1994 DMA Design / Psygnosis
Platforms: Amiga AGA / CD32
Hired Guns is regarded by many as one of the finest first-person action RPGs ever released on the Amiga, so it should perhaps come as little surprise that an enhanced AGA edition was once in development. Never released commercially, the project remained little more than a rumour for many years until a surviving prototype eventually surfaced online, giving us a fascinating glimpse at what original programmer Scott Johnston had been experimenting with.
For a long time, the existence of the AGA version was only really hinted at. That changed when Scott mentioned the build in a 2000 review of Bloodwych. Whilst discussing the influences behind Hired Guns, Scott casually revealed that an unreleased AGA version existed and noted that one of his favourite sound effects was only present in that enhanced edition.
Over the years, further snippets of information emerged through forum discussions and comments from those connected with the game. Scott later described an enhanced version featuring new levels, new weapons, improved graphics, extra sound effects and a special lighting system. He also noted that one of the most ambitious additions was smoother 45 degree rotation, which consumed a significant amount of the extra memory available on AGA systems.
For a long time, however, that was all anyone had. The enhanced version was spoken about occasionally, but very few people had ever seen it and many wondered whether anything had actually survived.
The origins of Hired Guns
In 2026, Games That Weren’t spoke to original Hired Guns writer Steve Hammond, who provided a wealth of new information about the game, the people involved and the eventual AGA experiment. Steve’s involvement came about in a rather unexpected way, thanks to his love of tabletop role-playing games and science fiction.
“I can thank Cyberpunk 2020 for that!” began Steve. “The tabletop role playing game (of the dark future!) was something I played with non-DMA friends some evenings. Within the game setting you had these ‘screamsheets’, short single-page vitriolic newspapers. I had a dot-matrix printer. I had an Amiga. And I thought it would be so cool to make a real one featuring the adventures of our characters.”
“Of course DMA had a fancy laser printer and so I created a screamsheet of much higher quality… and pinned one to the wall of my not-quite-cubicle (we called them ‘caves’ and weren’t supposed to do that… they preferred open-plan). I was really just trying to hide myself away from the bustle of the office. Right next to the fileserver, which provided some much-needed white noise. Scott and I regularly talked Sci Fi over lunch in town, and at work. One day he ambled across, saw the printout, was impressed, and just asked if I wanted to write the HG story. How could I not?”
Steve went on to develop the characters, story and background, while also starting work on the manual. At the time he was reading Iain M. Banks’ Consider Phlebas, which helped inspire the decision to make the protagonists mercenaries.
What happened to Hired Guns 2?
There had initially been plans for a proper Hired Guns 2, with Steve and Scott discussing where the series could go next. Their shared interest in Celtic history even found its way into the original game.
“It was entirely Scott,” Steve explained when discussing the later AGA project. “We’d been talking about Hired Guns 2, and what we wanted in it. As the original was nearing completion, we discovered a shared interest in Celtic history, and wanted to somehow crowbar this into the new one. There was still a little time until HG was done, so I quickly added a planet to the manual and gave it the Celtic name Taranus, as a little foreshadowing.”
However, Hired Guns only broke even, and Steve recalls being told that piracy meant the sequel was not going ahead. Scott subsequently left DMA. Steve continued to develop ideas for the sequel on his own, but these never progressed beyond notes. Meanwhile, Scott appears to have taken a different route with the original game.
Scott’s AGA experiment
With the arrival of the Amiga CD32 and its additional memory, storage and colour capabilities, Scott began experimenting with an enhanced version of Hired Guns in his own time. “He did coding and graphics… all of it aside from the music,” Steve told us. “With the availability of the Amiga CD32, that allowed more colours, more data, more everything, and Scott started on an enhancement of HG entirely on his own time.”
Exactly what the ultimate commercial intention was remains uncertain. Steve isn’t sure whether it was ever planned as an official release and suspects that Scott may simply have been experimenting with what could be achieved.
“I don’t actually know this, though I suspect it was Scott just tinkering,” Steve explained. “I don’t remember when I found out that it existed, but it must have been after I’d left DMA. Knowing Scott, though, it would certainly have been ambitious.”
That ambition was very much characteristic of Scott’s earlier work too. Steve points out that Scott had already been using techniques that would still sound advanced many years later. “I’ve seen people just this year saying they’re clever because they create 2D game sprites from a 3D render. Scott was doing that in 1991! In the game Walker, animation came from a 3D renderer he wrote in AmigaBasic!”
The surviving prototype certainly reflects that experimental approach, with improved graphics, enhanced sound, lighting effects, new menu systems, AGA-specific colour modes and CD32-related functionality. At one point, Scott had even considered using more advanced artificial intelligence for the enemies.
“At one point he was intending for the Hired Guns enemies to be driven by a neural net, until he was persuaded by the other guys that it was impractical. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d planned some big improvements to the intelligence.”
The AGA prototype
When the prototype eventually surfaced publicly in 2021, it became clear that the project had progressed considerably further than many had expected.
What emerged was an enhanced Amiga CD and CD32-flavoured version of Hired Guns, although exactly what it was intended to become remains slightly unclear. The game refers to itself in various places as Hired Guns Amiga CD and Hired Guns CD AGA, whilst development files refer to it as Hired Guns CD32.
The prototype includes a surprising number of improvements over the original release. There is a completely new introduction sequence, a redesigned front end menu system, a new 256 colour world map, enhanced lighting effects, updated sound effects and a number of graphical improvements throughout the game.
One of the most noticeable changes is the new lighting system. Whilst fairly simple by modern standards, it gives levels a much greater sense of atmosphere compared to the original release. Areas are no longer lit uniformly, with light sources illuminating nearby sections whilst objects cast shadows and block light.
A number of screens were also enhanced to take advantage of AGA hardware. The mission map was regenerated with a much richer colour palette, removing much of the dithering seen in the original release. Between level graphics were also recreated in HAM 8 mode, allowing for dramatically improved colour depth, although parts of the display routines appear unfinished and do not always render correctly in the prototype.
The audio side saw attention too. New weapon sounds were added, including the famous Schmeisser-inspired sub-machine gun effect that Scott had highlighted years earlier. Some existing weapon sounds were replaced, whilst various monsters were also intended to receive a wider range of effects.
The prototype even introduces a brand new weapon. Clavius now starts the game with a Sub-Machine Gun instead of the original Blaster, complete with its own ammunition type and sound effects. Various balance changes were also made to character starting equipment, suggesting that gameplay was still actively being refined.
At some stage the project also appears to have been targeting Commodore’s CD32 console. A special GameCtrl mode was added, along with menu systems that could be controlled without a keyboard. However, the implementation was unfinished. The game still relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts for many functions, support for CD32-specific saving is absent and some controller functionality appears broken.
Attempting to run the prototype directly on a CD32 reveals just how incomplete the conversion remained, with the game eventually dropping out to an AmigaDOS prompt.
What was missing?
One of the biggest surprises from Steve’s recollections is how much of the original story had already been developed outside the game.
Steve’s planned plot involved a hostage rescue which would eventually be revealed as a trap designed to lure a team of mercenaries into field-testing highly illegal biological weapons. The player would then have to obtain proof of what had happened. Unfortunately, the limitations of the original game forced the story to be drastically simplified.
“Then that awful day when I was sat down by Scott and one of the managers Simon, and told that there wasn’t enough space in the game to fit it in!” Steve recalled. “Ultimately the in-game story turned into some guff about blowing stuff up with nukes.”
Much of the wider background nevertheless survived in the manual, including references to The Boundary and the loss of communication with Earth. Steve had also planted ideas for future stories that never got the chance to be explored. One particularly nice example was a fictional piece of technology that appeared in his original story material.
“My version has a page with a camera in it, a relic of the original story, game graphic and everything. It’s a camera where I describe it as an ‘image authentication’ camera, where they footage can be proved to be un-faked. (In 1992 no less!) I think we all need one of those.”
There were even traces of Hired Guns’ earlier history as a fantasy game. Steve recalls that Graeme Anderson created a fantasy introduction sequence before the game’s science fiction direction was established, although as far as he knows that material has since been lost.
Cheule and the ideas that almost survived
Steve also shared an interesting story about Cheule, one of the game’s characters, and what could have become a much more significant part of the series’ wider narrative.
“The character of Cheule is from Earth. Contact was lost with Earth. That would have formed the overall arc plot subsequently had everything gone supernaturally well for me! However… Cheule was in fact the main character, and when I was describing the characters to one of the artists for doing portraits, I described her as black.”
Steve had taken inspiration from Eve in the comic series Third World War, but the intended depiction did not make it into the final artwork.
“The artist subsequently ignored all my descriptions, did a set of a dozen random characters and – because of deadlines – that was now all locked in. So we lost having a black woman as a protagonist in a computer game in 1992. As far as I know that would have been a world first.”
How close was the AGA version?
Although the surviving prototype contains a substantial amount of work, Steve doesn’t regard it as particularly close to a finished release.
“There’s a long way to go,” he tells us. “I think someone’s got it working, but I haven’t seen it. It’d be great to get it into a proper revision control system, get people interested, and finish it. Can’t see that happening, though. But with the latest news about Amiga, maybe there’s the possibility of someone resurrecting and updating it.”
This is important when considering what the AGA version actually represents. It wasn’t simply a nearly finished commercial conversion waiting for a final round of testing. Instead, it appears to have been Scott’s ambitious personal continuation of Hired Guns, with no confirmed publishing plan behind it.
Eventually, work stopped.
How the prototype survived
Around 1998, Scott contacted Steve after no longer having an Amiga and offered him the hard drive containing his development files. In the gallery, you can see the Amiga 1200 dev kit that the game was developed on, thanks to Mike Dailly.
“He contacted me sometime in 1998, saying that he no longer had an Amiga and would I like the hard drive with all the dev files on it. Obviously I said yes, he posted it to me, and I turned the drive into a large zip file for preservation.”
Steve kept the material privately for many years, eventually passing copies onwards. He also tried to secure official permission for a wider release.
“I can’t remember who it was managed to get official permission from Psygnosis for the level editor to be released. I later contacted Sony (yeah, it was still possible to do that back then!) to get permission to release the whole lot as open source. The reply showed that they didn’t really know what that meant (what was my business plan???) and the effort stalled.”
The prototype was eventually provided to members of the retro gaming community who helped get it into circulation. Steve stresses that he did not personally upload it to the Internet Archive, but confirms that the publicly available version can ultimately be traced back to the hard drive Scott sent him.
A surviving piece of Hired Guns history
There is very little surviving material compared with some of the larger projects Steve worked on, but his archive still contains a fascinating collection of related material.
“I have a few printouts, lists of weapons, level design template printouts and a whole load of prints of my text, including in my idea of a manual. I have some concept drawings of spacecraft I made for that manual, but all that was mostly sundry, not included in the game proper.”
He also has early graphical material from before the final version of Hired Guns. “Certainly I have some graphics from a very early version. That was when Scott had the digitised giant heads of some staff travelling up and down the levels. Proof of concept, I think!”
Some of the material Steve supplied, including scans from his original manual, you can find below in the gallery. Despite everything that was lost, Steve is pleased that players can finally experience the AGA work.
The game clearly remained close to Steve’s heart. He recalls fans asking him to sign several original Hired Guns boxes at Kickstart 3 in 2026, something which he found remarkable after all these years. The AGA version may never have become the official enhanced release that some Amiga owners hoped for, but it is now possible to experience this unusual continuation of one of the system’s most respected games.
It also raises the possibility of more material surviving elsewhere. Given that Scott’s original hard drive, Steve’s own archive and other copies all existed independently, there may still be further development files, artwork or builds waiting to be found.
For now, the surviving prototype provides a unique glimpse at Scott Johnston’s continued experimentation with Hired Guns, while Steve Hammond’s recollections add a fascinating amount of context around both the original game and the ideas that never quite made it into it. Hopefully more of the story can be preserved in the future.
With a huge thank you to Steve Hammond for taking the time to share his memories, answer our questions and provide further material from his personal archive.
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Interview with Steve Hammond
In August 2026, Games That Weren’t spoke with original Hired Guns writer Steve Hammond about his involvement with the game, Scott Johnston’s AGA experiment, the story ideas that were cut, the survival of the development files and some of the many other projects and anecdotes surrounding his time at DMA Design.
Steve very kindly provided extensive answers, along with scans and other surviving material from his archive. The complete interview follows below.
Frank: For readers who may not know, what was your role on Hired Guns and how did you become involved with the project?
Steve: I can thank Cyberpunk 2020 for that! The tabletop role playing game (of the dark future!) was something I played with non-DMA friends some evenings. Within the game setting you had these “screamsheets”, short single-page vitriolic newspapers. I had a dot-matrix printer. I had an Amiga. And I thought it would be so cool to make a real one featuring the adventures of our characters.
Of course DMA had a fancy laser printer and so I created a screamsheet of much higher quality… and pinned one to the wall of my not-quite-cubicle (we called them “caves” and weren’t supposed to do that… they preferred open-plan). I was really just trying to hide myself away from the bustle of the office. Right next to the fileserver, which provided some much-needed white noise.
Scott and I regularly talked Sci Fi over lunch in town, and at work. One day he ambled across, saw the printout, was impressed, and just asked if I wanted to write the HG story. How could I not?
So that was what happened, I started working on the characters, the story, and the background. I also made a start on turning it all into a manual. At the time I was reading Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, which inspired me to make the characters mercenaries.
Frank: Scott Johnston’s name is closely associated with both the original game and the AGA version. How much of the enhanced version was being driven by Scott, and who else was involved?
Steve: It was entirely Scott. We’d been talking about Hired Guns 2, and what we wanted in it. As the original was nearing completion, we discovered a shared interest in Celtic history, and wanted to somehow crowbar this into the new one. There was still a little time until HG was done, so I quickly added a planet to the manual and gave it the Celtic name Taranus, as a little foreshadowing.
Hired Guns broke even. I was told that piracy meant HG2 wasn’t going ahead, and Scott subsequently left DMA. I’m pretty sure that played a part in his decision.After that I didn’t have much contact with him.
In the aftermath, I worked on an idea for Hired Guns 2 anyway, which would only really have had the name in common, but it didn’t get any further than some notes. I wanted the background to be two warring alien races, in which a human colony ship – unarmed – finds itself in the middle of it all. The fun would come from improving weapons from anything on board. Medical lasers, carving knives, that sort of thing.
With the availability of the Amiga CD32, that allowed more colours, more data, more everything, and Scott started on an enhancement of HG entirely on his own time. He did coding and graphics… all of it aside from the music. I’m not sure what the overall plan was for publishing, but eventually he gave up on it without it being finished. He contacted me sometime in 1998, saying that he no longer had an Amiga and would I like the hard drive with all the dev files on it.
Obviously I said yes, he posted it to me, and I turned the drive into a large zip file for preservation. I can’t remember who it was managed to get official permission from Psygnosis for the level editor to be released. I later contacted Sony (yeah, it was still possible to do that back then!) to get permission to release the whole lot as open source. The reply showed that they didn’t really know what that meant (what was my business plan???) and the effort stalled.
Frank: What was the original goal for Hired Guns AGA? Was it intended as a straightforward enhancement, a CD32 release, or something more ambitious?
Steve: I don’t actually know this, though I suspect it was Scott just tinkering. I don’t remember when I found out that it existed, but it must have been after I’d left DMA. Knowing Scott, though, it would certainly have been ambitious. I’ve seen people just this year saying they’re clever because they create 2D game sprites from a 3D render. Scott was doing that in 1991! In the game Walker, animation came from a 3D renderer he wrote in AmigaBasic!
At one point he was intending for the Hired Guns enemies to be driven by a neural net, until he was persuaded by the other guys that it was impractical. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d planned some big improvements to the intelligence.
Frank: Looking back now, how complete would you say the project actually was when development stopped, and how close did you feel it was to a potential release?
Steve: There’s a long way to go. I think someone’s got it working, but haven’t seen it. It’d be great to get it into a proper revision control system, get people interested, and finish it. Can’t see that happening, though. But with the latest news about Amiga, maybe there’s the possibility of someone resurrecting and updating it.
Frank: The prototype hints at additional levels, content and features that never made it into the public build. What was originally planned that we don’t get to see today?
Steve: Bit of a tale, that one. Literally. What never made it into the game was my original plot! It was a hostage rescue, in which it is eventually revealed to be a ploy to lure in a team of mercenaries. The truth being that they were only there to provide a field test for some highly-illegal biological creatures created as weapons. The story then became obtaining proof.
Then that awful day when I was sat down by Scott and one of the managers Simon, and told that there wasn’t enough space in the game to fit it in! Ultimately the in-game story turned into some guff about blowing stuff up with nukes.
The background in the manual remained intact for the most part, set against The Boundary ten years previously in which all communication was lost with Earth. I put in a lot of details which were intended to pay off later. In fact I was halfway through typesetting the manual myself when Psygnosis decided they were going to do it (or at least get a third party to do it.) My version has a page with a camera in it, a relic of the original story, game graphic and everything. It’s a camera where I describe it as an “image authentication” camera, where they footage can be proved to be un-faked. (In 1992 no less!) I think we all need one of those.
But there’s some distorted elements in evidence, such as the box cover saying they were fighting “mutants”, which was so far from the truth. And I guess a lot of the assets, from before I started causing trouble, never made it in because HG was originally a fantasy game. Graeme Anderson animated a fantasy intro sequence which as far as I know has been lost to time.
Frank: What ultimately happened to the project, and why did it never reach release?
Steve: Ultimately, it wasn’t an official project. It was owned by Psygnosis, who were bought by Sony, so as far as I know it belongs to them. Around the same time – 1997 – I was working on a Hired Guns remake with Devils Thumb Entertainment. DMA was bought by Gremlin, who were a publisher. HG being owned by Psygnosis – a different publisher – meant the project had to go. And it did… to DTE for which I had to go freelance to keep working on it.
The remake was using the Unreal Engine, for modern PCs (as they were then) so no push to do anything Amiga-related. The remake stalled, I was let go because they said they weren’t using third parties anymore, and that was that. No more games industry for me. I have an unfinished ISO of that, grabbed from a dark corner of the web, but in 20+ years I haven’t found the will to even try looking at it. From what I’ve seen of YouTube clips, it was kind of uninspired.
Still, I ended up with a whole load of story and further background I wrote… most of which I did late at night at home. Not on company time! Only way to get the peace to think properly!
Frank: Are there any particular features in the AGA version that you’re especially proud of or wish players had seen properly finished?
Steve: I can’t speak for Scott, and I’m probably being a bit selfish when I think that the main thing I want players to see is my story. After the release, I planned out in rough detail the next stages of the tale. I even knew how the whole thing was supposed to end after five games (yeah, very much inspired by Babylon 5 which I was and am a huge fan of.)
These days I’m trying to muster the willpower to write a novel based on all those ideas which never quite made it in, the stuff I fleshed out afterwards, and all the things I figured I would change. Probably an entirely new story by now.
Proud… well, the most pride I have is something which /almost/ made it in. The character of Cheule is from Earth. Contact was lost with Earth. That would have formed the overall arc plot subsequently had everything gone supernaturally well for me! However… Cheule was in fact the main character, and when I was describing the characters to one of the artists for doing portraits, I described her as black. My inspiration was Eve in the comic series Third World War. The artist subsequently ignored all my descriptions, did a set of a dozen random characters and – because of deadlines – that was now all locked in. So we lost having a black woman as a protagonist in a computer game in 1992. As far as I know that would have been a world first.
I remember one magazine at the time said in a review something like Hired Guns has robots! Hired Guns has women! Hired Guns has robot women! I am utterly baffled at some of the present-day gamers who get all weird about a game having a woman or someone of colour as a main character or indeed having any diversity at all. A stream of short-haired white chiselled men with stubble and a grimace gets old after a while. Pick your protagonist out of a line-up!
Frank: After keeping hold of the files for so many years, how do you feel about people finally being able to experience the AGA version today?
Steve: So glad. It’s the authentic Hired Guns experience. Someone, years ago, tried making their own modern version, which didn’t get very far. Someone else got a decent way into making a Sci Fi dungeon crawler which was explicitly inspired by Hired Guns. There’s not much fan art out there, but I have seen some. And from comments made over the years, I know HG is highly regarded. It would be nice to reward them.
At Kickstart 3 this year, I must have signed at least four or five Hired Guns boxes, and that feels remarkable to me. I just want to do something nice for them!
Frank: Is there any additional material still out there, such as source code, artwork, design notes, earlier/later builds or even concepts that never progressed beyond the planning stage?
Steve: There’s very little compared to all the other big projects. I have a few printouts, lists of weapons, level design template printouts and a whole load of prints of my text, including in my idea of a manual. I have some concept drawings of spacecraft I made for that manual, but all that was mostly sundry, not included in the game proper. If there were any concept drawings made by the artists, I never saw them.
Certainly I have some graphics from a very early version. That was when Scott had the digitised giant heads of some staff travelling up and down the levels. Proof of concept, I think!
Frank: Are there any other memories or anecdotes about the development of Hired Guns (and maybe specifically the AGA edition) that you’d like to share?
Steve: Yeah! Because I’m an astronomy nut, I wanted to have the star system in Hired Guns be a real one. I had a book called The Science in Science Fiction which had a diagram of the nearest stars to the Sun, which I thought looked really cool. So I arbitrarily chose one just over 11 light years away, Luyten L789-6. (For some reason it’s just referred to in the manual as Luyten). Turns out, years later, when I was seriously into astronomy to the point of doing an Open University course – and passing! – that I looked back at the diagram and saw loads of mistakes! The book had the magnitude diagram backwards! I’d thought they were all sun-like stars because they were depicted in yellow, but L786-6 is a red dwarf!
So anyway, when we found out about Frontier: Elite II and that all the stars were real ones, Scott wrote to David Braben to try and get some easter eggs in Elite: our (real) star system and vice-versa, but we never heard back. That would have been so cool, though.
If/when I do the novel I’m going to totally lean into the red dwarf part. Because it’s actually a triple-star system, all red dwarfs, all flare stars. Now that’s more interesting than a plain old star like the Sun…
Oh, and the copy protection in HG where you have to enter a star parameter from a list in the manual? I wrote a Pascal program to generate those values. Values which, in retrospect, might have been pure nonsense! But of course no-one ever pulled us up on that.
I remember water being a relatively late addition to the game.
And… and… I’m sure any followup questions will prompt some other memories. Thanks for asking me about HG. It deserves some love!
