Shrooms

16K ZX81 - 2021

My interpretation of the classic arcade game Centipede.

After watching the film 'PIXELS' one night in 2018, which features Centipede, I thought I should have a go at writing a version of it for the ZX81.  True, it's been done many times before, and actually pre-dates the Zeddy by a year (which isn't something you can say about a lot of games) but all the versions I'd found tended to be very slow and unresponsive, which is exactly what this game isn't.

Due to a certain other project (Melkhior's Mansion) taking the majority of my time since then, this fell onto the back-burner for a couple of years, but I recently resurrected it as a distraction from that main project, and made a promise that I'd finish it this year (2021)

Luckily for me a really good was written on the game at the time - "The Video Master's Guide to Centipede" by Ron Dubren - which goes into a huge amount of detail on both the mechanics of the game, as well as how to win at it.  I honestly thought this game was a much simpler affair until I started reading up on it!  I also had some help from one of the winners of the 1988 UK National Computer Games Championship, who helped fine-tune the game into being as close to the arcade as it could be, whilst being adapted for the landscape orientation of this conversion.

Be warned - it is fast!