Skool Daze

Skool Daze by Microsphere dates from 1984 and is offered here in the Commodore 64 version. It remains one of the most original ideas an eight-bit machine ever received. You play Eric, a schoolboy whose goal is to steal his own report card from the safe in the staff room. Meanwhile the school carries on around you: bells ring, lessons change, teachers patrol the corridors, other boys start fights, and you have to look like you belong there.

Four masters know the combination to the safe — headmaster Wacker, the science teacher Rockitt, the geography teacher Withit and the history teacher Creak — and getting it out of them is the whole game. First you have to set every shield hanging on the school walls flashing with your catapult. Some can be hit from a staircase, others cannot, and that is where invention starts: bounce a pellet off a master's head while he is sitting on the floor, or knock a boy over and climb on him to jump higher. With all the shields flashing, you shoot each teacher and he gives up his part of the code. The exception is old Creak, who cannot remember his number and will only reveal it once he sees the year of his birth written on a blackboard. The finished combination then has to be written on a blackboard in the right order.

Hanging over everything are lines: misbehave and teachers hand them out, and ten thousand of them get you expelled. The game forces you to be a troublemaker and a model pupil at once, which is precisely the joke.

The controls feel clumsy now, and without a guide you can spend an hour just running the corridors before the goal clicks. The payoff is worth it, because few games of the era feel this alive.

On oldgame.cz the game starts straight in your browser, with nothing to install.