The History of Banshee - the Danish take on the classic 1942

In 1984, a full 42 years ago, Capcom released the game 1942, which can best be described as a classic "vertical scrolling shoot 'em up," where you control a small plane at the bottom of the screen and fly across various landscapes whilst trying to defeat and survive wave after wave of enemies, bosses and much more. It went on to become a huge success in arcades, and later on various computers, all over the world. As a result of this great success, a number of other games naturally followed, trying to capitalise on the winning 1942 formula with varying degrees of quality.

Ten years after the release of Capcom's game, interest in 1942 (and the many games inspired by it) had perhaps waned slightly, but out of the blue came one of the absolute best alternatives to 1942: Banshee. The game was released by the British company Core Design (yes, the ones behind the original Tomb Raider a few years later) and behind the game were two Danish Amiga enthusiasts, designer Jacob Andersen and programmer Søren Hannibal, who together delivered one of the best shooters on the Amiga.

However, the game came into being in a slightly unusual way. It all started when Jacob Andersen and Karsten Hvidberg, who both had roots in the Danish Amiga demo scene, were talking about making a shooter together, and Jacob thought at the time that it might be fun to create something along the lines of 1942, so he set about making loads of aircraft sprites. We've been sent a selection of them by Jacob and you can see them in the article.

However, the project petered out as the two people involved had slightly different views on what was important in a game of that kind, but the work was not wasted. At the same time, Jacob and Søren Hannibal, a programmer also with roots in the Danish Amiga demoscene, had been having casual chats about how, after sixth form, it might be fun to make a game together before they went on to further study. A couple of their mutual friends worked at Core Design in England, and when they told them about their plans, they said they could simply send a demo of the game to the boss, and they would put in a good word for the two Danish lads.

Søren Hannibal "quickly cobbled together a demo of a simple shooter", as Jacob puts it, and it was sent to England. After that, things started to move quickly for the pair. It wasn't long before a couple of plane tickets arrived in the post, along with an invitation to a job interview at Core Design in Derby, England. Jacob tells us that he remembers from the interview that he "didn't really care about the salary, as long as he got an Amiga with a large hard drive and extra memory" and he adds, "the boss must have thought we were idiots", but the two Danish Amiga enthusiasts were simply so excited that they were now going to make a proper game, with a proper salary and everything. Shortly afterwards, Jacob and Søren moved to England to work in earnest on what would eventually become Banshee.

The basic idea was still based on 1942, but as they worked on it, they began to fill the game with lots of strange ideas. At one point, the managers at Core Design probably felt the game lacked a bit of direction, so they attached a writer to the project to pen a backstory. After a few brainstorming sessions between the writer, Jacob and Søren, they ended up with a rather odd story about some aliens who wanted to invade Earth, but as they were having problems with their UFO, they had to fight us earthlings using old military kit from the Second World War. Jacob says: "A rather thin story, but we were fine with that".

Banshee was probably one of the first games to use what we would now call dynamic difficulty. Jacob explains that they struggled to balance the game at the start of development; it was either far too difficult or far too easy. Søren came up with the idea, which was probably quite ground-breaking in the early 1990s, of letting the game track how often the player was hit in relation to how many shots were fired. If the player is struggling, the game automatically adjusts the number of shots and their speed, and this actually meant that the vast majority of new players got quite far in their first playthrough, with the game gradually becoming more difficult as they improved. However, Jacob and Søren didn't tell anyone about this system, because if people knew about it, they could easily cheat their way through the game.

Development progressed for the two lads at Core Design, and Jacob tells us that they actually shared an office with Toby Gard, the man behind the first Tomb Raider, whilst the groundwork for that game was being laid. Core Design brought their own in-house musician, Martin Iveson, onto the project, and he created the sound effects and was responsible for the game's soundtrack. Like both Jacob and Søren, Martin also had roots in the Amiga demo scene particularly the British one so they actually already knew each other.

If you look at the title screen on Banshee's start-up screen, it's a fairly typical 3D rendering for the time, though it's very different from the rest of the game's pixel-art graphics. The reason for this is that Core Design at one point purchased five large Silicon Graphics machines, which were placed in their own workstation room, and the designers had to book time to gain access to the machines. It soon became apparent, however, that these large machines and the demanding software were too much for many of Core Design's graphic artists, and Jacob spotted this. He went to the boss to ask if he "couldn't just grab a machine and put it on his desk" and he was given permission to do so. It was something of a dream setup for a 21-year-old lad, with a fully upgraded Amiga 1200 and a Silicon Graphics 3D workstation.

So the title screen ended up as it is because Jacob was like a kid in a sweet shop when he sat in front of one of these big 3D workstations, but there is a funny little twist to that story. If you look closely, the image used on the outside of the box isn't quite identical to the one used on the title screen inside the game. This is because, at the time, there was no printing company that could convert the image from Jacob's 3D rendering into the correct colours so it could be printed on the box. The solution was to hire an airbrush artist who could reproduce Jacob's image using an airbrush, which is why the image on the box became a strange copy of the title screen in the game.

In 1994, Banshee was released on the Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000 and Amiga CD32. It was very well received by both players and the press, and the respected magazine Computer and Video Games (CVG) wrote, amongst other things, in their review: "If I were a cynical old hack, I'd say Banshee offers nothing new, but I'm not, and the game plays so well I just don't care. [...] There might only be four levels, but they're huge and the two-player option is a blast, so longevity shouldn't be a problem. The only criticism is that it's on four disks, but as it stands, Banshee is the best shoot-'em-up on Amiga since Project X." It has been hailed in several places as "one of the best 2D shooters on any platform" at the time, and when I asked Jacob how Banshee ended up selling, he replied quite briefly: "I think it sold OK; we certainly got a bonus".

At one point, Jacob and Søren considered converting Banshee to the Sega Megadrive, as they felt the game was well-suited to that audience, but it never came to fruition. Shortly after the release of Banshee, they both travelled to Los Angeles to throw themselves into new projects they were to work on with Karsten Hvidberg, who, as you may recall, was the man Jacob wanted to make a little shooter with right at the start of this article. Karsten Hvidbjerg was now living in Los Angeles and wanted both Jacob and Søren to join him there to work on a game together. Karsten Hvidbjerg later went on to work as an Engine Programmer on Hitman: Contracts, Hitman: Blood Money and Hitman 2: Silent Assassin at IO Interactive.

Since leaving Core Design, both Jacob and Søren have worked on a number of games. Søren has worked on games such as Enter the Matrix, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and Minecraft for both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 4, whilst Jacob has worked on a long series of Hitman games, Freedom Fighters and co-founded Reto-Moto, which released Heroes & Generals in 2014.

Jacob concludes this little story about Banshee by recounting that, before he left Core Design, Toby Gard dropped by and asked if he would like to do the graphics for his new game Tomb Raider, but by that point Jacob and Søren had already decided to leave Core Design once the Banshee project was finished, as the opportunities in Los Angeles simply seemed more interesting. Jacob says: "I didn't realise that, right there, I'd just said 'no thanks' to one of the biggest hits of the time, but on the other hand, I probably wouldn't have been involved in making Hitman if I'd said 'yes'. Incidentally, it turned out that when Jacob and the team were pitching Hitman to various publishers many years later, he came across his former boss from Core Design, who was now sitting on the other side of the table at Eidos and his familiarity with Jacob, amongst other things, contributed to him recommending that Eidos sign on for Hitman, which ended up releasing a handful of games in the years that followed.

Banshee was released on the Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000 and Amiga CD32 and never made it to other platforms, nor did it ever get a sequel. The game ended up ranking among the best shooters ever on the Amiga. One could well, in one's quiet mind, go and dream of a full remake of this, the best Danish shooter ever.

We would like to say a big thank you to Jacob for helping us tell the story of Banshee.