What was the Akira game for Amiga and CD32?
Britain’s attempt: an action game the CD32 never lived down.
The second Akira game came from the opposite direction to the first: not Japan, but Britain; not the year of the film, but 1994, when anime’s Western surge made Akira the safest license in the catalogue. International Computer Entertainment built a side-scrolling action game for the Amiga and the Amiga CD32, assembled from the film’s set-pieces, bike chase included.
It was received the way the Famicom game had been, only louder. The CD32 version is regularly counted among the worst games on the console, and the game’s name became shorthand for how badly a great film could be served.
THE GAME ITSELF
ICE · 1994Action, at last, of a kind
Where Taito made a book, ICE made a platform action game: run, ride, and fight through scenes modeled on the film. Contemporary and later verdicts converge on the same words: punishing design, drab presentation, monotony.
A license ahead of its market
The game exists because 1994 was the moment Akira’s Western fame peaked on home video. The license was gold; the machine it landed on, the CD32, was already failing. Both facts are in the cartridge’s reputation.
THE OTHER 1994 AKIRA
The THQ games that never shippedAnnounced for everything
At the same moment, THQ was developing Akira games for the Super NES, Genesis, Sega CD and Atari Jaguar, with handheld versions for Game Boy and Game Gear. The console game was the ambitious one: each level was to retell part of the film in a different genre.
Shown, then cancelled
The Genesis version was playable at trade shows in 1994. Then the whole family was postponed and cancelled, and for two decades that was the end of the story.
The attic find
In 2016, video game historian Patrick Scott Patterson obtained four unfinished Game Boy Akira prototype cartridges from an attic find and demonstrated them publicly: the handheld Akira, preserved by accident, a generation after its cancellation.