The only Scorpion game to actually be ported across different formats (a Dragon 32 version was also completed), Escape From Colditz is a seven-level epic of escapery, which sees the player imprisoned in Colditz Castle many years in the future, guarded by evil robots and deadly lasers. Insanely difficult in "Hard" mode, unimaginably simple in "Easy". (Once you work out how "Easy" mode works, that is.) The fourth level was a blatant rip-off of the Speccy classic "Mined Out". Don't tell anyone, eh?

(Control: Q, A, O, P)

Download Escape From Colditz (41K)

Initially a conversion of one of the first ZX81 games I'd ever written, I realised this was a bit boring and decided to pep it up a bit by having the races take place on a minefield, and putting snipers in the grandstands. Works okay, except that when only one horse is left alive the game still allocates movement points randomly between six, so it can take quite a while for the last horse to make it to the line. I can't remember why they all have such stubby tails. I think adding another pixel probably made them all look like spiders or something.

Download Flogging A Dead Horse (8K)

Download "normal" version (6K)

Simple little reaction game, originally inspired by a ZX81 type-in from Computer & Video Games but turned into something very different. Basically a racing-themed version of those games where you have a little metal hoop on a wand and you have to move it along a twisty wire without touching it. The next step was to replace the green boxes with pretty pictures of racing tracks, which would have been very easy to do, but I can't draw for toffee so the plan never came to pass.

(Control: Q, A, O, P)

Download Formula 2 (8K)

Download "Forest Rally" version (8K)

The year is 2029. The Earth has been infiltrated by an advance guard of alien invaders. Now the motherships come to enslave the planet, but only if they can get their troops to the surface using landing ladders. (They can't use parachutes because of, er, their tentacles. Yes that's it, their tentacles.). Defence ships block their way, so the mothership must drop enough ladders for the ground aliens to climb up and zap the defence ship and clear the path for invasion. Ooh.

(Control: O and P)

Download Mothership (3K)

These days, it's all "realism, realism, realism" in videogames, which more often than not makes for excruciating tedium instead of the glamorous, escapist excitement that characterised the Speccy days. This version of the classic City Bomber, years ahead of its time, took the "realism" doctrine to its natural conclusion, being a scarily accurate and complete simulation of global thermonuclear war, from the perspective of the crew of a B1 bomber (albeit apparently a non-partisan crew happy to bomb all sides with equal vigour). Naturally, you play the bombardier.

(Control: Press "B" to drop a bomb.)

Download Nuclear City Bomber (3K)

Showing a keen eye for a controversial angle even 16 years ago, The Rat is a game about software piracy, from the pirate's viewpoint. Trade bought, borrowed and stolen original and pirated games with a cast of characters until you own every title available, including the legendary Yomp (a heroically terrible game really published by Virgin, and only available when you'd got all 49 other titles in the game). Featuring realism (all the games featured are actual Speccy titles with accurate price levels), artificial intelligence (beat people up or steal from them and they won't be your friend) and resource management (buy games, copy them, and return them to the shop; put money in the bank for safekeeping and interest), in many ways The Rat blazed the trail that would later be so successfully exploited by Command And Conquer.

(Controls: Menu numbers, plus "A" for return to previous screen and "S" for status report.)

Download The Rat (42K)

Ace title screen by Simon Reid

A stupid, slightly sick and pointless waste of time. Execute screen after screen of grinning Pi-Men (the star of Pimania, produced by the much-missed Automata Software, who pioneered non-violent games) shooting off individual limbs first if you so desire. No scoring. No lives. No entertainment. Just shooting. Eek. (To be entered in the comp.sys.sinclair Crap Games Competition 2000.)

(NB Must be run in 48K mode. Keys are 1, Q, G, H, and anything on the bottom row to fire.)

Download Videodrome (2K)

Download MacSpeccy-compatible version (Q, A, O, P, Space) (2K)

A traditional "Snake"-type effort (except your snake doesn't grow longer as it eats things, it just grows all the time), but notable for being, as far as I know, the only Speccy game ever written in BASIC to boast continuous music. (For, as will become obvious, extremely good reasons.) Another technical first for the wizards at Scorpion.

(Control: Q, A, O, P)

Download Wipeout (V1.4, apparently) (4K)

With it being 1984, the Apocalypse was of course on everyone's minds. Around this time, a survey on ITV's World In Action news magazine showed that 85% of the people of Britain believed that nuclear conflict was "inevitable" within 10 years. With that in mind, we produced a text adventure game about surviving the atomic holocaust. I'm quite proud of it, since it's totally written in BASIC with a reasonably comprehensive interpreter (albeit in a slightly cheaty way), yet response times averaged under 1 second - there were plenty of professional, commercial games around at the time with much less impressive performance. (Plus they all had wanky plots about orcs and trolls. Plus ca change.) On the other hand, there are so many colossally annoying "sudden death" incidents that playing it now, I want to invent a time machine, go back in time 16 years, and punch myself in the face.

You can't tell, but the guy on the TV is based on George Orwell.

Download Your Attention Please (35K)

Ace title screen by Simon Reid

THE LAST ARCADE (1984)

The first game in a trilogy which represented Scorpion's main Dragon 32 focus. Adventure games in the then-popular multiple-choice Fighting Fantasy style, the Last Arcade Trilogy told of a horrific dystopian future where arcades had been outlawed by an ultra-pacifist government. The world, as you'd imagine, had regressed to a strange and primitive state - an environment clearly recognisable as today's, yet inhabited by a strangely medieval populace. For the good of mankind, you must locate the last surviving arcade - kept by the evil rulers to satisfy their own secret gaming lust -   reveal its existence and remind the world of the joy of games, that sanity might once again prevail.

Download The Last Arcade (39K)

Early draft of the cassette inlay artwork, actually largely nicked from an old Spectrum game called Realm Of The Undead.

QUEST FOR THE DISCS (1984)

On reaching the Last Arcade, the bold player discovered that even this oasis of technological entertainment and wonder was not immune from the catastrophic changes sweeping the planet. The Arcade's showpiece games, the laserdisc machines [these, remember, were the times when Dragon' Lair, Space Ace, MACH 3 and the mighty Firefox appeared to represent the absolute pinnacle of coin-op achievement] stood as silent, empty hulks, the all-important laserdiscs having been stolen by forces unknown. Having only just found the Last Arcade, the player must now leave its welcoming embrace again in order to save it...

Download Quest For The Discs (34K)

REVENGE OF THE ARCADE REJECTS (1984)

Tragically, our collective memory completely fails us as to the plot of the third and final part of the trilogy. (Inexplicably, it starts off in what appears to be the middle of some World War 1 trench warfare.) If the truth be told, it's fairly irrelevant anyway - all three parts of the trilogy were developed more or less simultaneously, with the result that none of them are properly finished, and all are prone to one extent or another to crashing when attempting to visit locations or manipulate objects whose existence hadn't yet been fully defined. But hey, feel free to debug any of the games and send them back to us if you feel like it...

Download Revenge Of The Arcade Rejects (57K)

The Dragon version of Escape From Colditz is, for many observers, implacable proof of the superiority of the Spectrum over the Dragon. In fact, the Dragon version is less a game and more a blueprint - it contains the same levels as the Speccy version, and plays in fundamentally the same way, but it's full of bugs and (largely for Dragon technical reasons which made it all but impossible to combine graphics and standard text) uses letters to represent all the items rather than the Speccy's pretty sprites. (Though "F" representing a key was always a nice touch, I thought.)

Download Escape From Colditz (23K)

After the first appearance of this Scorpion Software page, Louis wrote from his desk at the Royal Bank Of Scotland in Edinburgh to correct my assertion at the top of the page about the machine-code books we'd purchased with our Youth Action Fund grant. While mine remains in immaculate unused condition to this day (I started to read it while relaxing in the garden with a lime milkshake one gloriously sunny summer's day, but immediately gave up in favour of the Sandman comics my mate Simon had brought round), Louis had begun to study his with honourable intent. Optimistically, he began to conceive far more technically ambitious titles, planning to convert them into machine-code when sufficient mastery of the language was attained. Sadly, Lou eventually gave up too, leaving a legacy of nicely-designed but hypnotically slow BASIC games like this one.

Download Head-On (9K)

...and this one, a simple survival horror which took the theme of the classic Robotron, but deprived the unfortunate player of the ultra-powerful laser guns of that game, leaving him at the mercy of the cannon-fodder enemy robots (known in Robotron as the Ground Roving Unit Network Terminators, or GRUNTs). Luckily, in Grunt's Revenge, the evil robots are almost at the end of their energy reserves, so if the plucky player can survive a certain length of time in each screen, the robots will power down and the player will make it to the next level.

If we'd put as much effort into actually knuckling down and learning machine-code as we did into coming up with stupid plot justifications, we'd probably both be millionaire programmers by now. Tch.

Download Grunt's Revenge (10K)

ROYAL ASCOT

The obligatory horse-racing game, about as straightforward as they come. The nicest feature of Ascot was the way that fallen horses could sometimes get back up again and rejoin the race. Thanks to the Dragon's rudimentary graphics capability in text mode (what you see on the right is pretty much the most sophisticated thing it could do in that particular mode), though, this was achieved in a really stylish way - using just two characters - that made it look as though the stricken horse was actually twisting itself round and getting to its feet. Load it up and watch in wonder.

Download Royal Ascot (7K)

Not, properly, a Scorpion Software game at all, but a hack of a dodgy football management game called Champions! (by, if I recall correctly, Peaksoft), modified to give the players hilarious names (well, they were hilarious if you were one of our friends) and replace the game's mundane weekly news items ("Income from tea stall - £3.75") with tremendously amusing ones like "Your share of TV pool - four buckets of water". Look, we were 17, okay?

Download Chumpions! (61K)

Not strictly a Scorpion Software game, but it's included anyway for completist/nostalgic reasons. Curse Of The Aztec Tomb was originally a type-in game from the first games magazine I ever bought, the magical Christmas 1982 issue of Computer & Video Games. Huge chunks of the listing were completely missing, so I made up my own bits to get it working. Overcome with the thrill of programming, I went on to add several entirely new sections to the game, a scoring system (originally, you either won or died, and that was it) and a bunch of fancy graphical effects. Well, fancy for the ZX81, anyway. This version, adapted for emulator use last year, even features high-score saving, although I'm not absolutely sure how I actually did it. Even though half of the game's hazards are completely random and unfair, I still really like it. That's you at the top left, by the way.

(Controls: 1 to move, 0 to jump.)

Download Return To The Curse Of The Aztec Tomb (10K)

Download Special Commemorative Edition v2000 (14K)

Sadly, I can't actually claim credit for this fantastic game (essentially a cross between Thrust and Defender, but even better than that), since it was written by Dan Hewitt and published by Mirrorsoft. However, it's so great that it's the only game I've ever used a level editor to create my own levels for. I liked Oids so much I designed five entire galaxies of my own for it, ranging from the nice'n'easy, bad-pun-laden Arkanoid (planets include Saturdaynoid and Aharddaysnoid) to the moody Bewilderness (inspired by the 2000AD comic strip Bad Company), the inordinately taxing Championoid and the completely over-the-top Devoid, in which all the planets were named and designed after Devo songs. (Devoid also featured the planet Oid-Ching, which wasn't a game planet but a fantastic decision-making device. Simply start the planet and allow your ship to fall untouched through the various teleporters until it eventually alights on one of the two landing pads.) And Eviloid, which was just evil.

Further evidence of Oids' greatness is that someone has written an entire Atari ST emulator (called Echo) solely for the purpose of playing it, because it didn't run on any of the existing ones. Oids is completely forgotten, but it's one of the mightiest games of all time. Try it now and see for yourself.

Download Oids with Stu's custom galaxies (643K); Echo (140K)

* "We need the money."