Spooks

Spooks appeared in 1985 for the Commodore 64, published by Mastertronic. That name explains more about the game than anything else could: Mastertronic was the British budget label whose releases sold for a fraction of the standard price and were correspondingly short, simple and built around a single workable idea.

It is a single-player game filed with a top-down viewpoint. The title points at a haunted theme, which was popular on eight-bit machines because ghosts and monsters remained recognisable even when drawn from a handful of pixels, and because they fitted naturally into mazes and corridors.

The Commodore 64 was a generous host for this sort of thing. Its graphics chip handled hardware sprites, so several figures could move around the screen without slowdown, and the SID sound chip gave even cheap games music that people remembered long after they stopped playing.

Budget titles from the middle of the eighties are often harder to trace today than the famous names, despite selling in large numbers, which is exactly why they deserve a place in a catalogue and a chance to be tried.

Budget software had an economy of its own. Development took weeks rather than years, the author was usually one person or two, and the publisher bet on volume: many copies at a low price. That produced a great deal of mediocrity, but it also left room for ideas nobody would have risked on an expensive release. The British scene got a whole generation of programmers out of it, trained on exactly this kind of commission.

And tried it can be: this one runs straight from your browser here, so you can judge for yourself what a couple of pounds bought in 1985.