Flight of the Amazon Queen

Trivia

The games antagonist, Dr. Frank Ironstein, seems to be loosely based on Dr. Josef Mengele, also known as "Angel of Death". Mengele was an officer of the German "Schutzstaffel" (SS) and a physician in the infamous Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he conducted various experiments on the prisoners. Holocaust survivors gave detailed descriptions of his atrocious "researches". Mengele later fled to South America and was never captured. His person served as inspiration for villains in popular culture more than once. For another example, just watch "Marathon Man" starring Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier.

The game was originally written in AMOS BASIC on Amiga, but was eventually converted to C code instead, and later ported to PC computers. The tools to build the game were also written in AMOS. The game engine was called JASPAR for "John And Steve's Programmable Adventure Resource".

There were three additional tools called JOKER (building rooms, laying out objects and actors), ACE (cut scene editor) and DOG (dialogue editor). The engine and tools were written by John Passfield and Tony Ball converted the JASPAR engine to PC.

This game was developed about three years (a year and a half before signing publishing deal with Warner). Back in the early days it was an Amiga floppy product which eventually became four language Amiga/PC CD-ROM game with full voice. Most of the graphics were done using Deluxe Paint IV running on an Amiga 1200 with an accelerator board because the Amiga had the best version of Deluxe Paint at the moment.

Flight of the Amazon Queen has now been made freeware! The source code was kindly given to the ScummVM team, by John Passfield and Steve Stamatiadis, who then made it fully compatible with their engine.

Apparently, both the floppy and the CD versions of this game have been released to the public for free. They can be downloaded from:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scummvm/FOTAQ_Talkie.zip?download

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scummvm/FOTAQ_Floppy.zip?download

This game was also released on CDROM, that featured full speech.