Utopia! Do you remember that old Amiga-game from the early 90s? DJ Daemon remembers the game that may have paved the way for many later real time strategy games.It was itself not an RTS, and it was by and large later forgotten until people got nostalgic. Here is the story and an hour with tracker music mostly from 2025 and 2026. A mix of the old and the new.
Playlist:
00:00 ericade.radio - Time for Flashback, tracks from the past - today with a stories from the retro past
00:06 DJ Daemon: It's time for another retro game story. We haven't done these for years now. So, it's something that has to be fixed right now. And today's game is Utopia from Gremlin software. Time for "the creation of a nation" in space. Because space is awesome! First out today is Barry Leitch the intro song from the game itself. Enjoy!
00:30 Barry Leitch - Utopia tune 1
07:26 DJ Daemon: The year was 1991 when Utopia was released for the Amiga, Atari and the PC. It was a bold decision, trying to cater to the Amiga platform. In this year it was in a steady decline, and the Amiga 1200 had not even been released. But I digress… This game was not the success Gremlin had hoped for. But it has been remembered by several retro gamers through the ages. I will talk more about my theories as to why it didn't succeed. But we must start with the basics. You know the game story, the game play, the graphics and the sound. But first, let's go to music. Here comes… lt;artist, songgt;
08:09 Shadabim - Element wind
16:52 DJ Daemon: Let's delve into the game itself. I played it on my Amiga in the early 90s. It starts with a nice clip show telling the story of the man who you will play as in the game. He is unable to stop an attack on his colony and finally gives this unfortunate order to abandon it and flee. But this is only a simulation that had no solution. He heeded Sun Tzus 34th stratagem and fled. This was the correct action and he passes the test. This is how the Kobayashi-Maru scenario in Star Trek was intended to play out by the way. And you have your Picard style administrator. Yeah, he's bald. The game starts when he is assigned the role of the colony leader on an uncharted planet. The honeymoon is soon over as the planet has a set of insectoids already living there. And as history has shown us so many times before, only one species will be left standing.
18:04 Melodia - Study in a0x major
23:53 DJ Daemon: Alright, Utopia then. It plays like a mix of Sim city and a real time strategy game. This was before that latter genre even existed. So, you have to manage the budget, the enemies, the need of the people and the QOL. QOL? Yes, the main metric is the "quality of life". It's a value that ranges between 0 - 100 and keeping it high is imperative. If it starts sinking, your Utopia becomes a dystopia. Crime rates shot up and if it sinks low enough someone will put a price on your head. If you fail this way, you meet the most mild-mannered assassin ever and then it’s game over. So keeping your people happy while funding your spy network and preparing to the inevitable war is the whole game play. You build warehouses, living quarters, power plants and airbases. Also, this is not the world of today. You have to keep a balanced budget.
25:12 Dippy - Diskmag dance (opl2 mix)
30:06 DJ Daemon: The graphics is something nice. By the standards of the day, it was a little bit stale, but have aged well in my opinion. The buildings look nice and the graphics are your typical 16bit era pixel graphics. Your council is manned by aliens and some woman that looks mostly human. It's well drawn and gives the game a visual appeal. The screens show statistics so you can fix the budget, know if people are angry and know what needs to be built next. I played the game on my Amiga 500 and it was showing its age already back then. But as far as I remember, it was running smoothly. And I had a Final Cartridge 2 that meant I could pause the game an edit the memory contents of the Amiga. I amused my little brother Philip by changing some of the game's warning. So attacks were named "Philip attacks" and he loved it.
31:18 JustOrb - De Honingemmer
35:42 DJ Daemon: The music. You know this one, it was Barry Leitch and that was the tune we started this episode with. If your pod player can handle chapters, feel free to jump back to ít and enjoy some of the best Amiga mod music there has ever been. Not to be that guy, but the music eventually becomes tedious as you only have four songs. One of them is a pretty nice but unimaginative version of Pachelbel’s "canon D". Where have we heard that before? Well, everywhere. Even some rap-song use it. Still until you get tired of it, it's nice to have in the background.
36:35 ASIKWUSpulse - Summer bells (in space)
40:22 DJ Daemon: The game is funny and engaging. You must eventually go up against those pesky bugs. To quote "Ron Perlman" from some obscure game: "War… War never changes". This means first you must have your spy network reporting on what is happening and having them at peak efficiency is expensive. Then you have to build an army. The war machine then attacks the enemies off map, and you get a report that is as detailed as your spies have a budget to do. It will take a lot of time to route the enemies, and they can and will attack you back or if you don't deal with them soon enough.
41:09 Juice - Cryptomnesia
44:43 DJ Daemon: Are there any bad sides to the game? Well… When the bugs have been eliminated, the game goes on autopilot. It spams you with requests to fix various shortages. You also must fight the quality of life issues that popup. The there is not much going on. It has the same problem as Sim City without its obvious solution. In Sim City, you can always bring cool disasters to spice things up a little. Then you rebuild the damage until you get bored and bring another disaster along. I once blew up a nuclear power plant in Sim City 3000. The area was forever irradiated. Utopia brings no such solution to the table. It's just tedious at this time. And when you have played all maps with different bug enemies, it does not offer that much replay ability. But in small doses, this game offers many hours of great nation building.
45:55 Fear of dark - Labrat funk (Mesdup)
49:24 DJ Daemon: So why didn't it become a classic and legendary game? Here is my take of it: it was released before RTS was a thing. RTS stands for "Real time strategy". And Utopia plays as "Prototype" for such a game. Games like Dune, Red alert and Command and Conquer gained popularity soon after and prospered in the a time span between mid-90s and mid-00s. It was released to the PC but does not have seen such a big impact. A sequel was released, but I don't know much about it. The Amiga went away in 1994. It was in a steady decline even back then. So there were not much that could be done to save it. Also, it kind of didn't really look like games like Sim City or Civilization. It was a novel idea that went under as it failed to be interesting in the long run. But for me it was easy: I loved the game. It was exactly my kind of game with a mix of management, strategy and real time war. It may not have been a game that stood the test of time, but it kind build legacy of its own. Music, you say? Yes!
50:58 Shatty - Theme of Simon Belmont
54:22 DJ Daemon tells you that most of the music was made in 2025 and 2026.
54:42 Fear of dark - Hell freezes over
58:09 DJ Daemon leads you into the good night with the last song.
58:24 Nikku4211 - Aquatic ambience
Production notes:
Going back to producing episodes with some storytelling. You know like we used to do back in the day.
Errata: the administrator is not really bald, I just remember him as such. He is pretty Picard, though.
Insight: Kobayashi Maru was a scenario presented to Star Trek captain James T. Kirk. It was not winnable, but the captain hacked the simulation and won it. Utopia's counterpart does not play out that way at all. I'm just saying.
Colophon: None. That's exact name of the game.
Tags: 2026, Amiga, Storytelling, Retro history, Host: DJ Daemon, Utopia
