Penetrator

Melbourne House released Penetrator in 1982, and it was one of the first home computer games that could stand comparison with the arcade machines it took after. The core is a horizontally scrolling cave shooter: you fly through narrowing tunnels, destroy ground installations and missiles, and above all avoid scraping the ceiling or the floor. The format was among the most popular of the period, and the conversion captured its pace convincingly.

What made this release stand out was the built-in landscape editor. Players could reshape the tunnels, reposition obstacles and save the result. In 1982 that was genuinely unusual, since games of the era were fixed objects, and the ability to design your own difficulty added a great deal of life to a cartridge that would otherwise have been exhausted in an evening.

The play itself is unforgiving. Clearance between roof and floor shrinks as you advance, defences thicken, and a single graze against the terrain ends the run. Progress comes from rehearsing a route and from fine control of the stick, which in an era of comparing scores with friends was exactly the point.

On the Commodore 64 the presentation is plain but effective: legible tunnels, quick movement and targets that stand out clearly against the background. Multiple players take turns and compare results rather than sharing the screen. It runs directly in the browser on OldGame.cz, so the editor can be tried too, which is the most interesting part for anyone curious about how early such features appeared.