Deluxe Paint - History

History

DPaint was the product of an in-house art development tool called Prism. As Silva added additional features to Prism, it was turned into a showcase product to coincide with the Amiga's debut in 1985. After release, it was quickly embraced by the Amiga community and became the defacto graphics (and later animation) editor for the platform. It was used almost ubiquitously in the making of Amiga games, animation and demoscene productions. Amiga manufacturer Commodore International later commissioned EA to create version 4.5 AGA for bundling with the new Advanced Graphics Architecture chipset (A1200, A4000) capable Amigas. Version 5 was the final release after Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994.

With the development of Deluxe Paint, EA introduced the ILBM and ANIM file format standards for graphics. Although widely used on the Amiga, they never gained widespread end user acceptance on other platforms, but were heavily used by game development companies. Dpaint was used by Lucasarts to make graphics for their adventure games such as Monkey Island, and is the source of the name of the main character in the Monkey Island series, Guybrush Threepwood - the character's name derived from the file used to store his image data. Contrary to popular belief however, the original source sprite was not named "guy.brush" as the file extension used was ".bbm" and not ".brush". The file was in fact named "guybrush.bbm", the "brush" portion of the file name being included by the artist behind the character, Steve Purcell.

Early versions of Deluxe Paint were available in both protected and non copy-protected versions, the latter retailing for a slightly higher price. This copy-protection was later dropped. Deluxe Paint was part of a series of products from the Electronic Arts Tools group—later moved to the ICE (for Interactivity, Creativity, and Education) group—which included such Amiga programs as Deluxe Music, Deluxe Video, and the Studio series of paint programs for the Macintosh.