Spectrum Analyzer: Gridrunner

[Phillyman]

From the Atari 2600 to the NES to the Sega Genesis, you thought you've experienced everything there is to know about retro. Don't get too cocky though, Americans! There's a whole other chapter of classic gaming you've likely missed. Pack your bags... 1UP is taking an extended trip to England to discover:

Llamasoft founder Jeff Minter is one of the best known British game developers in the United States, not just for the quality of his software but for the eccentricities of the man himself. He’s brash, stubborn, and outspoken, and is often willing to support lost causes for the sake of personal autonomy. His Tempest 2000 was one of the bright spots in the dismal Atari Jaguar library, and he threw his weight behind the Konix Multi-System, a European game console with high aspirations and absolutely no hope of being released. Most recently, he developed the music visualizer for the Xbox 360, and was a fierce advocate of Space Giraffe, the Xbox Live Arcade release that received considerable backlash for its distracting psychedelic graphics.

His games are often as self-indulgent as they are ingenious, but it’s hard to deny the quality of his early work. One of his first successes was Gridrunner, originally released for the Commodore VIC-20 and later ported to the ZX Spectrum. Best described as a hard-edged, futuristic Centipede, the game pits you against trails of crackling electricity on a conductive grid. Firing at the serpentine bolts of electricity breaks them into pieces and creates shorts in the grid. Like the mushrooms in Centipede, the shorts absorb your shots and force your enemies downward on contact. However, if left unchecked, they grow in size, eventually hatching into bombs. Adding to the stress are two lightning cannons perched on the left and bottom of the grid. When the cannons discharge, anything caught in the crossfire is instantly vaporized… including yourself!

Viciously intense and a great deal more exciting than Atarisoft’s sedate conversion of Centipede, Gridrunner was a hit for its US distributor Human Engineered Software. Minter quickly released a sequel called Matrix, also known as Attack of the Mutant Camels. The first round suggests that it’s exactly the same as Gridrunner with smoother gameplay and enhanced graphics, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find everything from shot deflectors to roving camels that give the action more depth and challenge. (Yeah, I don’t get the camels either. It’s a Minter thing… he’s the only one who understands.) There’s even a nasty surprise for anyone who lets the electricity reach the bottom of the grid… rather than being dragged up to the center of the playfield, it ricochets offs the edges of the screen, making it far more dangerous.

Minter rewrote the two games for the Spectrum to capitalize on the system’s success in Great Britain, but on his web site, he admits that “the Speccy was never really… the platform of choice for Llamasoft.” It’s easy to tell from these conversions, which lack the teeth of their VIC-20 counterparts. The original Gridrunner is especially disappointing on the Spectrum, but even the noticeably improved Matrix suffers next to its VIC-20 cousin, with tiny characters and mousey chirps where a cacophony of explosions and gunfire had been. It’s still playable, but it lacks the finesse it had on Commodore’s machine. Fortunately, they’re free thanks to a generous distribution license by Llamasoft, so there’s no harm in trying them both.

Special thanks to the Llamasoft web site for historical data.

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