Gloom

When a wave of first-person shooters inspired by the Doom phenomenon flooded computers in the mid-nineties, the community around the Amiga could not stay on the sidelines. Gloom was exactly that answer: a fast, bloody and, by the platform's standards, surprisingly smooth FPS that showed the Amiga could handle corridor massacres with textured walls and hordes of enemies.

In terms of gameplay, it is straightforward action in the spirit of the genre of its time — you make your way through mazes of corridors, collect weapons and ammunition, and eliminate everything that moves. The emphasis is on pace and on the feel of firing; Gloom does not pretend to be a deliberate tactical game, but rather an adrenaline-fueled shooting gallery where it is all about reflexes and survival in tight spaces. For the Amiga hardware it was a technically demanding task, and the very existence of a brisk engine was, for many users, proof that their machine did not yet belong on the scrapheap.

In development terms, Gloom falls into a period when the Commodore platform was already facing tough competition from PCs and consoles, and the developer community was trying to keep pace with emerging trends. The creation of a homegrown FPS on the Amiga was therefore seen as a small victory — proof that the computer still had something to offer even in a genre that seemed tailor-made for more powerful PCs with accelerated graphics.

The cultural significance of Gloom lies precisely in this symbolic dimension. At a time when people were talking about the twilight of the Amiga, the title represented defiance and the community's effort to show that the platform could keep pace with genre novelties. For fans it became one of the few seriously intended attempts to bring to the Amiga the kind of experience that games like Doom defined elsewhere.

The Amiga CD32, as a 32-bit console from Commodore's workshop, benefited from the CD-ROM medium and from an architecture derived from the Amiga 1200. Titles like Gloom were meant to demonstrate that it was worth releasing even more demanding action games for it. Today it is a valuable piece in the collection of anyone interested in what the alternative evolution of shooters looked like outside the PC world.

Why play: Gloom is proof that the Amiga could do a fast corridor shooter too — ideal for FPS fans who want to see the genre from an unusual angle of a retro platform.