Gloom
1995
Publisher: Black Magic
Maybe the first well designed Doom clone for the Amiga. You should own a quite expert Amiga config to play it with good graphics and speed. A 68040 cpu required! Gloom is a hard game, with brutal ADULT scenes. The enemies can blast, the blood is spluttering, etc.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the first successful Doom clone for the Amiga (Gloom was released in the same year as, but before, Alien Breed 3D) came from Germany. Irony, because the German system of laws is all but friendly towards this genre. Justification of violence is considered a punishable offense; violent games or movies might also run afoul of the constitutional article that human dignity is sacrosanct; but what what might happen at the least, and what usually happens, is that violent games get "indicted": They are considered detrimental to adolescents, and while they still may be legally owned or sold, they must not be sold to minors or by mail order, displayed where minors could see them, or even advertised where minors might see the ad. Since courts have found that even a neutral review constitutes advertising, you are not even supposed to mention them in public. In the German version of Marc Saltzman's "Game Design: Secrets of the Sages", offending titles like Doom, Heretic, Quake or Duke Nukem 3D were replaced by random strings sharing only length and first letter with what they replaced. A CD with add-on levels for Doom was sold under the title Toom. This aversion to violence is not a post-WWII development, by the way: up to about 1910, boxing matches were illegal in Germany and therefore performed in secret, behind closed doors.
Of course, it also shows the growing importance of the Amiga for the German gaming landscape. The Germans discovered the Amiga later than other European nations, but then they became its most loyal followers. France, it seems, never knew another platform. The French gaming industry rose and fell with the Amiga. The British gaming industry started out on the Commodore 64 and domestic micros. With Pipe Mania and Lemmings the Amiga had become the default platform, but was increasingly abandoned for the PC from 1994 on. In Germany, however, Commodore 64 and Atari ST remained the most popular platforms well into the early 90s. The oldest German Amiga game in this collection is Sexy Droids from 1992. But then development continued into 1996, often done by Austrian companies who, of course, catered a lot to the German market.
There's not much to say about the game itself. It is generally considered one of the best Doom clones on the Amiga. It had modem, null-modem, and split-screen multiplayer, with a horizontally split screen. And like the others, it could not hide the fact that an Amiga 1200 wasn't really made for this sort of game, but it was successful enough to warrant a few sequels.