Babylonian Twins has taken a rather unusual route to release. Work on the Amiga puzzle-platformer finished in 1993, yet the game never made it onto shop shelves. More than 30 years later, the complete Amiga version is finally available to play. This isn’t a remake. Nor is it a modern recreation built from surviving artwork and notes. It’s the original two-disk Amiga game, supplied as ADF disk images for use with emulators or compatible Commodore hardware. For Amiga players, it’s a curious new arrival from an era most people assumed had stopped producing surprises years ago.
Built in Baghdad on an Amiga 500
Babylonian Twins was developed in Baghdad by programmer Rabah Shihab, artist Murtadha Salman and musician Mahir AlSalman. The team created the game using a single Amiga 500 equipped with 512KB of RAM, no hard drive and a television serving as its display.
Shihab wrote the game in Motorola 68000 assembly language. Development relied heavily on the Amiga Hardware Reference Manual, with direct access to the machine’s hardware forming a large part of the programming process.
Salman produced the graphics pixel by pixel, building environments inspired by ancient Mesopotamian and Assyrian architecture. Palaces, platforms and decorative details were created around the limits of the Amiga’s display hardware rather than converted from artwork produced elsewhere.
AlSalman handled the music. His soundtrack used samples from Iraqi instruments, giving Babylonian Twins an audio identity closely tied to its setting. The project is described as the first commercial Amiga video game developed in Iraq.
Finished in 1993, but never released
Babylonian Twins reached completion, but getting a commercial Amiga game from Baghdad into shops proved another matter. By the mid-1990s, Commodore’s collapse had badly damaged the commercial Amiga market. International sanctions created further problems for publishing and distribution from Iraq. The finished game never received its planned retail launch. For years, Babylonian Twins remained largely unseen.
Interest picked up after footage appeared online. The developers were later traced, and a playable Amiga demo surfaced in 2008. Players could finally try part of a game developed 15 years earlier, though the complete Amiga edition remained unavailable.
The name didn’t disappear. Babylonian Twins later reached mobile platforms, and work continued on Babylonian Twins: Definitive Edition for modern systems. This new Amiga release is different. It’s the 1993 game itself.
The complete game comes on two Amiga disks
The full version arrives as two 880KB ADF files, matching the familiar floppy-disk format used by Amiga emulators and disk-transfer tools. Disk 1 boots the game. Disk 2 goes in when requested. There’s little ceremony involved, which suits the software perfectly. Load the first disk and you’re playing an Amiga title built during the machine’s commercial life. A separate ADF containing the 1993 playable demo is included too.
Anyone using an emulator can run Babylonian Twins through software such as WinUAE or FS-UAE. Owners of original machines can transfer the disk images using suitable Amiga storage or disk-writing hardware.
The recommended real-hardware setup is modest: an Amiga 500 with 512KB of chip RAM plus another 512KB of slow RAM. In other words, hardware close to a common Amiga 500 configuration should be enough. Scans of the manual and development notes are planned for a later update.
A new Amiga release from 1993
Babylonian Twins now occupies an unusual spot in the Amiga catalogue. It’s a newly available game, yet its code, graphics and music come directly from 1993. There’s no need to treat it as anything more complicated.
Three students in Baghdad built a commercial Amiga puzzle-platformer on limited hardware. They completed it. Circumstances prevented a retail release. Decades later, the original two-disk version has reached players in playable form.
For anyone interested in Amiga games, Motorola 68000 programming or lesser-seen releases from the platform’s commercial years, Babylonian Twins offers something refreshingly straightforward: a finished Amiga game from 1993 which most players never had a chance to play. Now they can.
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