Computing counts down the best ever titles released on the Amiga
26. Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker
You know what real snooker's missing? Cheeky balls that pull faces and blow raspberries at you when you're lining up a tricky shot. Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker immediately righted that wrong upon its release in 1991.
But it was far from being about the gimmicks, this was a game that made full use of the 16-bit home computers of the era, with crisp graphics, an intuitive interface, and great 3D modelling, which made the balls behave believably and created a genuine feeling of the real thing.
In fact, coding the physics alone took one-man coding team Archer MacLean several months to complete.
The game was promoted by a novel marketing technique: a snooker tournament played in-game, held in Virgin Stores, Virgin being its publisher. Regional heats were held across the UK, with the winner playing MacLean himself, with Jimmy White commentating. Somehow, we can't help but feel it may have been better the other way around...
