In 1986 it was originally released on the Mac in 2 colours. In 1987 it was completely redesigned for the Commodore Amiga which was ridiculously powerful for the time and cost $1500 which is $3100 in today's money. It was then ported to the PC and to view it in VGA as you see here you would have had to have bought a bleeding edge graphics card for your PC which would have cost about $800 ($1670 now) let alone the cost of the actual computer. Everyone else who would have been sensible would have waited into the 90s to get a card of that specification for much cheaper.

***** That explains a LOT. I thought those graphics were a bit too good to be true for 1987. Obviously they're from 1987, but the average person wasn't going to get that kind of experience.

Notice that although the graphics are big and colourful, there's not a lot of gameplay going on. The system wasn't powerful enough to throw around those graphics in a meaningful way, the equivalent of cutscenes looking better than gameplay today. The Amiga even with upgraded ram and firmware in the form of the 500+ couldn't keep up when the SNES arrived although it still beat it hands down in sound capability (this game isn't a good example). Imagine if you could do the same thing today.... Buying an expensive graphics card to play standard games in a ridiculous resolution doesn't count. There's no aspirational advanced hardware these days like an equivelent of an Amiga or Neo Geo in the 8bi/16bit days. PCs have outpaced consoles and the better technology gets the more expensive games are to produce.

Daytime Sky This collection has the... considerably less impressive looking DOS version as well. I should maybe do a quick post of that one too at some point.