Defender of the Crown opens like a film, with credits over a harpsichord tune, and for many people who saw it in 1986 that was the point. Cinemaware’s first game put castles, jousting tournaments and torch-lit sword fights on the Commodore Amiga in hand-drawn pictures that no earlier home computer game had matched. Underneath was a simple strategy game, a cut-down version of the board game Risk. Computer Gaming World’s reviewer saw both sides in January 1987. Judged strictly as a strategy game, he wrote, it “would be mundane”. But “you will use it as a showcase program to demonstrate the power of the Amiga to your friends.”
Fast facts
- Publisher: Master Designer Software, under its Cinemaware label; distributed by Mindscape in America and Mirrorsoft in Britain.
- Released: Christmas 1986, for the Amiga; $49.95, on two disks, needing 512K.
- Team: designer Kellyn Beeck; producer John Cutter; art director Jim Sachs; programmer R.J. Mical; music by Jim Cuomo.
- Setting: England after the death of Richard I, borrowed from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, with Robin Hood as an ally.
- Later versions: Commodore 64, Atari ST, PC, Amstrad CPC, NES, CD-ROM, and remakes into the 2000s.
Saxons, Normans and Robin Hood
The king is dead and the crown is missing. The player picks one of four Saxon lords, each with different strengths in leadership, jousting and swordplay, and sets out to unite England and drive out three Norman rivals. Each turn is a month. The lord collects taxes from his lands, buys soldiers, knights and catapults, and chooses one main action: hold a tournament, raid an enemy castle for gold, or march into a neighbouring territory. Robin of Locksley, waiting in Sherwood Forest, can be called on for help three times in a game.
The action scenes are where the pictures move. A tournament puts the player behind the lance, aiming at an oncoming knight’s shield. A siege is fought with a catapult lobbing boulders at the castle wall. A raid, or the rescue of a kidnapped Saxon lady, becomes a sword fight. Rescue her and, as Jimmy Maher describes it, “gratitude turns to love”, in a romantic fireside scene with no bearing on winning the war. Maher traces the game’s characters, including Cedric of Rotherwood, Brian de Bois-Guilbert and Wilfred of Ivanhoe, to Scott’s novel, and its look to decades of Hollywood swashbucklers.
AmigaWorld’s Bob Ryan liked the strategy most and the action least. After two or three goes at the catapult, he found, “you will be a catapult expert and bored by future breach attempts”. He still called the game “a giant leap forward in computer game design”.
Made in a hurry
Bob Jacob had founded Cinemaware early in 1986 to make games with what he called a “mass market sensibility”: “no typing, get you right into the game, no manual”. Kellyn Beeck designed Defender of the Crown, and Jim Sachs, whom Jacob recruited as art director, led the artists, who drew in Deluxe Paint. Sachs remembered the three of them flying to the Amiga’s makers in Los Gatos to talk over Beeck’s ideas. “The Amiga was vital to the game, because I would not have been interested in doing it on a lesser machine.” He and Beeck researched castles and costumes, and argued: real castle walls “would have been plastered smooth and painted, but most people these days expect them to be bare stone.” He worked mostly in the Amiga’s 320 by 200 pixel, 32-colour mode, and he would have liked a first-person sword fight. “There were many compromises due to deadlines.”
The deadline nearly sank the game. “With about three months until our deadline, we scrapped all our code and hired legendary programmer RJ Mical to rewrite the game,” the producer, John Cutter, told Retro Gamer. Beeck had designed it to run in real time; Cutter switched it to turns. “We shipped on time, but I don’t know if my decision ultimately helped or hurt the project.” Sachs told CU Amiga in 1994 that the art and music were done before the programming was settled, and that two programming teams had already “found it too difficult” when he suggested hiring Mical. To Retro Gamer he called the work “pure hell. Several months of 20-hour days, with no days off.” Maher records that the rush left a bug that doubled the player’s army if the home castle was left undefended, and that neither Sachs nor Mical worked for Cinemaware again.
It sold anyway: 20,000 copies in its first six weeks, Maher reports, when about 150,000 Amigas were in use. The artist Jeff Hilbers explained Jacob’s plan. Amiga sales “could never get much bigger than 30 or 40 thousand”, so the company would build its name there, “then create a degraded version on the C64 that would really pull the money in.”
The Commodore 64 and other versions
Mirrorsoft released the Commodore 64 version in Britain in 1987, on disk only at £14.95; a reader asking Zzap!64 for a cartridge was told the game needed about 300K. Zzap!64 made it a Sizzler in August 1987. “No doubt many of you will have seen screen pictures of this game on a certain 16-bit machine, and thought, ‘what on earth would a 64 version turn out like?’” one reviewer wrote, before praising “the finest static graphics to grace a 64 game”. Maher notes that some of the ideas cut from the Amiga original went into the conversions, which “looked uglier but played better”.
Versions followed for the Atari ST and the PC, and in 1988 Amstrad Action reported that Ubi Soft was converting it to the Amstrad CPC for Mirrorsoft. In 1989 ACE reported a CD-ROM edition for PCs from Mirrorsoft and Cinemaware, with a narrator and a recorded soundtrack. Konami published an NES version; Germany’s Video Games reviewed it under Konami’s Palcom label in January 1991 and gave it 52%, finding it heavy on strategy and suited to beginners.
Later history
Sachs came back to the game alone. For Commodore’s CD32 he made Defender of the Crown II, a “Director’s Cut” with narration in five languages, new scenes and new music, in which the player raises a ransom for King Richard. “Commodore shipped a few copies just before shutting down operations,” he said. “It was heartbreaking for me.”
When the Cinemaware name was revived in 2000, a remastered Defender of the Crown came out for the Game Boy Advance, followed in 2003 by Robin Hood: Defender of the Crown for the PC, Xbox and PlayStation 2, and later by an iOS version. The rights passed to Starbreeze in 2016 and to the publisher Nordcurrent in 2024; the Cinemaware entry follows that story.
Sources
- Jimmy Maher, The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga (MIT Press, 2012), chapter 8, pp. 210–216: the Risk model; the bug; the Ivanhoe sources; the Saxon lady; Jacob’s aims; the team (Cutter, Beeck, Cuomo, Mical, Sachs, Deluxe Paint); the Christmas rush; Sachs and Mical; sales of 20,000 in six weeks against 150,000 Amigas; the conversions; two 880K disks.
- Computer Gaming World issue 34, January 1987, p. 30: review by Wyatt Lee.
- AmigaWorld, March/April 1987, p. 80: review by Bob Ryan (Master Designer Software, distributed by Mindscape; $49.95; 512K; six knights, three Saxon and three Norman; Robin Hood’s three visits).
- ZZAP!64 issue 28, August 1987, p. 98: Commodore 64 review, Sizzler (Mirrorsoft, £14.95 disk; four lords and their skills; Robin of Locksley). Issue 30, October 1987, p. 30: letters (the 300K the game needs).
- Mike Bevan, “The History of Cinemaware”, in Retro Gamer’s The Amiga Book (Imagine Publishing), pp. 80–85: Jim Sachs on joining and on Los Gatos; John Cutter on the rewrite by R.J. Mical and the switch to turns; Jeff Hilbers on Amiga and C64 sales; Sachs and Beeck on castles; Sachs on Defender of the Crown II for the CD32; the revival from 2000; the list of formats.
- Mat Broomfield, interview with Jim Sachs, CU Amiga, January 1994, p. 44: the art and music done first; two programming teams who “found it too difficult”; Sachs’s suggestion to hire R.J. Mical.
- “The Art of Amiga”, in Retro Gamer’s The Amiga Book, pp. 52–55: Jim Sachs on 320×200 32-colour mode and on “pure hell”.
- Amstrad Action issue 30, March 1988, p. 12: Ubi Soft’s Amstrad CPC conversion for Mirrorsoft.
- ACE issue 19, April 1989, p. 9: the CD-ROM version from Mirrorsoft and Cinemaware.
- Video Games (Germany), January 1991, p. 36: NES review by Heinrich Lenhardt (Palcom/Konami; 120 marks; 52%).