The full 1993 Amiga game — the real disks, finally free

In 1993, in Baghdad, three of us made a video game.

I'm Rabah Shihab. I wrote it in pure 68000 assembly on a single Amiga 500 — 512KB of RAM, no hard drive, plugged into a TV. Murtadha Salman painted the palaces of Assyria pixel by pixel. Mahir AlSalman composed the music, sampling real Iraqi instruments for the soundtrack. We worked under sanctions: no internet, no Amiga manuals — just one copy of the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual, which I used to program the hardware directly — electricity a few hours a day. The 50°C summers killed the disk drive three times. We finished it anyway — the first commercial video game made in Iraq — and then Commodore collapsed, the sanctions scared off every publisher, and a finished game had nowhere to go.

In 2008 the English Amiga Board found my brother's old gameplay footage on YouTube and started a thread — "Babylonian Twins — An Amiga game?!" — that ran to 24 pages. They tracked us down. A playable demo followed, downloaded in over 70 countries. But the full game never came out. Until now.

This is that ending. The complete original game, on its two original disks, free.

What's in the download

• The authentic full game on its two original disks (Disk 1 boots; insert Disk 2 when the game asks) — .ADF for FS-UAE / WinUAE or real hardware
• The 1993 demo ADF, kept here as history
• Manual and design-note scans are coming in a follow-up devlog

If you want more of the story, there's a heritage page at babyloniantwins.com/1993. And for anyone who'd like to play a rebuilt version on a modern machine, a Definitive Edition is coming to Steam this fall — but that's not why this page exists. This page is for the community that never stopped asking. Thank you for keeping it alive.

— Rabah Shihab