Costa Panayi was a mechanical engineer who worked with 3D geometry every day, and when he started writing games he could not see the point of doing it in two dimensions. “It just seems like a step backwards to return to 2D now,” he told CRASH in 1986. “You get a feeling of space when you’re working in 3D, and I don’t think I could write in 2D.” Every game he wrote from Android 2 onwards was in 3D, and the company that sold them, Vortex Software of Manchester, was built around him.
Vortex released few games, about two a year, which was as many as Panayi could write on his own. CRASH reviewed them for its Spectrum readers from 1984 onwards, and by October 1986 it noted that the lowest overall score any of his games had collected was 79%.
Fast facts
- Based in: Manchester; by late 1986 at Vortex House, Salford.
- People: Costa Panayi (programming), Luke Andrews (business), and at the start Costa’s brother Crete Panayi.
- Began: late 1982, as a hobby that paid for itself; run professionally from 1983.
- Spectrum games reviewed by CRASH:
| Game | Year | Score | Issue |
|---|---|---|---|
| Android 2 | 1984 | 90% | 2, March 1984 |
| TLL (Tornado Low Level) | 1984 | 81% | 7, August 1984 |
| Cyclone | 1985 | 79% | 12, January 1985 |
| Highway Encounter | 1985 | 95% | 20, September 1985 |
| Alien Highway | 1986 | 88% | 29, June 1986 |
| Revolution | 1986 | 91% | 33, October 1986 |
| Deflektor (with Gremlin) | 1987 | 77% | 47, December 1987 |
From ZX81 to Android
Panayi bought a ZX81 at the end of 1982 and swapped programs with friends who owned one. “Our first games were Pontoon and Othello — small BASIC games — and we sent them off to a publishers and started earning royalties!” he recalled. With the money they bought books on machine code. When the Spectrum arrived they wrote Cosmos and Android 1. Running a business on the side took too much of their time, so they brought in Luke Andrews, then a teacher, to handle it. “I got involved on the business side to allow the lads to program,” Andrews said.
Android 1, a robot-maze shooting game for the 16K Spectrum, reached the charts early in 1983. Its sequel was Panayi’s first 3D game. CRASH made Android 2 its Game of the Month in March 1984 and scored it 90%. It described a playing area that was “part massively convoluted maze, part open space”, seen in “solid 3D, seen from well above and slightly to one side”, and its reviewers thought its graphics “just about the best, possibly as good as any other game for the Spectrum to date”. Vortex licensed Ocean, another Manchester company, to produce the Commodore 64 version.
TLL and Cyclone
TLL, short for Tornado Low Level, put a swing-wing jet over a scrolling landscape of buildings, pylons, power lines, rivers and cliffs, about 36 times the size of the screen. The way to show height was a shadow. “The 3D effect of your shadow works extremely well, breaking up quite accurately if you are half over a building,” CRASH wrote in August 1984, and it found the game “not quite simulation, not quite arcade, but somewhere in between”. Targets scored more the lower you flew over them, so players went under bridges and power cables to get them.
Cyclone followed, reviewed in January 1985. Computer & Video Games introduced it as coming “from Costa Panayi, the programmer who brought you the chart topping Tornado Low Level”: you fly a helicopter “on a mercy mission around a group of islands threatened by a deadly storm”, winching up survivors and crates of medical supplies while the cyclone roams the map and throws the helicopter about. CRASH liked the effect but found the play too close to TLL, and gave it 79%, Panayi’s lowest score. Panayi noticed the market following him: after Cyclone, he said, “there were dozens of helicopter games on the market suddenly”.
Highway Encounter
Highway Encounter was Panayi’s highest-rated game. You control one of five droids, Vortons, pushing a bomb along a straight road through 30 zones to the enemy base, seen “from an oblique aerial angle”. The other droids follow automatically and stop dead at any obstruction, so most of the game is clearing a path: shoving barrels and boxes into place to block the mines, and holding off enemy robots with a laser that pauses to recharge after every three shots. CRASH gave it 95% in September 1985 and compared its graphics to Ultimate’s, “both in design and quality”.
It was not built on the earlier games’ routines. “Highway Encounter meant starting from scratch again,” CRASH reported, and Panayi explained: “I like to take a completely different approach to the way I handle the 3D in each game.” Its sequel, Alien Highway (88% in June 1986), was a remix with a random element in its layout, and was written by Marc Haigh-Hutchinson, according to CRASH’s review.
Revolution
Revolution was a deliberate change. “With Revolution we thought there are no bouncing ball games, so why don’t we have a go?” Panayi said. The player bounces a ball around platforms hung over bottomless ravines, touching pairs of grey blocks within a time limit to solve each puzzle. Each new game shuffles the puzzles between levels, so a player who never passes level one still gets new ones. CRASH made it a Smash with 91% in October 1986 and thought it “still seems to have something that relates it to the Highway games”.
U.S. Gold and Gremlin
In 1986 Vortex signed a deal with U.S. Gold to handle its marketing. “Now that the market’s moved on to Europe, and we’ve moved on, VORTEX has outgrown the VORTEX team,” Vortex told CRASH, and it planned to build a team of programmers around Panayi. Revolution’s advertisements that November carried the line “Manufactured and distributed by U.S. Gold Limited”.
From the end of 1986 Vortex’s games also appeared with Gremlin Graphics. ZZAP!64 credited the Commodore 64 Highway Encounter to “Gremlin Graphics/Vortex” in December 1986, and Amstrad Action described Deflektor in 1988 as “the first Vortex title since they linked up with Gremlin”. Deflektor was a puzzle game of 60 levels in which the player turns mirrors to guide a laser beam, while gremlins wander about turning them back. Amstrad Action rated it 90% and called it “an original concept, wonderfully implemented”, and its second reviewer was glad that “Vortex and Costa Panayi have lost none of their flair and originality since teaming up with Gremlin”. By 1989 Panayi’s next game, H.A.T.E. (Hostile All Terrain Encounter), a return to his three-quarter 3D view, was reviewed as a Gremlin Graphics release.
Period sources do not record Vortex being taken over by Gremlin, or when the company stopped trading.
Sources
- CRASH issue 2, March 1984, pp. 12–13: Android 2 review, 90%, Game of the Month; p. 50: Android 1.
- CRASH issue 3, April 1984, pp. 100–101: Vortex/CRASH competition, with the company’s history, Costa and Crete Panayi and Luke Andrews, Ocean’s Commodore 64 licence and TLL in development; Vortex advertisement, 280 Brooklands Road, Manchester.
- CRASH issue 7, August 1984, pp. 14–15: TLL review, 81%.
- CRASH issue 12, January 1985, p. 76: Cyclone review, 79%.
- Computer & Video Games issue 40, February 1985: Cyclone review.
- CRASH issue 20, September 1985, pp. 122–123: Highway Encounter review, 95%.
- CRASH issue 29, June 1986, pp. 22–23: Alien Highway review, 88%, author Marc Haigh-Hutchinson.
- CRASH issue 33, October 1986, pp. 16–17: Revolution review, 91%; pp. 110–111: Graeme Kidd, “Vortex — A Whirl of 3D Games”, interview with Costa Panayi and Luke Andrews.
- CRASH issue 34, November 1986: Revolution advertisement, Vortex Software Ltd, Vortex House, Salford, “Manufactured and distributed by U.S. Gold Limited”.
- ZZAP!64 issue 20, December 1986: Highway Encounter, “Gremlin Graphics/Vortex”.
- CRASH issue 42, July 1987, p. 15: 3D The Best Of Vortex compilation review.
- CRASH issue 47, December 1987, p. 123: Deflektor review, 77%; CRASH issue 48, January 1988: index of reviews.
- Amstrad Action issue 30, March 1988, pp. 41–43: Deflektor review, 90%.
- The Games Machine issue 19, June 1989, p. 44: H.A.T.E. review.