The recently-unveiled new The Chaos Engine will be a “restoration” of the Amiga original, it has been revealed.
Producer Neil McKenna said the PC, Mac and Linux release, which was teased with a trailer, will be the original game with some minor tweaks.
“It’s built on the Amiga source code. The developers have written an emulator to go around that,” at indie games expo Rezzed.
Changes include “a bit of gloss” to make it look better on larger monitors and new 16-directional controls compared to the original’s eight directions.
The save system is now “less brutal”, adding mid-stage checkpoints and saving progress at the end of each level, as opposed to every four levels.
Fans of the original can switch off the visual and control tweaks, and use “old school” generated passwords.
There is also the additional of drop-in, drop-out online co-operative multiplayer.
“That’s essentially it; we haven’t done anything else,” McKenna explained.
“We haven’t added any new playable characters, any weapons, messed around with the balancing, any of that.
“It’s our intuition that people just want to play The Chaos Engine, they didn’t want to play some crass HD remake which we’ve all seen.
“We’ve seen dozens of terrible remakes of classic games. When we sat down and looked at it, it didn’t even need that.
“The gameplay, even though it is old-fashioned, it just works really well. You just need to add anything in.”
The remastering is published by Mastertronic and developed by Holland-based studio Abstraction, with The Bitmap Brothers’ Mike Montgomery advising on how to best use the original’s Amiga source code.
As well as a release on PC, Mac and Linux for early August, there are plans to release The Chaos Engine on consoles.
“We’ve looked very closely at it, but nothing is final on that yet,” McKenna said.
“We’re looking very closely at working with consoles, but nothing is signed at the moment.”
The Chaos Engine is a steampunk shooter that was released in 1993 for multiple platforms, including Amiga, Mega Drive and SNES.
