I love finding stuff like this, especially early in the morning.
(Thanks to
neilsouth and
Indie Retro News for the news, and the laughs.)
In the grand year of 1986 a 12-year old named Jason Kendall made a game on the Commodore 64. He tried to get it published... and
succeeded. In fact, he created a rather good game, all things considered.
The game has the very strange name of
Sqij! and is a screen-by-screen shooter in a similar vein to
Equinox or the
Cybernoid games, where you control a psychotic-looking pigeon hunting down parts of a tree that contains the secret to eternal life. (Uh-huh.) Below you can catch a glimpse of the C-64 version.
Remember, 12-year old developer at work here. I am impressed.
As the game was a decent success, inevitably conversions to other platforms were ordered. A C-16/Plus/4 version exists, but it's the Spectrum version that's the infamous one. That one was made by another Jason (this one's a Creighton) and he got into a spat of troubles. First the publisher refused to send him a copy of the game, then finally sent one on disk... except Creighton didn't own a disk drive. So he had to code the game with nothing more on hand than impressions from playing it at the publisher's office, and a copy of the in-game map. With things like exams looming over him and the deadline for the port creeping closer, Creighton made the dubious decision to purposefully create a crap conversion.
How bad is it?
That comes close to a 8-bit rendition of
, if you ask me.
A grand total of 250 copies of the Spectrum port were sold, and the game is hailed as "one of the worst Speccy games of all time". It's hard to claim otherwise, especially since there's a bug creeping about that makes the game only accept lower-case input from the keyboard, but the code automatically LOCKS THE KEYBOARD IN UPPER CAPS. (This may be due to emulators having trouble emulating BASIC, but whatever.)
The Spectrum version of Squij! is also notable for its cover art. If you're well-versed in big box cover art, this may look more than familiar:
(Keep in mind that Sqij! was released in 1987, while
Obitus was released in 1991.)
So why is this game making news again? Because there's a small company/bloke/idunnoreally out there that decided to do a proper Spectrum conversion, and it's
out now.
The cover art looks really neat:
And this is how the new Sqij! plays on the Spectrum:
So, it was only 30+ years in the making, but now Spectrum owners can finally play a decent port!
