I first saw a preview of Frontier in Amiga Power #20, December 1992. There’s a double page spread with some impressive 3D screenshots of space stations orbiting planets, moons, and a ship branded ‘Konami’ – pretty impressive detail for 3D of the time. The preview promised boundless adventures in a near infinite galaxy, and my 9 year old mind was blown away. I told everyone about this game, explaining all the things I was convinced you’d be able to do to my parents and friends at school. I wrote pages planning out all the cool things I was going to do, asteroid mining, space piracy, flying to our actual house in the in-game Earth. But then the game didn’t materialise ‘forever’ to my young mind. It wasn’t until the end of the next year that a cracked copy became available to me. Luckily there was a guy on the opposite side of the street that was ‘well connected’ and received every cracked Amiga game that existed. I never asked how.
So, a year after the initial excitement I slammed the disk into my 1987 model Amiga 500. The game starts with an opening cinematic rendered using the ingame engine… at about 2 frames per second. Though now I appreciate the technical miracle of having this game run on the Amiga 500 at all, at the time I was incredibly disappointed. I’d played visual novels with more lively animation. This was a slow flipbook that was hard to look at and even harder to play.
Eventually I came back to the game, probably worked out how to minimise the graphical requirements, and played the game a good deal. Deep space flight distant from planets, ships and stars ran fine – it was only when there were many polygons to draw – combat, docking at space stations, in proximity to planets – that the game would really chug. Careful use of autopilot saw me through low framerate landings, but combat forever proved incredibly difficult. Did I understand that my Amiga was underpowered? No, I just assumed the game was this way for everyone. I still had fun, but it was a painful kind of fun.
It wasn’t until we bought a Windows 95 machine a few years later that I really got to play the game ‘for real’. In fact, this is probably the game that made me realise that our Amiga was limited. The same game now running at an order of magnitude higher framerate was amazing, and I spent hundreds of hours finally fulfilling as many of my old plans as were possible in the game. Docking with smoothly spinning stations was amazing, gliding through the populated areas of planets and receiving fines from traffic control was hilarious, and combat became an actual game instead of a slow motion joust. While my siblings played Space Cadet pinball, Command and Conquer and a hundred generic FPS games, I was trading with Lave station and serving in the Imperial Navy, upgrading my ship (pimped out Cobra MKIII forever) and slowly forgetting about my Amiga.
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