Sabotaje

Sabotaje is a small Spanish action game from the late eighties, hosted here in its 1988 DOS incarnation. It comes from the period now called the golden age of Spanish software, when local studios were turning out arcade games by the dozen for the Spectrum, MSX and Amstrad, with some titles also converted to PC. Sabotaje shipped as a cheap tape for five hundred pesetas, never made a splash, and today reads mostly as a curiosity for genre archaeologists.

The content matches the title: you control a robot sent on a sabotage mission — infiltrate a guarded complex and knock out a nuclear device. In play it is an old-school maze arcade game: you thread your way through the corridors of the installation, avoid its hazards and search for the route to your target. There is no hand-holding whatsoever; just you and the map you gradually assemble in your head, exactly as the eight-bit school of design prescribed.

The DOS version is the humblest of the three releases. It runs in four CGA colours and its sound is minimal, whereas MSX owners got a proper melody that period reviewers praised. That eight-bit ancestry shows on PC — this is a port with all the austerity that implies.

Honestly: Sabotaje was an average arcade game even in its own day, and time has not been kind to it. The Spanish press received it lukewarmly and the game passed through the market without glory, as local retrospectives put it. Yet titles like this actually paint a truer picture of the era than the polished classics do — and as a short trip into the world of budget Spanish tapes, it serves its purpose. It also demonstrates why that scene was called a hard school: the game forgives you nothing.

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