Tom & Jerry - Hunting High and Low (AMI)

Tom & Jerry - Hunting High and Low

Platform:	Amiga
Year:	1989
Developer:	Parsec Software, Magic Bytes

Tom & Jerry - Hunting High and Low is a platformer and the first video game based on the famous cat-and-mouse cartoons.

Jerry must eat all 50 pieces of cheese spread over five rooms within 10 minutes. Through holes, Jerry travels to another room and either wins or loses a few seconds. Tom keeps throwing Jerry onto the floor and catching him there, costing you 30 seconds, but Jerry can distract him using various objects.

German Magic Bytes got a license to Tom & Jerry and made all graphics, Parsec Software had come over from Denmark and made all Amiga audio, and both companies did programming. Although most magazines pointed out the sluggish controls and boring gameplay, Magic Bytes gave Europe a direct Atari ST port and a sequel with changed rooms.

Screenshots

ROAR!

The title card. 10 seconds silence.

Hold Alt and left mouse button to skip.

There's no time to lose.

20-second hurdles.

The last laugh.

Music

The Amiga soundtrack consists of three public domain songs, played on mainly orchestral samples, and some cartoon sound effects.

Once we see Jerry in a room, an upbeat rag begins to loop. Inside a hole, The Barber of Seville plays for 20 seconds. In between, you can switch between both songs by putting Jerry on a radio and pulling the joystick towards you. When Tom catches Jerry on the Amiga, the music stops, his laugh from the 1955 episode "Pecos Pest" plays, and the music restarts.

The music is arranged for three channels, leaving one channel for sound effects. From where the five sound effects and nine instruments originated is unknown, but they all appear to be sampled at 10000 Hz.

Magazines gave the Amiga sound of Tom & Jerry - Hunting High and Low the best reviews, if still mixed and sometimes ambiguous: 62% as a "lullaby blares", 63% for a "good" and "very cartoon-like continuous tune", 7/15 for reproducing "Tom's manic laughter perfectly" and the mousehole soundtrack sounding like "a turbo-charged Russ Conway on a Bon-Tempi organ", and CU Amiga-64 calling the sound both "a poor imitation of the Tom & Jerry theme" and "decent". Commodore Computing International wrote: "Thanks to some sampled effects, a hint of humour shines through." The highest rating was 77% from Génération 4. Nowadays on YouTube, it is the other way round: Commenters got tired of Tom's laugh, and the music's most specific description is "screechy, scratchy".

The sequel merely adds three new samples for piano, cello, and drum, and reuses a sample in room 4. The 8-bit versions have very different audio, apart from having a 20-second Barber.

Recording

The music was recorded in WinUAE 5.3.1 with NTSC off, Audio filter Emulated (A500), and Stereo separation 100%. The game was modified not to play sound effects, and each looping song was played twice plus 10 seconds for fade-out.

#	Title	Composer	Arranger	Length	Download
101	Magic Bytes	Georg Brandt	Unknown	0:12	Download
102	Enter Room (Heliotrope Bouquet)	Scott Joplin and Louis Chauvin	Jim Rankenberg	3:06	Download
103	Hole and Radio (The Barber of Seville)	Gioachino Rossini	Jim Rankenberg	1:55	Download
104	Time's Up! (The Ragtime Dance)	Scott Joplin	Jim Rankenberg	0:19	Download

Credits

Ripper: ExoticA (playable), Professor Chaos (separate files)
Recorder: Professor Chaos
Game Credits:
- Music by: Jim Rankenberg
- Sound Fx by: Allan Pedersen
- Not Credited Composer: Georg Brandt
- Not Credited Composer: Gioachino Rossini
- Not Credited Composer: Louis Chauvin
- Not Credited Composer: Scott Joplin
- Not Credited Arranger (track 1): Unknown
- Not Credited Programmer (track 1): Unknown
- Not Credited Programmer (tracks 2–4): Unknown