North & South was the first Amiga game on this website. It was a conscious choice: For me, it always represented an era of graphically attractive and relatively lightweight, but fun games. It had always been one of my favourites when it came to wasting half an hour with a friend. Even today, it reminds me of more innocent times…
War has never been so much fun?
That's right, those were innocent days in which a war could make for a humoristic scenario and when it didn't really matter what it means if one or the other side wins. No, North & South is more of a parody of all the clichés and myths which you might relate with the American Civil War.
1866. Fenimore Fillmore, lone young gunman stumbles across the mystery of the 3 Skulls of the Toltecs – artefacts which some bad guys are willing to kill for. 1996. The adventure game genre still sees a large amount of new releases, of which the fictionalized accounts of Fenimore are one. 2020. Years have passed since the game's release and I'm playing it again, with the advantage of hindsight wisdom.
One thing we've learned, of course, is that it was already the beginning of the end for the genre of graphic adventures. 3 Skulls wasn't a big success even at the time, but it somehow managed to stay semi-known over time. Today, it can be seen as a poster case for how such games were in the mid-1990s. For better and worse.