Games That Weren't^®

Following on from the recent console cancellation of Myth covered on the site, team member Grzegorz Antosiewicz got in touch to highlight a series of changes to the Amiga/ST editions of Myth. What follows is based mostly on the text which Grzegorz submitted and after briefly speaking in the past to Robin Levy and Paul Docherty.

Firstly, it is believed there were roughly distinctive three phases of development for Myth on the Amiga/ST platforms:

1. A simple port of the Commodore 64 game for both Amiga and Atari with similar art style.
2. A first phase of change for art style and gameplay.
3. A second (and likely final) change of art style and gameplay.

Phase 1

During the first phase, System 3 had Bob Stevenson on board as the main graphic artist. At this stage, the game was going to be released for both Atari and Amiga. The game would have more colours compared to the C64 version of course, but with the same main hero just like in the C64 version.

There were early press previews in “Zero” and “The One” magazine showing this version, where there was going to be picture of girl in the intro, and she would welcome the player with a digitalized voice sample like in the C64 edition.

Phase 2

During the second phase, Paul Docherty seemingly took over as the main graphic artist. The game art style was changed, with the main hero now represented as short, old bald muscular barbarian.

It was originally thought that the graphic artists influenced the change of the main character, though Robin Levy corrected us on this. As far as he recalls, it was a decision made by Mark Cale due to the Les Edwards original painting that he bought and that more of the formats featured the swords and sorcery angle. Phil Thornton then later persuaded Mark to change the character again because Mills and Bisley’s The Horned God TPB were popular and gained favour in the mainstream.

According to ACE magazine, the game would now feature many new cut scenes between levels with pictures and text that would describe the player’s journey. Zero magazine posted even more early graphics and concepts for the game intro in 1991. In issue 23 there was also a floppy disk with playable first level demo and rolling demo for the Valhalla stage.

http://amr.abime.net/issue_391_coverdisks

In the intro for that demo, there was also an intro with early graphics. Grzegorz believes that there was also a playable demo for Atari released at some point too which may have further differences.

Phase 3 (final)

In the third and final phase, Robin Levy become the main graphic artist. System 3 by this point decide to just focus on an Amiga release. They also decide to cut the graphics between the stages and intro. Robin was required according to Grzegorz to redraw the main hero sprite to look as “Slaine: The Horned God” from British comics books.

Robin also redrew the upper status bar to have more colours and details, icons for collected items, graphics for stages. He confirmed that his job was mostly to try and stitch together in the game with all the different art, and fill in the gaps too.

Magazine “Amiga Action” in issue 32 also had a floppy disk disk with a new playable demo of the first stage.

http://amr.abime.net/issue_105_coverdisks

This time the demo was very similar to finished game in 1992, with only minor differences.

Finally, in 1994 System 3 released a port for the Amiga CD32. There are no noticeable changes or improvements, game was now on one cd instead of 3 floppy disks and had controls mapped to CD32 pad.

With thanks to Grzegorz Antosiewicz for the majority of the text, supply of images, Robin Levy for the confirmation and corrections and also Stephen Stuttard for the hi-res versions of the screenshots.