Aztec Challenge

Most people remember Aztec Challenge for how it sounds rather than for how it plays. The 1983 Commodore 64 version was written by Paul Norman for Cosmi, and its opening scene — a sprint up the causeway toward the pyramid while rows of Aztec warriors hurl spears at you from both sides — runs on a bassline that was about as good as the SID chip got at the time. Norman was a trained musician and it shows; the soundtrack is still routinely cited as a landmark of 8-bit game music.

The game itself is a chain of short, self-contained dexterity scenes. After the run come jumps over pits and obstacles, a swim past predators, corridors of snakes and darts, and a climb into the temple interior. Each stage has its own control logic that you essentially have to learn by dying, and each can kill you in under a second. Lives are scarce, there is nothing resembling a modern checkpoint, and a mistake sends you backwards.

So this is a game built on memorisation and on the precise timing of a single button. If that school of design leaves you cold, you will bounce off it in minutes. If it does not, you will notice how good the running animation is — the sprite moved more smoothly in 1983 than was normal on home computers.

One thing worth knowing: two different games share the title. The earlier Aztec Challenge from 1982 was also a Cosmi release, but it is a simpler and visually poorer thing. The one people mean when they call it a classic is this 1983 version.

It has aged unevenly. The music and the atmosphere still land, the actual content is short and merciless. Treat it as a postcard from an era when a single strong idea was enough to sell a game.