1989 Electronic Arts
Platform: Commodore Amiga 500
You may think you’re looking at a PC Engine title, but instead – here’s an Amiga game you likely have never heard of. An early and impressive PC Engine style beat-em-up called Path of the Little Dragon (a working title). The game was being developed at Imagitec from between 1988 and 1989 that was coded and designed by Che Guevara John.
This was an original title that Che developed to try and take full advantage of the Amiga hardware (dual playfield, parallax scrolling, copper/blitter and hardware sprites). The idea was to deliberately replicate the look and feel of the PC Engine import titles that were becoming popular in Europe at the time.
One level was overall developed as a technical demo with an in-house artist (unfortunately their name cannot be recalled), with a view to then refine and expand the gameplay/design elements back in 1988. The game was a sort of souped up version of Kung Fu Master, where you would scroll from right to left and carry out various kung fu moves on different enemies that block your path. It isn’t clear if there were plans for additional gameplay elements.
Che gives a bit of background about the design:
“The game design was set in ‘ancient China’, with the player embarking on a journey to take revenge/rescue their captured family from marauding hordes! It drew heavily on the side-scroller ‘beat ’em up’ genre & Kung Fu narrative tropes popular in the mid-to-late 80’s, featuring boss encounters against distinctive martial arts ‘masters’ and as well as platformers such as The Great Giana Sisters aka Mario :). As mentioned, the look and feel also drew inspiration from PC Engine titles of the era, aiming to tap into that market while leveraging the Amiga’s advanced hardware features etc.”
When Che left Imagitec in 1989 to form a small start-up studio called Lightsource Productions with another employee, he briefly returned to work on the project. The game was pitched to Electronic Arts, who agreed and were to publish the game, but was cancelled soon afterwards.
Che stopped development and pulled out of the project, and down to personal reasons wanted to just return to art and design/broader creative tech. After a fairly intense few years working on Blood Valley, seeing Hill 19 shelved and with Lightsource Productions being started (resulting in the release of Narcissus and Sci-Fi) – it felt like a good time to have a break.
Everything was handed over and Lance Abson took ownership of any remaining Lightsource properties. Interestingly the base-code to the game did resurface around 1995 (when Che was studying his masters), when he was asked to make a game for a film ‘scene’ financed by Barclay’s New Futures and for a school-based project in Wales. This was a project called Smarty Marty.
This wasn’t aimed as a marketed or published title (the school had a bunch of old Amiga’s), and Che had quickly re-worked the graphics and gameplay. Che dug out some screenshots that we’ve added to the gallery – though we’re not sure yet if anything has survived of this updated variant. Che hasn’t located any disks with it by the looks of things. If that changes, then hopefully we’ll be able to add it here in the future as an interesting curiosity!
In 2025, Che got in touch for us to help preserve some Amiga disks with remains of the game, and we are pleased to present a few different builds of the game at different stages. The disks were deteriorating quite a bit, but we have managed to recover pretty much everything – and just in time too, as one or two of the disks wore out after capturing data.
Unfortunately there are a number of sprite glitches, which could be emulation/configuration issues. We have been able to run them fine on a standard Amiga 500 configuration – but let us know if you find a good optimal configuration. We must warn that some of the prototypes are quite volatile too, and will crash if you click the mouse button or press up to jump (especially on the earliest prototypes). Over time we may see fixes to some of these issues, and if so we will add to this page.
Che is also planning to go through the recovered source code to help create a definitive version of the prototype and tidy up a little in the future. Once done, we’ll be sure to add to this page, but Che for now is happy for the current recovered prototypes to go onto the site to be explored. Some of the screens that Che provided from an old video, seem to show more NPC’s compared to the previews we have – so its possible there is more to show (or we have just missed the content!).
Some of the earlier prototypes have a completely different main character, and others also have NPC’s which are not present later on. It seems the design evolved and changed as the year went on, finalizing with a version that had a colourful background and big headed characters. The final version we have recovered seems to drop the colourful background and go for a dark background and single parallax layer.
It is a great glimpse at what was a very promising development and certainly would have felt right at home on the PC Engine.
With a huge thank you to Che Guevara John for allowing us to preserve his work and share with you.
Download
Video
Gallery
