Hired Guns
1993 · RPG Shooter · Amiga
Overview
Hired Guns is a 1993 sci-fi RPG shooter developed by DMA Design for the Amiga, featuring a four-player split-screen layout where each screen quadrant shows a different mercenary's first-person perspective simultaneously. Players guide four mercenaries through hostile futuristic corridors, managing equipment, combat, and navigation across all four viewports at once. It was technically remarkable for the era and represented DMA Design at their most experimental.
Deep Dive
Hired Guns presented a genuinely novel concept: four simultaneous first-person views on a single screen, each controlled by a different player or by the AI, all navigating the same 3D environment from different vantage points. The four mercenaries — each with different stats and specialisations — had to cooperate to progress through labyrinthine levels, with each player responsible for their own movement and combat. Even in single-player mode, managing all four characters was complex and rewarding. The game's environments were rendered in texture-mapped 3D, technically impressive for the Amiga in 1993. The sci-fi setting drew on cyberpunk aesthetics, with industrial corridors, alien creatures, and heavy weaponry. Character progression was handled through a simple RPG system of experience and equipment upgrades. The four-mercenary format meant players had to think about party composition, positioning, and resource management alongside the action. Hired Guns was praised for its ambition and technical achievement but criticised for its difficulty and the cognitive demands of managing four characters simultaneously. It sold reasonably well and cemented DMA Design's reputation as an experimental studio. The Dundee team went on to create Lemmings 3D and then, famously, the original Grand Theft Auto in 1997.
Developer Story
DMA Design was founded in Dundee, Scotland, by David Jones, who had previously created Menace and Blood Money for the Amiga. By 1993 the studio had grown to a small but capable team, and Hired Guns represented their most technically ambitious Amiga project. The four-viewport engine was a significant programming achievement. DMA's culture of experimentation and willingness to tackle unconventional design concepts later produced both the Lemmings series and the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
Did You Know?
- Hired Guns featured four simultaneous first-person viewports on a single screen — a technical feat that pushed even well-configured Amiga systems hard.
- DMA Design, the studio behind Hired Guns, later created both the Lemmings series and Grand Theft Auto, making them one of the most influential studios in gaming history.
- The game supported up to four simultaneous human players using a combination of joystick ports and keyboard controls — an unusual cooperative setup for 1993.
- Each of the four mercenary characters had unique stats and equipment specialisations, requiring players to consider team composition carefully before entering missions.