SWISS GAME DESIGN ARCHIVE 1968-2000

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A

GAME

1987
/
1st
/
Amiga
Shoot'em Up

Insanity Fight

Insanity Fight is a top-down shoot'em up game with a sci-fi setting, which was released for the Amiga in 1987. Christian Haller primarily programmed the game, while Christian A. Weber contributed the code for the continuously scrolling starry night sky background. The game features artwork by Roland Peterman, Jann Six, René Straub, and Markus Grimmer, and music by Helmut Melcher and Pascal de Sapio. Markus Grimmer acted as producer with his Swiss company LINEL and established contact with the publisher Microdeal in the UK. The game was mainly sold in Germany and the UK.

Unlike many other games of the same genre of that time, Insanity Fight was played over the width of the whole screen, with the status area occupying the bottom quarter. The shoot'em up scrolls vertically at a constant speed. As well as waves of aliens, there are lots of mounted structures to be shot before they shoot you. The player has five lives initially (with extras on offer for every 15,000 points), and the screen displays how many enemies you've killed thus far. It also shows the high score and an unusual bar indicating how high up the high score table you've reached. A review of the time concluded: "Insanity Fight is without doubt the most playable and impressive looking vertical shooter yet to emerge either for ST or the Amiga." Players especially loved the intro and the audio of the Starfighter pilot.

Developer Christian Haller states that the entire game uses only one source file, which has 6960 lines and is 100KB in size. He also points out that Insanity Fight was ahead of other games from 1987, as it was one of the few games that was developed specifically for the Amiga, and therefore made intensive use of the Amiga's technical capabilities.

27 years after the original release for the Amiga with LINEL, in 2014, Haller released Insanity Fight as an app in the iOS store. The IOS version plays like the original version.

In the IOS App-Store, Haller describes the game as follows: "Now you can carry Insanity Fight in your pocket and play it like in the good old eighties. All graphics and sound effects are identical to the eighties version. Watch the special elements: Turbo, supershot, invisible fighter, changed steering, mirroring, less energy - more score. Win an additional fighter for every 15000 points. Draw a map to be successful. Don't hit the ground stations. Use your gamecontroller like an Amiga joystick! Get ready starfighter!"