24. Meet Mr. Brimble

You are listening to the Ericade Radio Network. Time for another episode of Amiga Flashback, the show that takes you back to the 80s and 90s. Today we're celebrating the genius of Alistair Brembo. He was one of the most prolific artists on the Amiga scene during the early 90s and has composed music for a number of really high profile games.But we're not gonna play the original game music. No, in 2014 he created a remix of his best songs. And that's what you're gonna hear today.

Okay, you must know this. It's actually Super Frog, a game released in 1993 by Team17. And yes, he composed the music for it. It's a very fun and very addictive platformer where you play a frog who is really a prince that got, you know, he ran into one of those witches and that never ends up well for anyone. So here he is trying to save himself and find his girlfriend. You know.a standard fair theme there, but a really really nice game.

Most of the games that we play music from today were released by Team17, yeah, you know, the Swedish game developer studio. And it seems like LSD Brimble was a staple in their games and nothing more than Project X. Yep, we heard a special version of Project X here called Project X Old Timer, which was a remix together with Chris Julesbeck. And what is Project X done? Well, that is actually a...white a game, can say it's a horizontally scrolling shooter. You know, have a spaceship and you shoot stuff and it's kinda asteroid sometimes. It was published in 1992 and yeah, did quite well as far as I know.

Overdrive music composed by Alistair Brembo, but you know, that's all we play today It was released by team 17, of course in 1993 and it's a top-down racing game Think a little bit like micro machines for the Commodore 64 and you control buggies and sports cars and whatever and you race around a track Yeah, pretty standard, but the music yeah,

Yeah, this one had me guessing. Most of the games I know exactly what they were, and many of them I played. But Sexy Robot, yeah, that's the name of the song. Is that even a game? Turns out no, no, no, no, it's not a game, and it's definitely not something pornographic or erotic. It's actually a cover disc from the news.paper, the magazine called Amiga Format, and it was released in their AF number 3 cover disc in 1989. Well, it's simply this song and a robot that does not look particularly sexy, it's just a robot, more like a cool robot, and that's what it was.

Spellbound Dizzy. Yep, that's a name of a game that also is known as Dizzy 5. It's an adventure video game and also kind of more like a platformer with some story elements into it. And it features the character Dizzy, which is kind of, I don't know, an egg with legs and hands. Released in November 1991 by Codemasters. So this is not a Team 17 one. Yep, it's kind of a cute game if you ask me.

That was Sea Wolf, released in November 1994 by Binary Asylum. It's a single player 3D shoot em up. It's a helicopter game where you see the helicopter from behind and you have a landscape that you fly over and kinda bomb the crap out with your missiles and stuff. It's very simple graphics but seems to be captivating actually.

One of the most famous games for Amiga was of course Lemmings. And this is Trothers. The Trothers intro is what you just heard. And Trothers was kinda, I don't know if I wanna go as far as to say it was a rip-off of Lemmings, but it's kinda built on the same idea. And it was released in 1992 by a game developer known as Atod.It had a number of missions and you had to solve the problems on time, pretty much the same way as Lemmings works, but it had other kind of rules for it. And it got decent ratings as far as I know.

What's coming up now is a message on the screen. Insert disc 2. Okay, okay, gonna see if I can find one here. I have a USB stick, is that okay? Can I, can I rip out the hard drive and put it back in? I don't know. Anyway, that was Alien Breed and you must know this one. It's probably one of the most famous songs and themes and games that he was ever involved in, so to speak.The first Alien Breed came out in 1991 and the latest one is from 2010. So yeah, there has been a few of these, but the one from 91 plays like some kind of scene out of Aliens, know, James Cameron's master movie. You can see yourself from the top down and you shoot at aliens at an alarming rate here where they just pop in from pretty much everywhere. And the music, yeah, it matches the game perfect.

SSM, published in 1992 by, you guessed it, Team17. It's a rather modern platformer. Think Impossible Mission 3. Yeah, it got high ratings and the music, yeah, it matches the theme where you try to climb and crawl and hang on to a world that tries to kill you.

It's still Super Frog, but it's the Super Frog last level that is in space, because space. I like saying that. So anyway, we're going on with some more music, but time is running out and I can recommend if you like Alistair Brimble's stuff, go to Bandcamp and search for him. That's where I got the music. You can find a lot of good stuff.

music from Body Blows. Team17 of course, and it's a street fighter like game, came out in 1993. Raid reviews in mags such as CU Amiga, The One and Amiga Power and later became an AGA version. We're going out with a really happy note. Alistair Brimble, the Amiga never dies.