Thing on a Spring

Thing on a Spring was published in 1985 by the British house Gremlin Graphics for the Commodore 64. Its hero is a creature mounted on a spring, bouncing through an environment of platforms and corridors, and that bouncing is the central mechanic: momentum and rebound have to be judged with every jump.

The game is remembered above all for its music, written by Rob Hubbard. His SID compositions rank among the best-known work produced on the C64, and plenty of players recall this title by its opening tune before they recall anything about how it plays.

1985 was a period of rapid maturing for British eight-bit development. Programmers had scrolling, multicolour sprites and advanced use of the sound chip well in hand, and games were acquiring their own visual identity instead of merely imitating arcade cabinets. Gremlin Graphics was one of the companies driving that shift.

By modern standards the difficulty is steep. It is a single-player game with no saving, and progress depends on precise jumping and on learning your way around a set of connected rooms. That was the norm: a game was meant to last, and the reward lay in mastering it.

Gremlin Graphics started in Sheffield and belonged to that generation of British firms which began as computer shops and ended up as publishers with brands of their own. Their early C64 and ZX Spectrum titles share a profile: inventive settings, prominent music, and a level of difficulty that assumed the player would keep coming back for weeks.

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