The player in Paradroid is the weakest thing on the ship. Unit 001, the Influence Device, is a prototype droid with a small laser, beamed aboard a space freighter whose robot crew has killed every human on board. It cannot win many fights on its own. What it can do is take over another robot: ram it, win a short duel on a circuit board, and then drive that robot’s body, with its weapons, armour and security clearance, until the host burns out and it has to find another. ZZAP!64’s readers watched the game being made, through Andrew Braybrook’s diary, for four months before the magazine gave it a Gold Medal in November 1985.
Fast facts
- Design and programming: Andrew Braybrook, with gameplay ideas from Steve Turner; the two made up the team that became Graftgold.
- Publisher: Hewson Consultants, £7.95, for the Commodore 64.
- Released: autumn 1985. Hewson planned to have it in the shops on 20 September.
- Review: Gold Medal and 97% in ZZAP!64, November 1985.
- Later versions: an “Ultra Smooth” edition (1986), Heavy Metal Paradroid on budget (1989), and Paradroid 90 for the Amiga and Atari ST.
Robots as numbers
The freighter is shown from above, and scrolls smoothly in eight directions. The robots are not drawn as robots. Each is an oval carrying a three-digit number: the first digit is its class, the other two its rank. The player’s Influence Device is 001, and the single Command Cyborg on each ship is 999. To see what a robot really looks like, and what it carries, the player logs on to one of the ship’s consoles and opens the Droid Data Library, which only shows robots ranked below the one the player is currently controlling. The same consoles give a plan of the current deck and a side view of the whole ship, with its lift shafts.
ZZAP!’s review listed the classes, from disposal and servant robots through messengers, maintenance robots, crew, sentinels, battle and security droids up to the 999 Command Cyborg. The robots on a deck stay hidden unless the Influence Device can see them: the review explained that its sensors could not see “around corners or through walls”. Braybrook wrote in his diary that the idea came from Survive, a game he had played on an IBM mainframe, in which the players “never knew what was around the next corner”.
Clear a deck of robots and its lights go out. Clear all twenty decks and the player is beamed aboard the next freighter.
The transfer game
Holding the fire button with the joystick centred puts the Influence Device into transfer mode, and ramming a robot then starts the duel. The screen shows two sets of circuitry either side of a central bar of twelve blocks. Each side chooses a colour and fires pulses down its wires to turn blocks to that colour, though some wires, the “Terminators”, never reach the bar; the side that holds at least seven of the twelve blocks when the timer runs down from 99 takes the robot. The better the robot the player already controls, the more pulses it has to spend. Lose, and the robot the player is riding is destroyed.
The ZZAP! reviewer found the transfer game “great fun to play on its own”, with “rather tense moments (especially when you try to go from 001 to 883)!”, and liked that a skilled player could “make really huge jumps in robot classes”.
Written up as it was written
ZZAP!64 ran Braybrook’s diary as “The Birth of a Paradroid” from July to October 1985. The first entry, on Wednesday 1 May, begins: “Zzap64 have asked me to keep a diary and today I have to start it. Feel like a mega-star. Decide not to let it change my life.” What follows is a working programmer’s record of the game’s final months.
It shows the look of the game being found. Braybrook told ZZAP! later that he had wanted a blueprint look, but “the resolution of the Commodore wasn’t good enough to do that. It was out of desperation almost that I needed another type of graphics system”, and within a morning he could see that the raised, metallic bas-relief style would work. He redrew all the graphics in it. In June he restyled the doors and deck plans to match: “It’s nice to have a style for the whole thing, otherwise it starts to look like a hotch-potch of all sorts of meaningless patterns, rather like many platform games these days!” He switched a sunset colour scheme of Turner’s for “a blue decor”, and gave some decks a dark grey scheme with a yellow border, because “the lighter the border, the darker the on-screen colours appear to be”.
It shows the machine being pushed. He used all 64K of RAM, with “some fancy RAM bank switching during the game”, and hid the giant title lettering in a spare corner of memory. A routine copied across by hand crashed the whole program because of a single extra PLA instruction, “one of the most devastating single instructions known to mankind”. A laser routine failed because it assumed the 6510 would set the carry flag after a subtraction the way a Z80 does: “Wrong! totally the opposite”.
And it shows the design changing under test. Braybrook first had the player steer a gunsight to aim; the test pilots found it unplayable, and on 23 July he dropped it for “the old-fashioned, tried, trusted and medically proved eight directional dual laser”. Turner suggested that every robot the player controlled should fire its own weapons, which gave the game its ladder of weapons from the Influence Device’s “pea shooter” up to the disruptor. On 30 July Gordon Hewson rang with the idea that losing a host robot should not end the game: the robot explodes and the Influence Device escapes, low on energy, to fight on. “This was such a good idea,” Braybrook wrote, “that I put it in straight away.” On the last day he gave up on title music for lack of memory, and let the SID chip generate random sounds instead; the result sounded “like robots conversing, in robot language of course”. The final instalment also printed Gordon Hewson’s own diary of getting the game to market, from sending back the first roughs of the cassette artwork to ordering the bar code.
The review
The game arrived at ZZAP! after “three months of build up”, and the reviewer admitted wondering whether it would be a flop: “I needn’t have — it’s absolutely superb!” The magazine praised the “stunning graphics” and the sound, including “the robot conversation on the title screen”, and called it “one of the best programs I’ve seen on the 64”. It awarded a Gold Medal and 97%, announcing that Andrew Braybrook’s “elegant new game is a monster Gold Medal”.
Braybrook was less happy with some other magazines. In March 1986 he told ZZAP! that “in reading some reviews of Paradroid it’s blatantly obvious that a lot of people have not played that game for longer than ten minutes”, and thanked ZZAP! for having played it properly.
How the robots seemed to think
The robots appear to go about their jobs, walking between rooms, waiting for doors and stopping at consoles. In 2003 Braybrook told Edge that they had no purpose at all. He had mapped out routes over each deck “like train-tracks”, and what made them seem alive was that they could “see”: the line-of-sight check that decided whether the player could see a robot also told the robot the angle and distance back to the player. He called the result “Apparent Intelligence”: “it is more important what a player thinks is happening than what is actually going on.”
Later versions
For Christmas 1986 Hewson paired Paradroid with Uridium Plus in a double pack at £8.95. Braybrook had dusted down his source files for an “Ultra Smooth” Paradroid that ran at around twice the speed of the original. A further version with metallic walls and a new title screen, Heavy Metal Paradroid, came out on Hewson’s £2.99 Rack-It label; ZZAP! reviewed it in May 1989 and asked “How can anyone afford to be without a copy of Paradroid now?”
Steve Turner took the idea to the ZX Spectrum. His Quazatron (1986) put Paradroid’s robot-grappling into a scrolling 3D city, and CRASH gave it 94%. Braybrook remade the game for the Amiga and Atari ST as Paradroid 90, written under a Hewson contract and published by Activision.
Braybrook told Edge that, unlike Uridium, Paradroid drew no clones at the time: “I feel because the coding was more complex and less obvious.” Edge named Eurocom’s Machine Hunter as the one obvious attempt at an update, and Space Station Silicon Valley and Messiah as games that borrowed the idea of taking over other bodies. When a special issue of ZZAP!64 in March 2002 asked its readers to vote for the best Commodore 64 game ever, Paradroid came top.
Sources
- “The Birth of a Paradroid”, Andrew Braybrook’s diary, ZZAP!64 issue 3, July 1985, pp. 45–47 (1 May entry, Survive); issue 4, August 1985, p. 75 (part two); issue 5, September 1985, pp. 65–67 (the house style, colour schemes, 64K and bank switching, the
PLAcrash); issue 6, October 1985, pp. 95–98 (the gunsight, the weapons, Gordon Hewson’s idea, the 6510 carry flag, the sound, and Gordon Hewson’s diary with the 20 September launch plan). - ZZAP!64 issue 6, October 1985: news, “Paradroid is here!” (six months of design and programming).
- ZZAP!64 issue 7, November 1985, pp. 120–122: review (the robots and their classes, the transfer game, twenty decks; Gold Medal). Contents page: “a monster Gold Medal”. Hewson advertisement: £7.95.
- ZZAP!64 issue 9, Christmas Special 1985, pp. 43–44: Roger Kean’s interview with Braybrook (the blueprint look and the bas-relief graphics).
- ZZAP!64 issue 11, March 1986, pp. 55–56: Gary Liddon’s interview with Braybrook (other magazines’ reviews).
- ZZAP!64 issue 21, Christmas Special 1986: the Hewson double pack (Uridium Plus and “Ultra Smooth” Paradroid, £8.95).
- ZZAP!64 issue 49, May 1989: Heavy Metal Paradroid budget review. ZZAP!64 issue 72, April 1991: index of reviews (Heavy Metal Paradroid, Rack-It, 97%).
- CRASH issue 29, June 1986, p. 137: Quazatron review (94%).
- ZZAP!64 issue 107, March 2002: readers’ poll of the best C64 games ever; Paradroid’s 97% in issue 7.
- Edge issue 126, August 2003: retrospective on Paradroid (eight-way scrolling, numbered robots, hi-res two-colour bas-relief, the gunsight, robot routes and “Apparent Intelligence”, no clones, later games that borrowed the idea).
- Andrew Braybrook, “From Start to Finish: The Diary of a Game”, Amiga Action issue 4, January 1990: the Hewson contract for Paradroid on the ST and Amiga.