Blood Money

Blood Money is an action shooter from the Scottish studio DMA Design, which later became famous for the Grand Theft Auto series, and on the Atari ST it offered a combination of both horizontally and vertically scrolling levels within a single game, an unusual combination for the time. The player controls a spaceship passing through a series of differently themed worlds, from organic caves full of living tissue to technological complexes, with not only the graphical style but also the direction of screen scrolling and the character of the enemies changing between passages.

Between missions, the player can spend collected money in a shop to upgrade the ship with new weapons, shields, and additional modules, which gives the game a light element of strategic decision-making on top of pure reflex action and motivates careful collection of money from fallen enemies and destroyed background structures. Boss fights at the end of levels require recognizing attack patterns and precise maneuvering in a confined space, while the regular passages rely on intense firefights with waves of enemies attacking from all sides of the screen, placing the game among the more demanding representatives of the genre. The Atari ST version offers colorful, detailed graphics and smooth scrolling, which made it one of the visually impressive and technically ambitious titles of its genre on this platform, though it does not quite reach the quality of the parallel Amiga version.

Blood Money was praised at the time chiefly for the variety of its environments and solid technical execution, which demonstrated the growing skill of European development studios of the late eighties against established Japanese and American competitors. Today it also serves as an interesting reminder of DMA Design's early steps, before the studio turned to a completely different type of open-world games with which it became famous worldwide a decade later and forever changed the shape of action video games.

Why play it: For the variety of environments and solid technical execution, but also out of curiosity about what DMA Design's early steps looked like before the studio became famous for a completely different type of game.