Remember making art on the Amiga with Deluxe Paint? The stunning Tutenkamen image shifted thousands of Amiga 500s in the UK, with bundles featuring Deluxe Paint along with the usual games.
Pretty much every paint and graphic art application in use today across all desktop platforms draws from the design language of Electronic Arts’ (today known as EA) Deluxe Paint. The Retro Hour‘s Dan Wood takes an in-depth look at Deluxe Paint (which recently featured in Amiga Addict #6) in a new video (above).
Deluxe Paint is a bitmap graphics editor series created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts, which became the standard for pixel graphics in video games in the 80s and 90s. I take a brief look through it’s history and different versions.
Deluxe Paint had a multitude of uses, from static art like Tutenkamen to bitmap and level design for video games. Lemmings, Another World, and Wolfenstein 3D all featured graphics designed on an Amiga with Deluxe Paint, as did many console games. The software was ported to Apple IIGS, MS-DOS, and Atari ST. The final version for the Amiga was Deluxe Paint V in 1995, released on CD-ROM and floppy.
Learn more about the history and use of the stunning graphics package that basically sold the Amiga in the video above. Meanwhile, here’s something by me created in Deluxe Paint III, retrieved from old disks using an Armiga.
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Christian Cawley is a writer and editor who covers consumer electronics, IT, and entertainment media. He has written for publications such as Computer Weekly, Linux Format, MakeUseOf.com, and Tech Radar.
He also produces podcasts, has a cigar box guitar, and of course, loves retro gaming.