The Chaos Engine

The Chaos Engine
Chaos Engine cover art featuring (clockwise from top left) Navvie, Thug, Gentleman, Mercenary, Preacher, Brigand
Developer(s)	The Bitmap Brothers
Publisher(s)	Renegade Software
Designer(s)	Simon Knight Eric Matthews
Programmer(s)	Stephen Cargill Mike Montgomery
Artist(s)	Daniel Malone
Composer(s)	Richard Joseph Farook Joi Haroon Joi
Platform(s)	Amiga, Atari ST, Amiga CD32, MS-DOS, RISC OS, Sega Mega Drive, Super NES, Mobile phone, Windows, OS X, Linux
Release date(s)	March 1993
Genre(s)	Run and gun
Mode(s)	Single-player 2 player Co-op

The Chaos Engine is a top-down run and gun video game developed by The Bitmap Brothers and published by Renegade Software in March 1993. The game is set in a steampunk Victorian age in which one or two players must battle the hostile creations of the titular Chaos Engine across four landscapes and ultimately defeat the Chaos Engine and its deranged inventor.

It was first released for the Commodore Amiga, with a version available for AGA Amigas, and later ported to MS-DOS, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari ST, Amiga CD32, RISC OS and Sega Mega Drive platforms. In the SNES and Sega versions, the character The Preacher had his clerical collar removed and was renamed The Scientist. The U.S. versions of these two ports were retitled Soldiers of Fortune. A sequel to the game, The Chaos Engine 2, was released in 1996.

The setting is a steampunk Victorian era England. A time traveller on a reconnaissance mission from the distant future became stranded in England of the late 1800s, and his technology came into the hands of the Royal Society led by Baron Fortesque (based upon Charles Babbage), a grand inventor. Fortesque then retro engineered many of the futuristic contraptions, creating an entirely different, alternate timeline.