The Different engine
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at the end of The Chaos Engine, you destroy the titular mechanical menace and everything is presumably okay. But in fact, you end up caught in a time singularity, along with Baron Fortesque. Disaster! He can get you back to Victorian England, but you’re going to have to follow his instructions – and even then, only one of you can go back with him. As a result, the Brigand, Gentleman, Navvie and Mercenary must do battle, performing the Baron’s tasks while sabotaging one another in order to ensure that you’re the one that gets to go home.
“It was Spy Vs Spy that influenced that, to an extent,” says Mike. “We wanted to make it different. We really didn’t want it to be a sequel just for a sequel. We could have probably called it something different as well.” Despite being a major departure from the original formula, it makes sense – after creating a convincing artificial intelligence partner, repurposing it as a challenging opponent is a smart move.
“We had strong ideas at the end of
The Chaos Engine which were essentially discarded, which is the way of these things,” says Dan Malone. “The time travel thing – nah, I wasn’t into that. Although I enjoyed doing the different flavours for each level – Aztec, Japanese, all that kind of thing, and I liked the extra moves that we did. But the whole game didn’t have the pulse and the kinetic energy of the original Chaos Engine. I’d love to reboot it actually, a Chaos 1.5 or something. I wanted to take them to the New World – the Civil War, play with things like that – but it would start in Victorian England. But you’re limited with what you can do.”
When The Chaos Engine 2 finally arrived in late 1996, the game was reviewed well by the few Amiga magazines that remained in publication. Amiga Computing, by this point incorporating Amiga Action, gave it 92%, and CU Amiga gave it 90%. Amiga Format gave it 85%, noting that it was best in two-player mode. “I really liked The Chaos Engine 2 with its split-screen and head-to-head mode, and I’m sorry that my magazine (The One) shut down before we could get to review it,” says Andy Nuttall. “I think it too is a bit of a classic.” However, the game has a lower user rating than the original on popular Amiga games sites.
Unlike the original, The Chaos Engine 2 was never ported to other platforms. “To be quite honest, it shouldn’t have come out on anything,” Mike states bluntly. “Well, that’s not quite true. The biggest problem is that we should have canned it earlier.
The Amiga market was dead by the time that it came out. The sales were pitiful.
We’re a commercial company to an extent, and we should have made the commercial decision to either can it or move it to another platform. It cost us a lot of money.”
Was there no option to port the finished Amiga game across to those other formats, to try to recoup the loss? “The publishers weren’t interested because the Amiga version didn’t do anything – but of course the Amiga version didn’t do anything, because the Amiga was dead anyway,” The result was that The Chaos Engine 2 would be the last outing for these characters, as the Bitmap Brothers moved on to other projects.
“I think it was pretty good, and if it had been on a different format it might have sold well. I know how little it sold, and I’m not telling you, but considering how little it sold you’d be surprised by how many people know about it,” says Mike. That’s what he ultimately takes comfort in, despite the commercial disappointment.
“People liked it, people found it interesting.
It sold very little, but it’s not forgotten.”