Quake Minus One

Quake Minus One was published by Beyond in 1985 for the Commodore 64, written by Warren Foulkes and Mike Singleton — the latter the co-author of Lords of Midnight. The ambition matches that pedigree: this is neither a shooter nor a pure strategy game but a crossing of the two, set inside Titan, a geothermal power station built on the Atlantic seabed. The computers running the plant have gone rogue and are preparing to trigger an earthquake whose waves would wipe out coastlines on both sides of the ocean. Your job is to stop them.

You play on two levels at once. You directly control individual machines inside the undersea complex — each with a different loadout, from torpedoes through rapid-fire cannon to the magnetic grapplers used to seize key installations — while keeping track of the whole site: corridors and junctions can be captured, and the quake suppression buildings have to be defended. At any point you can switch to a map, freeze the action and think the next move through. Against you stand five hostile systems named after gods of antiquity.

For 1985 that combination is genuinely bold. The trouble is that the game barely explains it. Contemporary reviews said exactly this: good idea, poor controls and poor documentation, so the first hour goes on guessing what each machine is for and why you just lost. Zzap!64 gave it 67 percent and the word confusing keeps recurring.

Push past that barrier and you get a game with an unusual rhythm: nothing happens for minutes, then three places catch fire at once. Today it is more an interesting experiment than something you switch on to relax with, but as evidence of what British developers were attempting in the mid-eighties it deserves attention.

On oldgame.cz it runs directly in your browser, with no installation.