Battle Chess

Battle Chess is a chess game created by Interplay initially for the Amiga and published in 1988. It was so successful that it had been ported to most platforms available, including MS-DOS, Apple II, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Macintosh and many others. It was followed by two sequels, Battle Chess II: Chinese Chess and Battle Chess 4000, and you can find references to this game in movies and other media.

The game was produced by Brian Fargo himself, founder of Interplay. The idea is brilliant but straightforward: take the classic chess game, but every time a piece is captured, show an animation. If you have watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone you know what I'm talking about. When a piece is going to capture another piece, there is a short - and comical - combat scene, and after that, the captured piece disappears. There are a lot of funny references, such as the scene where Indiana Jones gets rid of the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

For every combination of pieces, there is a different choreography: 35 in total. The animators created eight disks full of material for the game, that needed to be packed into one single disk for the Amiga release. Not an easy task.

You can play against a friend, or you can challenge the computer. The AI is capable of 30,000 opening moves, but apparently, real chess experts considered the AI of Battle Chess quite weak. But if you are a chess guru you are probably not going to play this videogame, right? For the rest of us, this is a gem that it's still worth to play after 30 years - at least to enjoy the fantastic special effects.