Archery

Archery from 1985 is exactly the kind of game that traveled across American BBS boards in the mid-eighties: a tiny one-author program written in spare hours and offered to the world for free. The inspiration was the arcade classic Track and Field — specifically its archery event, except here that single discipline is the entire game.

The principle is simple. A moving target descends from the top of the screen and your job is to plant an arrow as close to its bullseye as you can. You shoot from five different starting positions with three attempts from each, fifteen arrows per round in total. Everything rests on timing: you judge the target's movement and release at exactly the moment your paths will cross. Scoring then depends on how near the center you land.

And that is genuinely all of it. There are no levels, no tournaments, no opponents; the graphics keep a low profile even by 1985 standards, and one round takes a few minutes. Measuring a game like this against commercial titles misses the point — it is closer to a digital version of the dartboard hanging in the garage. As a one-minute warm-up for eye and thumb it works, though: hitting the center from the last and most awkward position takes real feel, and anyone with a competitive streak will soon be chasing their own record.

The game is also interesting as a document. It shows the lowest floor of game making in its day — a world of programs created for the joy of it, passed from modem to modem with no publisher and no marketing. The great shareware scene of the nineties grew out of exactly this soil a few years later.

If you feel like loosing those fifteen arrows, Archery runs on oldgame.cz directly in the browser with nothing to install.