Flight of the Amazon Queen

Development

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.

It 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.

Freeware release

Flight of the Amazon Queen has 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. It can be downloaded from ScummVM.

Inspiration

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.

Version differences

This game was also released on CD-ROM, that featured full speech.

Voice Actor

The voice of Trader Bob is spoken by Christoph Waltz in the german Talkie-Version on CD-ROM. He became very famous in 2009 as the SS officer Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds or 2012 in Django Unchained as the bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz. His name is wrongly spelled as "Christoph Walz" in the intro credits.

Awards

• Amiga Joker
  • Issue 02/1996 – Best Adventure in 1995 (Readers' Vote)

Information also contributed by Apogee IV, B.L. Stryker, micnictic and xxxxxxxxxxx