Wings Over Sealand

Ask a thousand people what the best videogame of all time is and you’ll only get back a tiny handful of names (with variants) – Super Mario, Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto, Call Of Duty, Naughty Ones, all the usual suspects. But ask the same thousand people what the worst game ever is and you’ll get a thousand different answers.

It’s time someone stood up and made a decision.

There are good reasons why there’s no consensus on the worst games of all time. (The only one you might be able to expect to get at least a handful of votes is Mirage’s infamous Rise Of The Robots, a beat-’em-up so hyped yet so awful that it managed to become a universally-recognised byword for terrible games for the best part of a decade.)

The chief one is probably that really bad games don’t tend to sell very well (especially in the modern age at £40 a time). Word gets out, nobody buys them, so nobody plays them and very few people get to experience first-hand how awful they are. People’s memory of bad games, therefore, tends to hinge on unique individual purchases of relatively obscure titles.

Also, of course, quality is a subjective judgement. Games that one person might find unarguably intolerable and wrong (any Metal Gear Solid title, say), will be loved by someone else who actually wants to watch an impenetrable six-hour movie written by a frustrated film nerd, interspersed with occasional brief outbreaks of videogame.

But now, thanks to the twin miracles of emulation and the internet, it’s possible to share experiences on a scale not known to humanity since the days of Morecambe And Wise Christmas Specials, and from there to ascend to a pinnacle of indisputable, objective, empirical truth.

Ladies and gentlemen, the definitively worst videogame ever made in all of recorded history is Krazy Kong for the ZX Spectrum, by C*Tech.

By an interstellar distance, the best thing about the game is the cassette inlay, as seen above. The main illustration isn’t bad at all, albeit that it appears to have been done in crayon. But even the loading instructions hint at the unimaginable horror to come.

For a start, check out that description of the loading process. Load the first part, stop the tape, wait for Kong to jump across the screen and then start the tape again? Huh? The Speccy hosted something close to 10,000 games, and I don’t think I ever encountered another one that made me stop in the middle of the first load, wait for a pointless animation and then continue.

(Also, get a brainful of that keyboard layout.)

But even that doesn’t come close to telling the whole hideous story. Let’s examine what actually happens when you decide to have a game of Krazy Kong one sunny Sunday afternoon in 1982.

Spectacularly, the first thing Krazy Kong does is load a couple of hundred bytes, then stop and ask the user to use ZX BASIC to switch Caps Lock on. (If you don’t enable Caps Lock the loading process will continue all the way to the end, but you won’t be able to start the game.)

That done, the game loads two more chunks of code, then stops again and displays another ZX BASIC screen.

This time there are no instructions. The user is left staring at a command prompt with no idea of what to do. It’s a bit like the opening screens of Hacker or Pimania, only this isn’t actually supposed to be the game.

Eventually the perplexed consumer might (hopefully) hit upon the idea of pressing Enter, at which point a garish yellow-and-green screen will appear, on which will be painstakingly drawn, line by line, the ugliest representation of steel girders ever depicted.

When they’re finished, something looking like a robot wearing a frog’s head blinks into view and lurches its way (utilising a full two frames of flickering animation in which only its feet move) to the rightmost edge of the screen and back again, accompanied by something I wouldn’t like to put more strongly than the term “some sounds”.

The entire process takes a gruelling 24 seconds, after which you’re expected to remember the instructions from the cassette inlay and start the tape again, because nothing appears on the screen.

Some more loading later, you’re presented with a very slightly different display, in which the only difference is the white border and the presence of some small green stumps of what you deduce to be ladders.

This, dear viewers, is to all intents and purposes the menu screen:

At this point I should reveal that I encountered Krazy Kong because I was writing a magazine feature about unofficial coin-op conversions. I’d been aware of its existence when it came out (for reasons which will become clear later), but had never actually seen it in the flesh.

So when I got to the screen above and everything stopped, I assumed my emulator had crashed. I tried different copies of the file, and tried a different emulator, but nothing made any difference. I stabbed at a few keys randomly, one of which happened to be the space bar, and was startled to find that I’d inadvertently hacked my way into the game code.

If you’re not familiar with ZX BASIC, you won’t appreciate what a mind-boggling few lines of code that is, but perhaps the most interesting bit is the command “RANDOMIZE USR 0”, which means “obliterate everything”. It’s the Speccy’s equivalent of deleting something and then emptying the Recycle Bin and formatting the hard drive.

Appearing not just once but twice, the program’s only executable function is to commit suicide and burn its own body. Perhaps it knew.

Anyway, with (very unusually) no way to start the game code from within BASIC, the only option was to start all over again, which with emulation was only a 30-second task, most of which was spent sitting through the atrocious animation sequence. (Real users, let’s remember, would have just wasted several minutes reloading the whole game.)

Staring at the white-bordered screen once more, I started working my way methodically through anything that might spark the game into life. Enter? Nope. “S” for Start? Nope. “0”, the fire button of most Speccy joystick protocols? Nothing. “5”, the alternative fire for the official Sinclair joystick (not even invented at the time Krazy Kong came out)? Well, that one was a bit of a long shot, admittedly.

I tried every single key, with no response. In despair I loaded up the “Side B” version of the game file, and was encouraged (well, I was pretty desperate at this point) by a slightly different frozen screen:

I repeated the process, more in hope than expectation, but a miracle was about to occur. Eventually, having started at top left and pressing every button in turn, I hit “R” and everything went crazy. Or at least, the game began. In the full flow of action, it looked like this:

Keen Donkey Kong aficionados may perceptively have determined that the diamond-shaped blobs are barrels, and the splattery shapes are fireballs. (Neither is animated in any way.) They move so jerkily that at first it seems as though they appear at random and move only horizontally, but a closer inspection reveals that in fact the barrels travel in proper DK style – along the girders, drop down to the next level and reverse direction.

The fireballs, meanwhile, travel the opposite route – starting at the bottom, leaping up into the air (in a single frame) at the end of each girder and moving along the next one. Whenever either object reaches the end of its path, it loops round and starts at the beginning again. If either one touches the player, he loses one of his generous supply of 10 lives.

Well, around 40% of the time he does, anyway. If you’re actually moving when you collide with a barrel or fireball, more than half the time it’ll just go right through you, doing no harm other than to make your legs flicker a bit. It’s a fair trade, though – 40% is also the approximate chance you have of “Mario” moving when you press one of the keys.

(If a hit IS registered, incidentally everything else just carries on without interruption but you get replaced at the starting position at bottom centre, possibly right in the path of another barrel or fireball.)

Twisting my fingers around the cretinous keyboard layout (and there’s a whole other feature to be written about those one day – what the hell sort of freakish mutant squid wrote Speccy games anyway?), I eventually managed to claw my way to the top of the screen, which is to say the top girder – the second you reach that you’re whisked messily to the next stage. (The central ladder leading upwards is just for show, you don’t have to reach it.)

My top PRO TIP, incidentally, is to hold the left or right movement key down – Krazy Kong is clearly compiled BASIC, and after the telltale initial delay, the keyboard auto-repeat will speed you along far faster than normal taps can do. And here’s another handy hint – you can only reach the space below the middle level’s ladder by jumping to it, or jumping past it and then walking right. The game won’t let you walk under it from the right-hand side.

My reward was Krazy Kong’s interpretation of DK’s famous “cement factory” second stage, although I didn’t know it yet. That’s because the trademark conveyor belts of the arcade game are cunningly disguised in Krazy Kong, by not being animated to depict their movement. (That’s them over on the right-hand side.)

Sadly you don’t get any bonus for finishing screen 1. That’s not a major problem, though, because rather than Donkey Kong’s boring old countdown time limit, Krazy Kong uses an innovative scoring system whereby your score increases constantly as long as you stay alive.

That comes in particularly handy on screen 2, because – just like in the arcade game! – there are no barrels. The only sources of danger are the fireballs and those follow a predetermined circular path around the central block of girders, going up the left-hand column of gaps, across the solid top platform and then back down through the right-hand column.

As you’re standing safely on the bottom platform, then, you can simply wander off, have a cup of tea, climb Everest, marry and raise a family – all the while racking up points.

BUT! Krazy Kong is one step ahead of you. This cunning strategy only works up to 32,768 points (perhaps an hour of standing still), at which point the game’s ingenious anti-cheating mechanism kicks in and your score suddenly becomes minus 32,768. Oh no!

Fortunately, though, C*Tech aren’t completely heartless, and points still keep being added as normal after this harsh sanction. The scoreboard ticks up through -30,000 and -25,000 and so on until it gets back to 0, at which point it heads off towards 32,768 again. But hopefully you’ve learned your lesson.

So you make your way up the screen (noting that the ladder-walking bug from screen 1 makes a reappearance on the middle level), and as it’s all but impossible to die – since the ends of the conveyors are normal platforms so you can’t be thrown down the gap, and the fireballs are miles apart and never diverge from their circular path – you’ll soon be on the top girder, which instantly completes the stage.

What delights can possibly await in round 3?

Oh.

Yes, despite being for the 48K Speccy, Krazy Kong manages just two of the arcade game’s four stages. Because your reporter is a simple and trusting fool, I wondered if maybe KK mimicked the unusual ordering of the US version of the coin-op, which runs something like 1-2-1-2-3-1-2-3-4.

But three more times (with the help of some invaluable emulator save states) I looped round the two levels, and a third never appeared.

This was a disappointment, because the cassette inlay promises “three screens”, with the third featuring some kind of stairway. But then it also promises a “fantastic machine code game”, and that’s a big fat lie too.

(It’s slightly odd, because until then C*Tech had cleverly avoided any actual legally-actionable fibbing. The closest they came was one of the early game’s magazine ads, which breathlessly related how “The Program begins with a full colour KONG jumping across the screen”, which is true so long as you note that there’s no hyphen between the sixth and seventh words, and accept that black counts as a colour.)

Krazy Kong came out in 1982, the same year as Arcadia. And it’s sobering to note that reviewing standards back in the supposed Golden Age of videogame journalism were no better than they are now, with ZX Computing calling it “a good, fun game which can be played for hours” in the only recorded review.

Not everyone agreed, however. Indeed, pioneering mag Computer & Video Games got so many letters complaining about the game’s dreadful quality that they produced a special full-page feature under the heading “Great Software Disasters”. (Although one of them was from someone who appeared to have rather missed the point of Gorf, bless ‘im.)

Impressively, they challenged C*Tech’s “sales director”, one Shirley Fenton, who bravely ran through the full gamut of PR tactics – pacification (“We always exchange tapes”), insults (“Some people just don’t like video style games”), and finally threats (“If you print any letters you will never get any advertising from us again”). Plus ca change, eh viewers?

I defy anyone to name a single other game that’s so absolutely awful in every last solitary way, from appalling keyboard layout to farcical loading process, grotesque graphics to unfathomable start button, abysmal control response and collision detection to failure to even work properly within its own incredibly limited parameters – Crash would later reveal that the missing third screen was present, but unreachable as the result of a bug.

Compared to Krazy Kong, something like Rise Of The Robots is a masterpiece – it looks pretty nice and it does more or less work, even if you can finish it by sellotaping your joystick in the top-right diagonal and putting a brick on the fire button. Viewers, I challenge you. Fire up Krazy Kong in your favourite Speccy emulator, give it 10 minutes of your time and tell me you’ve played something worse.

So there we have it. One of the oldest mysteries in gaming has finally been resolved beyond rational debate. Krazy Kong for the Spectrum is the worst commercially-published videogame ever made. Let it be known unto nations. Let there be no more arguments. Let there be a moment of silence.

UPBEAT POSTSCRIPT:

C*Tech at least went out on a high note. The year after Krazy Kong (and a catalogue of other atrocities) they released their final game, a weird hybrid of Scramble and the later Speccy title Subterranean Stryker. It went by the name of Rocket Raid, and while not quite a lost classic it’s playable and inventive and it was also the first ever published game by Nigel Alderton.

So in a way, without Krazy Kong paying C*Tech’s bills for two years we’d never have had Chuckie Egg, and without Chuckie Egg there’d be no Bill And Ted’s Excellent Gameboy Adventure either. So hurrah for Krazy Kong!