Be Afraid. Be Slightly Afraid. It's Atic Atac.

Posted by: Paul Smith

In almost any context, it is usually a good idea to avoid trapdoors. They are the sort of thing that just sound like trouble, or else they would be called welcome gates, or warmth ways. Or cuddle ports.

Two brothers - Tom and Chris Stamper - certainly understood the tacit malevolence of trapdoors in 1983 when they decided to invent a sprawling maze of a game set in an underground castle, into which the player stumbled after falling through a - yes - trapdoor. The game itself, Atic Atac, was excellent, combining a tangible sense of doom with several key gaming innovations. It was, for example, the first game in which the player could choose a character class - wizard, knight or serf - with differing skills and tactics. The aforementioned sense of doom was provided in no small part by Tom Stamper's artistic understanding of the 'less is more' principle of suspense building - which is handy, as with only 48k of memory around, Doom was a very long way off.

The software house established by the Stampers for Atic Atac was called Ultimate Play The Game, which sounds a bit like a racehorse. Ultimate became a cult in itself, with a full time admin assistant employed when Mrs Stamper could no longer cope with the hundreds of letters cascading through the letterbox of the family home every week. Part of the appeal of Atic Atac (and subsequent Ultimate releases) was the open and unashamed invitation to fully immerse yourself in the game. This was seen to best effect with the Hobbit, which gave away a copy of Tolkien's unbelievably long book of the same name, and Elite, which used Richard Holdstock's The Dark Wheel a purpose written sci fi novel. The Stampers, whose main income during the writing of Atic Atac came from delivering newspapers round Ashby de la Zouch before school, were unlikely to secure the patronship of leading literary figures. Undaunted, they penned their own intro, which would scroll up the loading screen. It features a lot of exclamation marks, references to large shapes, corridors, cold things and the word 'Help'! written as'HELLLLPPPP!!!' more times than is probably necessary, but it nonetheless does the job.

There are somewhat over two hundred rooms in the castle, spread over five floors. As a rule, lower floor = higher danger, and the only way out of the castle is by assembling a three-part key. If all you had to do was traipse around until you found them, it would be a very straightforward operation. As you might expect, though, there is a fair amount of danger lurking, usually in shadows, coffins, and so forth. In the basement it is possible to run into Dracula and/or Frankenstein's monster, which is unlikely to do you a lot of good, and creatures who generally don't like you will attack at every opportunity. The player must also eat constantly. The health of the wily wizard or brave knight or plucky serf you have chosen to play is indicated by a roast chicken graphic on the right of the screen. The weaker the player becomes - either through hunger or attack - the less meaty and more bony the chicken becomes. When your chicken is all bones and no meat, you lose a life. This novel feature drew enthusiastic plaudits at the time, and has been widely imitated ever since. Why food would be left scattered around a building inhabited by beings that are already dead is anyone's guess, but eating it meated up your chicken carcass and kept you going for longer.

The player can power up, of course, even though the phrase had not been invented at the time. This was achieved by collecting additional weapons or spells which have presumably been left lying around by careless spooks and ghouls. Also, there are time warp generators which can deposit the player in other locations in the castle, and locked doors which can only be opened with the correctly coloured key. A feature of gameplay was the little headstone graphic that would sprout wherever a player lost a life. Players quickly learned that these markers were a useful starting point for mapping the castle, which was essential to cracking the game.

Interestingly, it was recommended that players spurn new-fangled joysticks in favour of keyboard control for this epic subterranean explore-a-thon, as the game could take so long to complete that even the sturdiest moulded plastic hand control would break under the strain. Whether or not this was true is immaterial: in 1983, £5.50 spent in the new gaming racks at Our Price would buy you into an absorbing and hugely atmospheric world, and keep you barricaded into your room until you discovered the Smiths.

The Stamper brothers would later invent the process by which graphics information is compressed into cartridge format, an idea which they flogged to Nintendo for trillions and trillions of pounds. Arguably, this had for more impact upon gaming and popular culture in general than blundering around a wire frame dungeon eating endless chicken legs, but trails are best blazed one at a time.

  About the author

Paul Smith

When not writing stuff for us, Paul has his own blog here. It deals mainly with his war of attrition with the general public, a conflict in which neither side seems to want to back down.

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