[1] Game design & coding by Trevor Mensah (2-Cool/LSd!) and Frank Tout (The Art/LSd!). Graphics by Frank Tout (The Art/LSd!). Music by Lee Smith (Assassin/DmX, CuLpRiT).
[2] The game began life as ATROPHY in 1995 and was originally scheduled for release on A1200/4000 (disk/CD) and CD32 by Guildhall in late 1995. Bitter internal fighting within the development team regarding game design (predominantly gfx and music) and up-front royalty payments resulted in the game's release being continually delayed. Reportedly, central to the internal fighting was team coder Frank Tout (The Art/LSd!) [Source: Trevor Mensah (2-Cool/LSd!), via message posted on EAB].
Amidst all this, the game's publisher changed - OTM replaced Guildhall as the publisher, although Guildhall maintained the distribution rights - and a new release date of March '96 was set. More significant change was to follow, however.....
Around mid-1996, the internal fighting came to a head after the team missed yet another release date, which triggered a mass exodus of team members from Intersect Development (Trevor Mensah & co.). The breakaway team members wasted no time and almost immediately joined forces with scener Dan Hammonds (Wade/Alcatraz) to work on a new game, ENIGMA, under the guise of Centillion Software. This left Frank Tout as the sole remaining coder of ATROPHY, which resulted in OTM cancelling the game. Other than the name changing to ATROCITY, nothing more was heard of the game and, sadly, it never saw the light of day [Source: Amiga Flame, news item, Dec 96].
[3] ATROPHY was set to be released on disk/CD with the following features:
- No less than 10 HAM-8 pictures (16.7 million colours) with a staggering 100MB+ worth of graphics in total for the game!
- Over 3MB of some of the best sounding music ever
- 6 giant levels
- 12 end-of-level/mid-level guardians
- Over 5000 frames of animation
- 60+ objects on screen at any one time
- Over 300 colours on screen during the game
- Keyboard, joystick operation, and redefinable keys
- HD installable, executable from WB
- Minimum disk swapping; as big as the game is, it will still only come on 4 disks or CD
- Simultaneous 2 player action, shared lives option
- Flexible configuration and options
- Quarter/half-pixel smooth dual playfield scrolling
- Intelligent, random aliens
- Super smooth animations
- No slowdown even with 2 players with total firepower!
[Source: Amiga Report #4.03 (Feb 96)]
[4] Previews of ATROPHY appeared in the following magazines:
- Amiga Format (Issue 77, Nov 95, p15)
- CU Amiga (Dec 95, p41)
- Amiga Power (Issue 57, Jan 96, p14)
- Amiga Format (Issue 81, Feb 96, pp36-37)
- Amiga Joker (Apr 96, p66) (German CD32 preview)
- CU Amiga, Apr 96, pp42-43
[5] ***ATROPHY (demo)*** is freely available for download from these sources:
- ATROPHY (demo) [Source: EAB FTP site]
- ATROPHY (demo) [Source: EAB FTP mirror site]
- ATROPHY (demo)(dir: /gamedemo/Atrophy_Demo.adf) [Source: Aminet]
- ATROPHY (demo) [Source: CuLpRiT, via message posted on EAB]
TRIVIA: [1] Main coder Trevor Mensah (2-Cool/LSd!) claimed he had found some undocumented features of the A1200 and had exploited them to make the game a groundbreaking technical tour de force. There was just going to one small hitch, however - apparently not all A1200s sold had AGA chipsets with these undocumented features [Sources: Galahad/FLT, via message posted on EAB; Amiga Format preview(Issue 81, Feb 96, pp36-37)].
[2] Reportedly, ATROPHY made use of a unique game engine that was developed over about 5 years by Intersect, and was quite conducive to a game being written around it in a short period of time. While ATROPHY was being coded, Intersect apparently had utilised the same game engine and were in the early stages of development of 4 other games (NEYOK, PHASIC DISTORTION, ALTERNATE FUTURES and DOMINIONS) [Source: Intersect Development interview; CU Amiga, Apr 96, pp42-43].
No manuals found.
No cheats found.
No maps found.