Wings Over Sealand

Super-veteran readers may recall the story of Scorpion Software, the amateur games development collective I formed with a pal in the early 1980s to create largely rubbish games mostly written in BASIC for the ZX Spectrum and the Dragon 32.

If you read the 2008 retrospective linked in that paragraph, you’ll note that it offers a bit of constructive self-critique on some of the games we produced, and the other day I accidentally stumbled into following my own advice.

It happened when I was passing the time of day with some idle chit-chat on the Spectrum Computing forums, and discovered that there was a Metacritic-style website which collated and ranked 3,663 old Speccy games based on user reviews. I was gently amused to find a Scorpion title – to be precise, one of our old throwaway “b-sides”, Nuclear City Bomber – at an impressive and frankly generous 3,661st place.

Just for fun I read the reviews, and was surprised to find that the game had a fatal crash bug I’d never been aware of (because unlike the reviewer I’d never played it to the end, as it was just a joke – it isn’t a “game” in any meaningful sense at all, nothing you can do affects the outcome).

Naturally mortified at having delivered such sloppy work, I decided to see if I could find and repair this bug. And down the rabbit hole I went.

The glory of ZX BASIC, the Speccy’s very specialised form of the easiest commonly-used coding language, is that it’s not only impeccably logical and essentially reads like normal English sentences, it’s also error-trapped to within an inch of its life. It simply won’t let you enter a line of code with syntax errors in it, and the “keyword” entry system helps you along every step of the way.

(The Speccy’s much-maligned rubber keyboard really comes into its own here – after a brief learning period you can really zip through typing in stuff because the smart interface is always giving you five keypresses for the price of one AND setting up what it’s expecting next. It more than compensates for what the cheap squishy keys lack compared to the proper hard keyboards of more expensive machines like the Dragon or the BBC Micro or other lesser pieces of junk.)

So even when you haven’t looked at a line of Speccy code for well over 30 years, it’s amazing how easily you can decipher and write it again. I found the bug in Nuclear City Bomber in a matter of minutes (thanks also to ZX BASIC’s super-helpful error messages), fixed it, and even buffed the “game” up with a few small improvements and a whole bunch of other cities to obliterate.

Naturally, after such an easy win, I started thinking about whether I could sort out the issues with some of the other games too. The standout candidate was the innovative rhythm-action/Snake hybrid Wipeout, which really only needed slimming down from a multi-lives game to a single-life one to make it more modern and addictive.

That was another straightforward job, and I also tidied up the interface to make starting a new game as fast and easy as possible. By this point I was really enjoying myself, more for the puzzle-solving elements than playing the games, so I took it up a notch.

The simple hoop-and-wire maze tracer Formula 2/Forest Rally – heavily adapted and expanded from an old ZX81 type-in from Computer And Video Games – had a badly flawed scoring system. It was essentially a time-trial single-lap race in which you were almost certain to record the exact same “time” every time you completed a circuit.

I’d noted in the 2008 piece that it’d be a much more fun game if you could just keep racing until you crashed and score points for survival, and also if the game stored separate highscores for each of its three tracks, which it didn’t as it stood.

This was a FAR trickier task, requiring the complete reworking of all the scoring code and the creation of whole new sections, as well as ensuring that players couldn’t score infinite points by just going back and forward on the spot. I was up until 4am before I’d broken the back of the latter problem in particular, and it still took another couple of hours of head-scratching the next morning before the last wrinkles were ironed out.

Clearly, if these superior versions had been offered to the gaming public back in 1984, Scorpion would probably have been bigger than Electronic Arts by now. But sadly that particular window of opportunity was long boarded up and we’ll never know.

(Jesting aside, I do think Wipeout and Formula 2 have a little bit of play value, by 1984 standards, in these modified forms. Your Attention Please and especially The Rat were definitely the high points of Scorpion’s literally-bedroom-coding oeuvre, though.)

In any event, for the sake of posterity here’s the entire Speccy portfolio in its original and updated forms, complete with recreated (sometimes double-sided) inlay art.

ESCAPE FROM COLDITZ
MOTHERSHIP (b-side)

(Colditz and Mothership are both very poor games, but are somewhat improved if you play them in an emulator at 4x speed.)

WIPEOUT (original)
WIPEOUT (2020 Edition)

(FUN TRIVIA FACT! While never mentioned anywhere, the “plot” of Wipeout is an alternative take on the story of Adam and Eve. God has forgiven them and they still live in the Garden Of Eden with their ever-growing family. The snake – who may have evolved into a lizard by this point – is very unhappy about this, because they’re eating all his apples, and he rebels and decides to eat all the humans instead, ie wiping out the entire human race, to protect his fruit. Readers may notice a recurring theme of nihilism/genocide in many of these games, because we were teenage proto-goths.)

FLOGGING A DEAD HORSE (b-side)
FLOGGING A DEAD HORSE (no-death version)

(Again, can be made substantially less tedious by upping the emulation speed to 4x or 6x. Fixing the annoying way the movement works when several of the horses are dead might be a fun advanced-level future project.)

FORMULA 2 (original)
FOREST RALLY (original, double a-side)
FORMULA 2/FOREST RALLY 2020 EDITIONS

(This actually makes a lot more sense as Forest Rally, because the narrow, twisting course and absence of other cars is much more like a rally than a track race.)

YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE
NUCLEAR CITY BOMBER (b-side, original)
NUCLEAR CITY BOMBER 2020

THE RAT
VIDEODROME (b-side)

Because I had fun even if you don’t.

.

PS While playing it for this feature I noticed that Escape From Colditz seems to have a bug that at least sometimes stops you getting out of the Minefield stage. Annoyingly, though, I put an anti-break routine in EFC that means I can’t actually get into my own code unless I remember the secret access cheat to get around it. And that, chums, might just be a puzzle too far.