Friday 14 December 2012

Specvent Calendar Day 13 - Atic Atac

Atic Atac (Ultimate, 1983)






Just to prove I'm not being deliberately cussed in all my picks... once again Ultimate pretty much invent a genre with Atic Atac, which was possibly the first game for the Spectrum to be widely anticipated ahead of release. Unlike most of that ilk, though, Atic Atac didn't disappoint, and we marvelled that Ultimate could produce such a wonder for under £6. A bit too loudly, as it turned out...

My first encounter with the game was Issue 1 of Crash, where it had arrived too late for a full review but early enough for thr reviewer to conclude the preview with the promise of a score "well into the nineties" - I remember being disappointed it only got 92% in the end, though looking back you wonder what the marks could possibly have been deducted for. Like Ant Attack you had a choice of hero, unlike that game your choice made more than a cosmetic difference, with each type having a different set of secret passages available in addition to the common doors & trapdoors. I never did find all the parts of the ACG key (a common refrain in these reports, I fear) but exploring was its own reward (I kept telling myself.) A giant leap forward in Spectrum gaming, and dare I say in home computer gaming besides.

1 comment:

  1. I got this for Christmas 1983 with my next spectrum and 'Spectral Panic'. I loved it even though I didn't know you could pick up items until months later. This is an all time classic and one of the games that means the most to me too.

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