Xadom

Xadom was written for the ZX Spectrum by Mike Moscoff and published in 1983 by Quicksilva, one of the first big names of the early British software industry. It comes from the days when genres had no names yet: an action game about wandering through a chain of single-screen rooms, dressed up by the period marketing in a bizarre story about being whisked away to a satellite five kilometres above Earth to answer to some Grand Council.

The principle is simple, though the game never explains it. Each room is one fixed screen viewed from above. You thread your way through a tangle of obstacles towards a portal near the top of the screen, which drops you into the next room. Along the way you pick up weapons that strike in four directions, and you deal with the traps and creatures guarding the rooms — some are worth taking on with a weapon in hand, others are wiser to avoid in a wide arc.

To be blunt: today Xadom is more artefact than entertainment. You deduce the rules by trial and error, the difficulty is erratic, and the abstract graphics give you almost no clue as to what is an item, what is a trap and what is mere decoration. Yet that is also where its value lies. This is what British game development looked like at the moment when everyone was still discovering what a computer game could even be, and when publishers would still ship experiments that two years later would never have made it to the shelves.

If you enjoy gaming archaeology, this is an honest dig site full of period fingerprints; if you just want a good Spectrum action game, look elsewhere. Either way, you can try Xadom at oldgame.cz straight in your browser, with no emulator setup or installation.