"PUTTING THE STING INTO COMPUTING"
The semi-glorious history of Scorpion Software

Of course, it's terribly easy to criticise.

"I bet you've never written any games, Mr Cleverclogs Critic", extremely stupid people often jeer at your reporter. "So who are you to slag off other people's efforts?"

But as usual, those people are wrong and smell bad.

In the Thatcherite industrial wastelands of Bathgate in central Scotland, in late 1983, myself (on Spectrum) and my chum Louis O'Donnell (Dragon 32), both at the tender age of 16, formed Scorpion Software. With the aid of a Youth Action Fund grant from the Young Scot organisation in the princely sum of £45 (spent on two books on machine code which went tragically unread, and several boxes of Cadbury's 99 Flakes) we resolved to become the new Codemasters, before Codemasters had ever been thought of. The home computer market was still young and foolish, so making a success out of selling the sort of tat that we were about to come up with didn't seem as ludicrously unfeasible a prospect as it does now.

(Although you should note that of all the games that are going to be discussed in this feature, even in the primitive days of late 1983 and early 1984 we only considered Escape From Colditz, The Rat, Your Attention Please and the Last Arcade trilogy as even remotely commercially plausible - the others were just practice and mucking around, innovatively planned to be used as throwaway "B-sides" on the proper games. And actually, we were fooling ourselves about Colditz - it's an absolutely terrible game.)

Quite what happened to this crazy dream I don't recall, except that it wasn't our becoming rich. We eventually discovered drink and girls and rock'n'roll music and abandoned the whole business. But by then we'd amassed a pretty substantial catalogue of games  - read on and remember that these are basically one year's work by two people, which isn't bad going. Modern programmers are such lightweights. Below you'll find Scorpion Software's entire recorded works, in their last known versions, alongside a couple of mods we made of other people's stuff, a decade before modding was the commonplace pursuit it is now. Enjoy. And try to remember how bad games could be 16 years ago before you judge, okay?
 

ZX SPECTRUM GAMES
(in chronological order)
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ESCAPE FROM COLDITZ (1983/1984)

The only Scorpion game to actually be ported across different formats (a Dragon 32 version was also completed), Escape From Colditz is a six-level epic of extreme escapery, which sees the player imprisoned in a Colditz Castle of many years in the future, now guarded by evil robots and deadly lasers and surrounded by minefields. Based mostly on random laser fire, it's insanely difficult in "Hard" mode, but unimaginably simple in "Easy". (Once you figure 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)

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FLOGGING A DEAD HORSE (1984) (b-side)

Initially a conversion of one of the first ZX81 games I'd ever written, I realised this simple horse-race betting game 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, turning it into a sort of cross between the Cheltenham Gold Cup and Death Race 2000. It works okay as a game, except that as a result of some unsophisticated programming, when only one horse is left alive the game still allocates movement points randomly between all six runners, so it can take quite a while for the last horse to make it to the line. (I'm not sure if there are any safeguards in place to ensure that it does, or if it's possible for every horse to be killed.)

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 with no death (6K)

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FORMULA 2/FOREST RALLY (1984) (b-side)

A 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. I turned the type-in game's single open and rather boring racetrack into something a single character wide, and added two all-new courses. (The one that's a loose tribute to the original type-in is the one at bottom right in the shots above, trivia fans.)

The next step was going to be to replace the green boxes (which make it look more like Crate-Filled Warehouse Racer) with pretty pictures of racetracks, which would have been very easy to do on the Speccy without any clever coding techniques, but I can't draw for toffee (let alone within the Speccy's palette restrictions) so the plan never came to pass. The closest we got was to put little trees in instead and call the game "Forest Rally" instead.

Annoyingly there aren't separate high-scores for each course, and the scoring in general could have been better thought out (it'd work much better as an endurance race than a time trial, since there's almost no scope for varying lap times), but the core of F2/FR is a hypnotic and gripping little game that was excellent value as a bonus freebie. (In fact, I might yet knock up a Director's Cut with some tweaks and maybe another track or two.) In the early days, the Speccy saw an awful lot of games much worse than this released as A-sides.

(Control: Q, A, O, P)

Download Formula 2 (8K)

Download "Forest Rally" version (8K)

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MOTHERSHIP (1984) (b-side)

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.

Frankly this one's total rubbish, but we were quite pleased with the big spaceship graphic. (Seriously, you should have seen how bad some professional Speccy games looked.)

(Control: O and P)

Download Mothership (3K)

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NUCLEAR CITY BOMBER aka B1 ATTACK (1984) (b-side)

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 in this biting political satire.

I did actually think of a way to turn this into a "proper" game with scoring, without altering the basic gameplay mechanic (you'd only move onto the next city if you managed to bomb the lowest possible building, ensuring that your bomber had time to get away and wasn't caught in the blast), but decided that would only perpetuate the ideological myth of a "winnable" nuclear war, and therefore contribute to an enhanced risk of apocalypse. When you're working at the cutting edge of culture, you have to exercise responsibility.

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

Download Nuclear City Bomber (3K)

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Ace title screen by Simon Reid.

THE RAT (1984)

Showing a keen eye for a controversial angle even 16 years ago, The Rat was probably Scorpion's finest hour, both technically and conceptually. It's a Dictator-style text-based game about software piracy, but with the twist of being depicted from the pirate's viewpoint. The object is to trade bought, borrowed and stolen games, both originals and pirate copies, with a varied cast of characters until you own every title available, including the legendary Yomp. (Yomp was a heroically terrible Frogger rip-off published by Virgin, and which only became available when you'd got all 49 other titles in the game - the joke, obviously, was that pirates were like magpies, obsessively collecting everything regardless of quality, and would prize even a terrible game if it was sufficiently hard to find.)

Challenging and subtle, to your reporter's admittedly biased eyes The Rat is the equal of several of the Speccy's most popular management-based titles like Football Manager, Software Star, It's Only Rock'n'Roll, Millionaire, The Biz and the aforementioned Dictator, though some of the juvenile humour and gratuitous swearing is a bit embarrassing now. It'd also be interesting to rework it slightly to take advantage of the ability nowadays to run emulators at double speed, enabling the interface to be a bit friendlier.

With painstaking realism (all the games featured are actual real-life Speccy titles with accurate relative pricing), artificial intelligence (beat people up or steal from them and they won't be your friend any more), considerable freedom in strategy formulation and fairly well-balanced 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" to return to previous screen and "S" for status report.)

Download The Rat (42K)

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VIDEODROME (1984) (b-side)

A stupid, slightly sick and pointless waste of time, which amounted to a simulation of when people say "first up against the wall when the revolution comes". Execute screen after screen of grinning Pi-Men (the star of Pimania, produced by the much-missed Automata Software, who pioneered non-violent games) with a laser gun, shooting off individual limbs first if you so desire. No scoring. No lives. No entertainment. Just killing and maiming. Erk.

(NB Due to some troublesome machine-code elements, Videodrome must be run in 48K mode. Keys are 1, Q, G and H for movement, and anything on the bottom row to fire.)

Download Videodrome (2K)

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

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WIPEOUT (1984)

A traditional "Snake"-type effort (except this is a trans-dimensional space snake which doesn't only grow longer when it eats things - it grows all the time, so you have to scoff all the humans on each stage before you run out of room and inevitably crash into yourself or an obstacle), 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 when you play it, extremely good reasons.) Another technical first for the wizards at Scorpion.

I still guiltily enjoy playing this one, and the "tune" is burned in my mind, but it would probably have been more addictive with only one life. Still, the way the length of the notes dictates the timing of your movement probably makes Wipeout the world's first rhythm-action game. Man, we sure did break a lot of ground in a short amount of time.

(You can also play the game without music, which makes everything faster and smoother. Incidentally, if certain passages of the soundtrack seem naggingly familiar, note that one of the elements making up the tune is actually the Death March - or Beethoven's Symphony No.7 Movement 2 to give it its proper Sunday name - which was the traditional computer-game signifier of a lost life in the early 80s, but speeded up to make it sound jaunty.)

(Control: Q, A, O, P)

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

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Ace title screen by Simon Reid

YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE (1984)

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 professionally-written commercial games around at the time with much less impressive performance. (Plus they all had wanky plots about orcs and trolls. Plus ca change, eh?)

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 over and over and over again for writing the adventure-game equivalent of Rick Dangerous several years early. Swings and roundabouts, there.

You probably can't tell, but the guy on the TV is supposed to be George Orwell.

Download Your Attention Please (35K)

* "We need the money"