So many graphics and audio tricks with the dedicated hardware. The Amiga ran some pretty high end non-game software too - I worked on a computational algebra system used by uni researchers and folks like the NSA - the Amiga was the lowest spec system it worked on, the highest end was a Cray YMP !
I remember being totally blown away when this game out - thanks for taking me back to my 22yo self!
You must be in your 50s 👍🏽
This game on the Amiga 500 was mind blowing BITD! It had so many disk swaps though. You literally only played 50% of the time. The rest of the time was loading and disk swaps. I started playing a little bit of the SEGA CD version and it sure feels close to what I remember on the A500.
Was the third game I bought for the Nintendo Switch. And FINALY played through it. Loved it in the 90s, do love it nowadays!
Awesome episode, Mr MVG :)
I remember playing this game's USA release (titled "Out of This World") as a 90s kid on our PC. It had a really cool feel unlike other games, like it was achieving something technically amazing even compared to Doom/Duke3D.
they changed the name in the US because of the daytime soap opera
Actually it was a sitcom. A really lame one also that nobody watched. UPN channel actually.
@@AngryCalvin Google it. The game had two names.
Not many mainstream outlets cover the Amiga.
Thanks for digging into important games history.
That's because many of them are American, and they seem to think that the entire world cut their teeth in the 80s on the NES, SNES and Mega Drive, the poor, misguided fools.
I love that a random dude on UA-cam (this is not a slight in any way, i love MVG) is mainstream outlet ❤ x
Me alegra que le hayas dedicado un video a esta verdadera obra maestra, aún al día de hoy sigo escuchando de vez en cuando la música de los créditos finales.
This game is a true masterpiece. I remember the first time I played when I was a kid. That game blew my mind. For the first time a game got my emotions just like a movie, it was special and wonderful.
Of all the "classic versions", the PC version of Another World is the best one because it was actually complete. It features one more level that couldn't be made in time for the Amiga and ST releases.
People have back ported it to the Amiga though, but only recently.
PC ports were a bit of a gold mine in this regard. If you remade Another World in the 21st century, it wouldn't be half as relevant and would absolutely lose the particulars that made it appealing. But reiterate it a handful of years after release, and what you have in short is the opportunity to idealize it without losing anything. So there's actually a pretty good number of games that started life on Amiga but saw their finest representation on PC. This is certainly not a knock on the Amiga, as PC was absolutely not equipped to match Amiga perfectly contemporaneously. But for someone like myself, who likes reliving old classics and doesn't mind seeing them spruced up, like I said, it's a gold mine.
It wasn't due to "couldn't be made in time", he created the extra level due to reviewers being negative that the game was to short and it was created before the DOS port was released so they could add it to that port.
Bollocks. An adept player could get through the game in 20mins, so the publisher wanted an extra level to extend its game time.
It took Eric two years to write but you really think he didn't have enough time to complete the Amiga version?
Laughable
Thanks for this. One of my personal favorite games. A prime example of immersive atmosphere and telling a game's story with no understandable dialogue, no interface clutter, and a very striking art style.
I bought this game when I was 9 and it scared the heck out of me. The first few screens.. the tentacles in the pool got me, and somehow I soldiered on until a slug killed me. And then the beast... I ran to my mum telling her we had to return the game hahaha. Yes I suppose I had a sheltered upbringing early on, I purchased it a few years later and finished it - awesome game.
Man, looking at that intro even now looks amazing and well beyond its time. In fact, with the retro styles that are popular in modern games, this game seems to have aged incredibly well. Highly underrated.
I finished this game on my trusty Nokia with Symbian S60 OS long time ago. Man I didn't know that this game is actually a classic.
Never played it. Loved my Amiga! Many years later it’s amazing to get these “behind the scenes” technical looks at what hard to be done to make these games work. Love the channel MVG!
Really cool, I remember seeing it when I was a kid, never knew what it was called, the premise is probably what made Half-Life to become what it is also. Thanks for the video as always
Éric Chahi is not just a genius developper, he is also a super nice human being.
This game blew my mind on Snes back in the day.
this game is a core memory for me, and when i grew up a bit, i watched all the videos with eric chahi on how he made it
Played the SNES version. Lost so many lives, got stuck a lot, but what a great game!
I played atari St version mainly but i did try the Snes version and noticed there's an extra part to that game, where you run jump across a pit and hang onto some (not sure what its called) cloth thing :D
Such an iconic game, I played it back in the day on a MS-DOS PC.
The PC demo was the first time I ever played this, then I picked up a used CD copy of it. I still have that CD copy (and the box maybe?)
The Jaguar version of this game is crazy impressive, both as a port of the game and a representation of what was possible on the hardware (it had the resourced to have it run the higher quality anniversary edition assets).
The story of the SNES version is interesting too: Execute code directly out of *IO Registers* because that kind of memory runs faster.
I really liked this game. I played it on the snes only. Loved it ever since. The whole family would laugh, and watch in amazement.
Yeah you can find a livestream Rebecca Heinemann did where she talked about the process of porting Another World to the SNES. She was basically blocked from using any sort of special chips or FastROM to cut on costs. Highly recommend watching it if you're a fan of Another World
@@TectonicImprov I will. Thank you for the recommendation 😃
@@TectonicImprov There's also an episode of the Retronauts podcast where Jeremy Parish interviews Rebecca.
@@jaysonl Sounds interesting, I love Jeremy Parish's work. Do you know which episode she's interviewed?
Im glad this game still is talked about 30 years later. Its atmosphere is just perfectly captured in that cool cinematic opening. And I agree that the Amiga version was the complete package. The music and sfx in have an unique flavor on that machine.
This is still incredible and was sensational when it released. I played it and finished it when it came out, but it was really hard with the clunky controls and no hints as to what to do. But I loved it and still do. Played it on PS4 when it got available there and smiled through the whole experience 😀 Thank you for giving more insight to this game MVG!
It makes me sad that there weren't a ton more games like this made. True art.
Developers now: you need a quad-core CPU, an RTX 3060 at least, 8GB of RAm and 100GB of SSD(you can do on HDD if you want loading screens to last 30 min) to play our game made using Unity.
You make a very solid point, but there would be... well... fewer games on the market if every developer had to create their own ridiculously sophisticated game engine from scratch in assembly language
@@rorychivers8769 I made the comment mostly as a joke, but my point is, nowadays the developers that do the "impossible" possible on modern hardware are getting rarer by the day, it is rare to see some coding that "wow" people, like for example quake's fast inverse sqrt.
Not only on game dev, my main criticism nowadays is how bloated web became because of soydevs.
@@rdxdt Sorry, I wasn't trying to be patronizing, I do actually miss the time when games developers really did know how the machines worked on a deep and profound level.
It's just sort of different now, those guys don't actually make games any more, they just make the engines that other people make the games out of. So you don't get a particular game that blows your mind with its technology, you things like the unreal 5 tech demo, or you get research paper demos or things like that. Then you wait for years for it to actually filter into a game and you're already sort of jaded.
Games have lost the power to mesmerize you with their awesomeness, even though they are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than they used to be. Weird irony, heh
Off-the shelf hardware is just so cheap nowadays. I work in the professional IT industry and when I started out I was designing ASICs. Back then (late 90s) you needed a dedicated chip to do something that a modern CPU will barely break sweat over.
It does make a huge difference to what can be produced because things are done in high-level languages using APIs which reduce the need for debugging or developing optimised routines. The cost of course is the resulting code is far from optimised and the system requirements are high, but do-able.
Are you enumerating the specs for Yandere Simulator?
I LOVED this game growing up. Was an essential part of any Amiga owners game collection. I was blown away by how good it looks and I think it still looks good even now.
If you're thinking about trying this out, be aware that it is VERY trial-and-error based. It will kill you mercilessly, until you work out the exact right sequence of actions to take. (You can see the Dragon's Lair influence there.) That's why I'd recommend a modern version of the game: newer editions include more checkpoints. This makes it substantially easier, by reducing time spent re-doing the same screens over and over.
Nothing is wrong with that. Back in the days the games were like this, one mistake and you had to go back and repeat until you succeeded. Often you could enter codes to get you back to the start of the level. In flashback there were special savepoint boots you could use, but forget about saving state at your will like it is today. To feel the spirit of a game I always recommend to check original and let it practice perseverance in you rather then fast finish
Since this game is very short,(only half an hour to finish) it's natural to make the game trial and error based to increase playtime.
@@phj9894 And also it has infinite continues, other games would just boot you up to the title screen if you died enough times
This story was so captivating and told so well, I didn't even know about the game! The guy who made the game was a genius.
5:26 "Chahi would make clever use of the co-proccessor found on the Amiga, known as the blitter."
No, the co-processor was known as Agnus. The blitter was just one of its components, and not even the main one.
Truly fascinating! I actually rented and played it on both the SNES and Genesis, but I was never able to finish it. All I do know is that it was like nothing I ever played before it. Happy 30th anniversary, Another World!
Amazing game, played a Dreamcast homebrew port.
You right,it was really art,and the fact that it doesn't fix in any category of games and doesn't give any explanation or dialogue,makes you feel you've entered in a movie. Really exiting,one of the last and biggest emotion before the damned kill gates pc
As infuriating as this game was....I was mesmerized by it.
Welcome back. Great stuff as always. A legendary game, and a technical marvel.
Great history class you gave us. I've always looked at Another World on many places and never actually care, but this video got me interested into trying it
Hadn't heard of this game before, it's insane how far ahead of it's time it was.
Show it to someone like me and they'd mistake it for a stylized indie game made in recent years, the fact it had animations and details this smooth all the way back when many console games at that time were trying their hardest to be comparable to the then brand new Sonic1 or MarioWorld, and Doom hadn't even been created yet.
This game definitely deserves to be in the hall of greats in terms of technical legends, I'm suprised I haven't heard of it before.
This has blown me away. Never heard of this game and now I am continuously revisiting some of its shots after this video!
I remember the first I played another world. I had an Amiga 500 at the time and I was completely absorbed by the game. My mind would capture the graphics and atmosphere and I would leave the game to do other things completely day dreaming about what I had experienced in the game. Great memories. Thank you for bringing us excellent content as always.
Another world keeps amazing me till this day... It is out of this world!
Seen several documentaries and hearing Eric Chahi explain how he did this is just phenomenal.
I really don't know how this graphical style and programming didn't become the norm for a decade
It was most definitely ahead of it's time in the gaming world.. I remembered this!
Great to hear big plans for 2022. I've been learning a lot recently watching MVG videos. Huge appreciation for this channel.
Really enjoy your content that goes into the technical and how they did it.
Another World absolutely blew me away when I first got it on my Amiga 500. I just remember that, in a world full of sprite based games, it was completely different, and properly jaw dropping at the time.
This was the first computer game I played that got me stoked about computer games. Played point and click, Wolfenstein, apogee, and puzzle games. This game was a gem. Eric Chahi was beyond brilliant and every bit of this game was a masterpiece. The cinemas, the meager hardware requirements, the puzzles. Everything legendary. Heart of the alien and flashback was nice, but this was a magnum opus.
I remember playing "Another World" for the first time on my friend's Amiga, thinking that it looks like something transported back through time from a not so near future! Especially since in '91 I owned a 286 PC with a Hercules graphic card and a monochrome, yellow and black monitor, on which I played games like "Barbarian", "Test Drive" and "North and South".
I remember the demo for this game was on our 286. It could only manage a few frames a second. The demo was the intro and the first chapter, right up until you run into the hunter while escaping the beast. I played it over and over. The atmosphere was like nothing I'd had played before.
I played this as a kid and I could never finish it from how difficult it was for my brain back then.
Only finished it once the 15th anniversary edition came out. Love love love this game endlessly.
I played this game quite a lot on my Amiga back and the day, and man was it epic. Just the intro cutscene was enough to blow most people's minds back then. No one, but those with an Amiga, had anything remotely close to those kinds of graphics and sound on a home computer or even console in the early 90s. Took a while to figure out and finally win it, and you never do get your character to make it back to our time / planet, but it was still a blast.
Chahi is an absolute polymath genius. No doubt. Literal sense of the word.
Played this on the 3D0 back in the day, great video.
I played this back in the SNES and was completely blown away. A buddy and i we're obsessed with it. Great times playing this game. Later discovered Flashback on Sega Genesis
That Black Lotus demo scene video and track are so sick, had them saved forever
One of the best games, from any era. And holy hell it was a technical masterpiece and you knew it as soon as you saw the opening. The art still evokes what it did then.
I remember when my friend told me about this game and it's opening sequence.
I was listening in silent and amazed and I asked, and this all happens inside the game?!
This was really amazing experience in my childhood.
Thank you for covering this. My top 10 most influential experiences.
I played the DOS release of this game, and my reaction was similar -- that was my first time recognizing video games as a medium for "art" even though I could appreciate the "artwork" as a component of other games. I was blown away and I still regard this as one of the best-designed games I've ever played.
This game is as groundbreaking today as it was then. This was a watershed moment in video game history. And the amazing part is it has that timeless feel to it, you could pick up and enjoy this game today
I'm so glad I lived through moments like this.
Working totally outside of the expected limitations. This really is incredible.
This was a great intro - thank you for sharing this. As a teenage programmer back in the Amiga days I was blown away by how the game seemed to draw so much, given my own limited attempts at animating polygons. I had nearly forgotten about it, 30 years later... but to finally have some insight as to how he was using backbuffers now makes total sense and removes another question buried in my mind's stack of "how the hell was this optimized enough to work" miscellany.
Fantastic video!
What a game! The intro was sooooo impressive back in the day, and so was the rest of it!
Nice of you to cover amiga it was a ground breaking machine back in the day
I remember having this as a kid on my Megadrive. It was truly like nothing else I'd played before.
Hands down, a true classic, was one of the lucky kid around the block back in the day to have an Amiga 1000, this was were I experienced this master piece of a game. There was no internet or guides back in the day, but as a very young lad, I completed this game.