Kicks

Kicks is a tiny DOS action game from 1989, credited in surviving records to a company called TranSoft, and it makes no secret of its ancestry: this is a clone of Qix, the Taito arcade classic of 1981. It does not try to reinvent that formula in any way — it simply brings it to the office PCs of the late eighties, plain graphics and all.

The rules take a minute to learn and hours to survive. You start on the border of an empty field and push a line out into open space. Close the line back against an edge and the area you fenced off gets filled in and added to your score; the goal is to claim as much of the screen as you can. The catch is the enemy drifting through that same open space — your unfinished line is your weak spot, and if it gets cut before you close it, you lose a life.

Everything that makes the genre tick follows from that one equation. Short, careful nibbles along the border are safe but painfully slow. One long, greedy stroke across half the playfield can claim a huge chunk in a single move, yet every second of it is an invitation to get caught mid-draw. The game constantly rewards gambling and punishes hesitation, which is why Qix and its clones still work even though almost nothing is happening on screen.

To be honest about it, Kicks is exactly that and nothing more: a bare, anonymous-looking take on a famous template, with little surviving information about its makers and no ideas of its own added on top. The presentation is strictly functional. As a curiosity from 1989 it still demonstrates how little a game needs to generate real tension — no story, no effects, just a line, a percentage counter and risk.

You can try it on oldgame.cz straight in your browser, with nothing to install.