“If you do something really well people don’t notice it — like the smooth scroll,” Andrew Braybrook told ZZAP!64 in March 1986. “I spent a lot of time getting that really smooth, but so what?” He was talking about Uridium, the game he had just finished, and he was wrong about one thing: people did notice. ZZAP! gave it 94% in the same issue, and its reviewers spent most of their words on how it moved. The scroll ran at the full 50 frames a second, one pixel at a time, under a fighter that looped, rolled and never stopped moving. Braybrook said he did not want it to look like “a cut-down arcade machine”: he was “trying to write a game that looks like it should BE in an arcade”.
Fast facts
- Design and programming: Andrew Braybrook, of Graftgold. Steve Turner, his partner there, wrote the music, Edge reported in 2003.
- Publisher: Hewson Consultants.
- Released: February 1986, for the Commodore 64; £8.95 on cassette, £12.95 on disk.
- Conversions: ZX Spectrum (1986, by Dominic Robinson) and Amstrad CPC.
- Reviews: 94% and a Sizzler in ZZAP!64; the Spectrum version scored 90% in CRASH and was a Your Sinclair Megagame.
Braybrook’s next game
Uridium followed Paradroid, and it was designed to be its opposite. Paradroid takes place inside a freighter; Uridium takes place on top of one. When ZZAP!’s Roger Kean saw a demo late in 1985, Braybrook described the plan: a game “like Defender, only it’s Defender from another point of view”, and “a bit like Zaxxon”, but flying in both directions and looking straight down on the enemy ships, “with the 3D represented by shadows”. There would be “full 50 cycles/second game scrolling to a single pixel resolution”, and variable-speed scrolling so the player could out-accelerate the ships chasing it. He expected it in the shops towards the end of February, and thought it would take two or three months to finish.
It came together faster than Paradroid had. “With this one I seem to have discovered how to program at last,” he told Gary Liddon. He and Turner went to the arcades in Norwich “to study the enemy”. Turner later summed up the Graftgold method to Edge: they began with the movement, got the control right, and made up the scenario last.
Fifteen dreadnoughts
The player flies a Manta-class space fighter over fifteen Super-Dreadnoughts that have come to drain the planets of their metals, and each ship is named after the metal it has come for. ZZAP!’s review lists the first three as Zinc, Lead and Copper, “right up to the fifteenth ship which is called . . . Well that would be telling”. The hulls are an obstacle course: walls and aerials too high to fly over, which have to be flown round or squeezed past with the Manta on its side, gun emplacements to shoot for points, and generator ports that launch homing mines. The only clue to how tall something is comes from the length of its shadow.
Waves of fighters attack from in front and behind. When the message “Land Now” flashes, the Manta has to set down on the runway at the far end of the dreadnought. Landing leads to the fuel rod chamber, “a sort of futuristic fruit machine”, where the player stops a set of flashing rods to decide the bonus for destroying the ship, and then the dreadnought dissolves away underneath. ZZAP!’s reviewers singled out that effect, “the boiling away of the ship at the end of the wave”.
How it moved
Braybrook took the friction out of the controls. “What I’ve changed in Uridium is that you’ve got no friction. Left and right will only accelerate you in those directions,” he explained; the game “tries to keep you on the move all the time”. Stop and reverse, and the Manta loops over to face the other way, lifting briefly off the hull as it does. He compared frame rates: Paradroid ran at 17 frames a second at its slowest, Uridium at 50.
He told Edge where the extra power went. He “drew loads of frames of it rolling and looping”, and because he wanted plenty of bullets on screen he used “something other than the hardware sprites” for them. ZZAP!’s review noticed: “Using software sprites for the ship’s laser fire means a lot of bullets. Even so the game stays super slick and smooth throughout.” The graphics carried on the metallic, bas-relief style of Paradroid. “You seem to be quite into metal lately,” Kean said to him. “Yes, well I suppose it goes with the graphics look.”
What the press said
ZZAP!64 made it a Sizzler in March 1986, with 99% for presentation and for graphics and 94% overall. Julian Rignall called it “surely the best arcade game yet to hit the 64”, with one complaint, that “the playing area on each screen is a little small”. Gary Liddon compared the Manta’s handling to Defender’s, and added that the game was not “all mindless violence”: “knowing the maps of the various Dreadnoughts is essential to get anywhere of note.”
The Spectrum conversion
Dominic Robinson had never finished a whole game before. He told Sinclair User in 1988 that he had been “very impressed with Uridium”, started writing routines for the Spectrum, and sent his demos to Hewson when it advertised for programmers. They hired him, and his first complete game was the conversion. CRASH opened its December 1986 review with “The Commodore game they said couldn’t be done on the Spectrum has finally arrived.”
The Spectrum Uridium lost the colour. “Hewson has sensibly opted for monochrome backgrounds,” Your Sinclair wrote, though that could make small bombs hard to spot against the textured hulls; “the horizontal scrolling, never easy on the Speccy, is superfast and smooth.” Sinclair User noted that the scrolling was “very smooth (17 frames per second it says in the blurb)” and “virtually flickerless”, and gave it five stars in November 1986; only Lightforce, it thought, rivalled it for making the Spectrum look like an arcade machine. CRASH gave it 90%. One reviewer said it was not up to the Commodore version, “but it is an extremely good, fast translation”; another called it “probably the best shoot em up that I’ve ever seen on a Spectrum”. Your Sinclair made it a Megagame with 9 out of 10: “Uridium has to be the ultimate shooting match.”
CRASH’s readers agreed. In the magazine’s poll of 1986 they voted it Best Shoot ’Em Up with 26% of the vote, and third for Best Game Overall. Robinson went on to write Zynaps for Hewson.
An Amstrad CPC version followed. Amstrad Action printed cheats for it in 1989, and in the same year a musician who converted game soundtracks to the Amstrad gave Uridium’s Commodore music as an example of his work.
Uridium Plus
Braybrook told Edge that within three months of release there were “two or three very close imitations”, one of which “even used most of the same graphics”. “I was as mad as hell about that,” he said, so Graftgold spent about a month on new graphics and new dreadnoughts. ZZAP! credited the idea to its own Gary Penn, who had suggested to Andrew Hewson putting in “fifteen new dreadnoughts” and sprucing up the gameplay. The result, Uridium Plus, came out for Christmas 1986 in a Hewson double pack at £8.95 with an “Ultra Smooth” Paradroid that ran at around twice the speed of the original. On the Spectrum, Uridium Plus appeared on Hewson’s 4 Smash Hits compilation, which ZZAP! gave 88% in January 1988.
The game carried on at budget price. Hewson’s Rack-It label reissued the Spectrum version at £2.99 in 1988, and CRASH gave it 90% for a second time: “at £2.99 it’s a steal”. Braybrook returned to it on the Amiga with Uridium 2, published by Renegade in 1993. He told Edge he used the Commodore 64 code as a reference and kept the scrolling and animation speeds identical to the original: “No one was going to tell me it didn’t feel the same.”
Sources
- ZZAP!64 issue 9, Christmas Special 1985, pp. 43–44: Roger Kean’s interview with Braybrook and first look at Uridium (Defender and Zaxxon, shadows, 50 cycles a second, the end-of-February target, metal).
- ZZAP!64 issue 11, March 1986, pp. 55–56: Gary Liddon’s interview with Braybrook (the arcades in Norwich, “discovered how to program at last”, the arcade look, no friction, frame rates, “people don’t notice it”).
- ZZAP!64 issue 11, March 1986, pp. 100–101: review (Hewson, £8.95 cassette, £12.95 disk; the fifteen dreadnoughts and their names, the fuel rod chamber, software sprites; Presentation 99%, Graphics 99%, Overall 94%; Sizzler).
- ZZAP!64 issue 21, Christmas Special 1986: “Catch a double dose from Hewsons” (Uridium Plus and “Ultra Smooth” Paradroid, £8.95; Gary Penn’s suggestion).
- ZZAP!64 issue 33, January 1988: 4 Smash Hits compilation review (88%).
- Sinclair User issue 56, November 1986: Spectrum Uridium review (Hewson, author Dominic Robinson, £8.95; five stars).
- CRASH issue 35, December 1986, pp. 20–21: Spectrum Uridium review (£8.95, 90%).
- Your Sinclair issue 12, December 1986: Spectrum Uridium review (Megagame).
- CRASH issue 38, March 1987, p. 34: readers’ awards for 1986.
- Sinclair User issue 71, February 1988: interview with Dominic Robinson.
- Sinclair User issue 79, October 1988, and CRASH issue 56, September 1988, p. 86: the Rack-It reissue (£2.99; CRASH 90%).
- Amstrad Action issue 41, February 1989: cheat for the Amstrad Uridium. Issue 44, May 1989: interview with a musician who converted Uridium’s soundtrack to the Amstrad.
- “The making of… Uridium”, Edge issue 124, June 2003: interviews with Braybrook and Turner (release in February 1986, Turner’s music, the Graftgold method, extra bullets, the imitations, Uridium+, Uridium 2).
- Amiga Power issue 31, November 1993: Uridium 2 review (Renegade).
- Spectrum Computing, “Uridium” (web, secondary): the Sinclair User rating (5/5) and the Your Sinclair score (9/10), which the period text extracts do not preserve. https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/5525/ZX-Spectrum/Uridium