Commodore just announced it's bringing back Alien Breed, an iconic Amiga shooter that's been in limbo for over a decade. The new 35th Anniversary Collection ports all six original Alien-inspired romps to modern consoles and PC, marking the retro hardware company's new venture into game publishing.
Scheduled to land September 24 on PS5, Xbox, Switch, and PC, the Alien Breed 35th Anniversary Collection bundles the six original shooters together. If you need a recap, that covers the 1991 Alien Breed original as well as the 1992 Special Edition, Alien Breed II: The Horror Continues (1993), Tower Assault (1994), and Alien Breed 3D I and II released on the Amiga CD32.
Yes, this is the same company that makes the Commodore 64 Ultimate and has a C64C remake on the cards. That's worth highlighting since there are so many fingers in the Amiga right pie (there's an unrelated Amiga microcomputer remake at Amazon for $189), but this publishing debut follows a recent deal that'll make releasing anything Amiga-related less painful. That's not to say we'll suddenly see an influx of retro console and microcomputing hardware, but bringing back Alien Breed feels like a positive sign of things to come.
In a press release marking the announcement, Commodore's CEO Christian Simpson (Peri Fractic) shares his love for the Amiga shooter with a personal backstory. “When I was 8, I persuaded my parents to let me watch a certain Ridley Scott movie," shares Simpson. "For the first time, they said yes. I had nightmares for two years afterwards. A few years later, it was payback time! Alien Breed is the reason a lot of us stayed up way too late as kids, creeping through those corridors with the motion tracker beeping and no idea what was waiting around the corner.”
Rosy memories aside, Christian Simpson also praises original developers, stating that "Team17 built something that still holds up without any nostalgia required, and bringing all six games together in one place, running the way they were meant to run, felt like exactly the right project to launch Commodore back into publishing.”
Bringing back the entire '90s Alien Breed series indeed feels like a power move. Not only is the original one of the best Amiga games of all time, but it's also notably absent from the likes of the THEA1200 microcomputer remake. The only other ports I can personally think of that still live are on GOG, which happen to be MS-DOS versions.
The Alien Breed revival is a collaboration between Commodore and "gaming preservationists Antstream, a studio that's normally associated with the Antstream Arcade streaming service. No, you won't need an internet connection to play the new collection, as the team's role here is seemingly on the porting side.
“As a British game studio, we are immensely proud to be working on a legendary gaming legacy from such an important British publisher,” says Antstream CEO Steve Cottam. “We believe it is absolutely vital to preserve games for future generations, and this collection honors that mission while opening it up to a new generation of gamers.”
There's certainly a bit of a dance required when it comes to making dormant retro games digital. By that, I mean you have to strike a balance between catering to new-age players who download everything and people who'd rather Alien Breed made its return on an Amiga 3.5-inch floppy, not to mention there are now lots of players fighting for physical media of the back of Sony's PS5 disc situation.
I certainly won't snub the chance to play the Amiga version of Team17's eerie top-down horror shooter on the Steam Deck OLED. But, there is part of me that's hoping we'll see an actual physical version of the collection launch alongside an Amiga FPGA machine I can plug into a CRT, and if that's the path ahead, Commodore could really help keep the physical gaming space alive.
- Retro consoles at Amazon
Swing by the best retro handhelds if you'd rather take your Amiga collection on the go.
