Gridrunner was first created in 1982. I'd begun my major Vic-20 career with the (somewhat piss-poor) Defender clone (with a bleedin' enormous great ship and loads of bugs) called Defenda and llater Andes Attack, so as not to draw the attention of Atari's lawyers ;), and then followed up with a simple bottom-shooter called Abductor.
I quite liked Atari's coin-op Centipede, but didn't just want to do a version of that, because everyone and his dog was cloning like buggery back then, and I wanted to do something a bit different; f'sure borrowing aspects of Centipede, but adding some new stuff to give the game a harder, spacier feel than the gentle garden-based action that Centipede had.
I was thinking about this one day whilst up in London at a computer show, and one evening I was down the tubehole on the way to somewhere in London (probably Leicester Square and the arcades nearby, as used to be my habit whilst at shows in London) and I noticed posters up everywhere advertising the latest Harrison Ford flick: none other than the great and glorious Blade Runner. I sort of went "Ah!" and substituted "Grid" for "Blade", and there was the name of the game I was thinking about making. And something of the graphical style :).
Home from the show, I set about coding the game. It was for the unexpanded Vic, and it ended up taking seven days, start to finish :). Halfway through the development cycle - it was a Wednesday, half way through the week - I took the work-in-progress to a meeting of the Basingstoke Computer Club, where it met with some approval :). When the work was done I sent a copy to my man at HES in the US, who were at that time distributing my (somewhat piss-poor) Defender clone on cart over there.
A few days later I got the infamous early morning call which is part of Llamasoft llore, in which said American dude waxed lyrical about how he hadn't been able to stop playing for hours and how I should expect to make a fair bit from sales of the game in due course. And in due course, I did :).
Best week's work *I* ever did ;)...
This is the game as it appeared in all it's fat Vic-20 glory :). The white guns at the sides of the screen move constantly and periodically fire bolts of lightning - the X-Y Zapper. The cyan things are bits of snake, and the yellow things are Pods. Unshot Pods turned into bombs and fell down the grid. There were 20 levels, each one introducing more and faster snakes to challenge the player.
Outside the US, the game was sold on tape by Llamasoft (cover artwork shown above - this was well before the Steinar Lund era!).
Shortly after I'd finished the Vic version, HES furnished me with a nice new C=64, and being as the Vic version was so well liked, asked me to do a C=64 conversion (shown above). Looking back on it I could have done a lot more with the C=64 version, like use some sprites and stuff, but HES wanted a version quickly, so I took a couple of days out from writing Attack of the Mutant Camels on the C=64 and did a more or less straight port to the 64. The play area was of course larger due to the C64's bigger screen, and in truth I think the graphics look a bit thin and weedy on the C64. I like the fat Vic look :).
HES also wanted an Atari 8-bit version. I had never touched the 8-bit Atari intimately, and as a result of being a novice on that machine I think this version of Gridrunner is probably the ugliest. I wanted to put a bit more colour in the game but ended up using a low-rez character mode that looked a bit too chunky. But again HES wanted it quite quickly. I like to think if I'd played with the Atari a bit longer I would have come up with something much more representative of that machine's graphical loveliness :-].
A few months later I thought it might be nice to do an update of Gridrunner for larger memory machines. The original was nice but it lacked any real depth. I sketched out a few ideas as to gameplay extensions whilst I was staying in San Francisco one time, and when I got home, set about coding up a sequel for the 8K expanded Vic, and the result was Matrix.
This is Matrix on the Vic, again, IMO, the best version. It had a scrolly grid, which changed shape and colours (and even disappeared entirely) as you went through the levels; it was generally faster and smoother to play, had more complex snake motions and extra features like Deflex-stylee deflectors on some of the levels, and herds of little camels (which you got 106 points for shooting; homage to KMEL 106, at that time a rock radio station, which I had listened to a lot on that trip to San Francisco and whose logo was a flying camel. In fact HES did a promotion with the station when they launched the game in the US). It was a fun game :).
Once again the game was distributed by Llamasoft on tape outside the US, and on cartridge by HES in the US. Confusingly, HES changed the name. They didn't like the name Matrix, but they *did* like the name of Attack of the Mutant Camels. They didn't however, like the C64 game of that name - so they chose to release Matrix in the US and call it Attack of the Mutant Camels. Which is why AMC means completely different games to people on either side of the pond :).
Skip forward a few years to the 16-bit era, and I thought it would be nice to do an updated version of Gridrunner for the Atari ST. The result was Super Gridrunner - written largely whilst I was on holiday skiing in France (and despite my having dropped my massive steel-clad external 20MB hard drive onto the tarmac at Geneva Airport on the way out there).
This was quite a nice game - lots of levels, considerably madder than the 8-bit predecessors, and it used mouse control - I really liked the extra control you could get with a mouse, although some gamers had difficulty accepting that anything than a nice big handful of joystick should be used to control a shooty game :).
The game had a Bonus Multiplier (a concept I learned of from pinball, and have always really liked) and a separate shooting head that the player could deploy or recall to the main ship by using the right mouse button. The game was pretty well-liked, and even ended up winning an award for "Budget Title of the Year - 16-Bit".
There was almost another version of Gridrunner before the present day - I had intended to put a hidden version of Gridrunner in Defender 2000 on the Jag - the "4th of July" mix - but in the end I never got around to finishing it, which is a shame, really.
Then earlier on this year I decided it was time to get shooty again, and...
:)
- Yak 12/8/2002