Strontium Dog - The Killing

Strontium Dog - The Killing was released in 1984 for the ZX Spectrum, written by Paul Hargreaves and published by Quicksilva Ltd. The name comes from the Strontium Dog comic strip, which ran in the British weekly 2000 AD, so this is a licensed adaptation of a well-known bounty-hunter setting rather than an original property.

Quicksilva belonged to the first generation of British home software publishers. Founded in Southampton at the start of the eighties, it worked at a pace that looks impossible today: one programmer wrote the game, an illustrator produced the cover art, and the cassette reached shops within months. The author's name on the inlay carried roughly as much weight as the label's.

Nineteen eighty-four was the Spectrum's peak year. The machine was selling in enormous numbers, competition between publishers was brutal, and a comic or film licence was one of the few ways to stand out on a shelf crowded with similar tapes. Technically it meant fitting everything into 48 kilobytes and living with the colour attribute system that limited how many shades could share a character cell.

Our record gives no perspective and no player count, so this description does not guess at mechanics. The year, the author, the publisher, the platform and the comic-strip origin are documented, and for a title of this age that is a fair amount of solid ground.

The British scene of that era ran on cassettes and magazine advertising. Loading a tape took minutes of screeching data noise, and anyone with a twin deck could copy a game for nothing, which is why publishers experimented with protection schemes and leaned on licences that were harder to imitate.

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