My Uncle’s Box of Pirated Games is a series on old, obscure games for the Commodore Amiga. I received an Amiga from my uncle in the mid-1990s, when I still had nothing but an Atari 2600 and a Game Boy. Included were two boxes of pirated (then called by the much less dysphemistic “bootlegged”) games that I played to death. While some are well known, others are less so. I hope to bring to light those that I liked and, perhaps, figure out how to play them again (I’ve never had luck with an Amiga emulator, sadly).

Pandora is a game that perhaps suffers for its generic name. Indeed, it took a long time before I was able to find any relevant information throguh Google dark arts, but I did. It turns out the Amiga is a system whose every piece of relevant information is archived in a way that would make even the most astute universities and governments jealous; every page of every Amiga-related magazine, for example, is scanned and placed up for public consumption.

As I recall, I had a disk that was a four-pack of Meganoid (an Arkanoid clone), Pandora, and two other games whose names I forget (no amount of Googling is helping, sadly– this may have been a “bootleg” collection). Being young in a time before the Internet, in a tiny village with absolutely no Amiga-related resources, I was virtually in a vacuum. I was a perfect, if not a bit young, control group for these games. In fact, a recent obsession of mine is this now-impossible vacuum; I’ll be talking more about it in the future. But, for now, I’ll attempt to quit digressing so much. I’m here to talk about Pandora, not the videogame-playing tendencies of a sleepy, rural Lake Huron hamlet.

Let me be bold for a moment: Pandora deserves to be incredibly important. It delivers what might be the best version of a mystery narrative within a game I’ve ever seen. In a nutshell, the game drops you inside a sentient, evil starship bent on destroying Earth. You are the only person onboard who can stop it; others are dead, unaware of the threat, turned evil by the ship, or simply jerks. There’s a catch, however; you have a time limit. The game starts with you dying a few times and starting over, to be honest. Soon enough, though, you find the traps that are set for you, both physically and socially, and start picking apart the world that’s set up for you. Each playthrough shows you a new hazard, and puts you back to its start (there may have actually been a save function, but I don’t particularly remember using it). So, the game takes two stages: the first, where you learn how to stop the disaster, and the second, where you learn how to do it before the disaster happens.

The obstacles are pretty standard fare for an adventure game; a diabetic needs a syringe, and will give you a valuable item in exchange; a punk will kick your ass if you’re not armed when you approach him; a security guard will give you a hard time if you’re poking around without a keycard and/or disguise (it’s been a while and it’s getting fuzzy, that last one might be made up). However, the graphics, the subject matter, the time-trial aspect, the insane expansiveness of the ship you’re exploring– it’s all ahead of its time.

Thanks to the twin magics of MobyGames and Google I managed to track down information on the developers to see what they’ve been up to since they worked on this game. Shahid Ahmad apparently worked on the music for many games over the past few years, in addition to the C64 port of Jet Set Willy (a favourite of many of my more British pals) and is in the “special thanks” section for many more. He now keeps a pretty interesting blog that keeps an eye on Muslim rights and issues in England and abroad. David Eastman is a bit less prolific from a games standpoint (only appearing as a part of the games I’m about to talk about below), but has plenty of info up about himself on his website. Terry Greer, all but unsearchable due to a football player with the same name, but, he either has continued to work in games or has a doppleganger with the same name running around designing Warhammer-related games.

There are two more games that both Ahmad and Eastman worked on together: Floor 13 and Conflict. While I haven’t played these games, my attention was caught; the former is a game focussing on scandal within the British government, and the latter is a simulator where you assume control of Israel during the tumultuous mid-90s (as opposed to, oh, the tumultuous any other time in the Middle East). Needless to say, while writing this blog article I became more and more intrigued with the work of these two developers, and less and less interested due to the original reason I wrote this (a nostalgic, wishy-washy, ephemeral vision of a game once played).

On Eastman’s site, he states: “Conflict was written in the 1990s, while game genres were still fluid and expectations for graphics were still relatively modest. A team of two or three people could quite reasonably produce a game [...] The early success of the software games industry ensured the interest of big business and the decline of small scale development. So Conflict is both a product of the period, and probably irreproducible in a modern commercial environment.” Indeed, that is how the indstry started turning out. Like the birth of the modern music industry, the games industry ramped up and more money and people moved into production. At some point, though, punk happened to games, too: gaggles of young, loud kids bit a chunk out of the industry. This has only happened recently, but already the giants are scrambling to keep their share during this time of upheaval; independent developers are getting snapped up into Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony exclusivity deals, or are jut producing their games on PC themselves. Here’s hoping talented, opinionated people like these two take note: the waters are warm again and we’d love to have you back.