Wizball | Code Like It's 198x

Wizball starts in grey. Wizworld has had its colour drained away by the wizard Zark and his “horrible henchsprites”, and the hero, Wiz, sets out to paint it back in, bouncing across the landscape inside a green ball he can barely steer. Sensible Software’s Jon Hare and Chris Yates made it for the Commodore 64, and Ocean published it in 1987. ZZAP!64 put it on the cover of its July issue with 96%. One reviewer called it “a breath of fresh air to our tired old 64s”, and another told readers to go to the shops and say “Mr Retailer, swiftly hand me a copy of Wizball”. Martin Galway, who wrote the music, later called it “probably the audiovisual pinnacle of my C64 days”.

Fast facts

Developer: Sensible Software: Jon Hare and Chris Yates.
Publisher: Ocean Software.
Released: 1987 on the Commodore 64, reviewed in June and July. Ocean’s Spectrum and Amstrad CPC versions followed in the autumn, and Peter Johnson’s Atari ST and Amiga versions in 1988.
Music: Martin Galway (Commodore 64).
Players: one, or two together, with the second player flying the cat.
Reception: ZZAP!64 96%; CRASH 92% (Spectrum); Your Sinclair 8/10 (Spectrum).
Sequel: Wizkid (1992), for the Amiga and Atari ST.

A ball that will not stay still

Hare and Yates took nine months over it, and they built it out of the arcade games they were playing. “We played Dropzone for four months solid, the Nemesis and Salamander coin-ops as well,” Yates told ZZAP! in 1990. Hare recalled that it “started as a Nemesis-inspired shooter”, which explains some of the enemy waves, combined with “a bouncing control method that Chris was playing with”. The ball came before the wizard: “the wizard was a storyline tagged on near the end,” Hare admitted.

The bouncing is what every reviewer wrote about first. At the start, pushing the joystick left or right only spins the ball, and it bounces off the ground and everything else. Shooting certain aliens releases green pearls, and each pearl lights up the next icon along a bar at the top of the screen. A waggle of the joystick buys the lit power-up, in the manner of Konami’s Nemesis. The first two icons matter most: thrust lets you steer in mid-bounce, and anti-grav stops the bouncing and gives ordinary eight-way control. Sensible kept the unruly start on purpose. “We thought the bouncing emphasised the uniqueness of the game,” Hare said, and losing your power-ups “was a good point to drop you back to, to penalise you for poor play!”

Painting by numbers

Wiz cannot collect paint himself. Floating blobs of red, green and blue release droplets when shot, and only Catelite can catch them: a cat inside a smaller orb, bought from the icon bar. Hare said the cat was based on Chris Yates’s own cat, Nifta, “who was always around when we were making games”. The droplets fill three cauldrons at the bottom of the screen, and each level needs a target colour mixed from them, so yellow means equal red and green. When a level has all three of its colours back, it turns from grey to colour.

The eight levels are stacked on top of one another, and only three can be reached at a time, linked by tubes. Finishing the lowest open level opens the next one up. Hare said this was partly to break up the usual level-by-level flow and partly to make the colouring work, because “we needed to ensure there was always an available level dominated by red blobs, one by green and another by blue”. Some droplets are traps. ZZAP!’s review listed them: a purple drop “drives the cat insane”, a black one makes the scenery go dark, and a light blue one brings a “Filth Raid”, with “sirens blaring and blue lights flashing” as police ships close in. Between colours Wiz visits the Wizlab to choose a permanent power-up, while the cat drinks a saucer of milk.

Two can play at once. The second player takes Catelite while the first flies Wiz, an idea Hare traced back to the pair’s hours of two-player Dropzone.

Galway’s music

Ocean kept its own composer in-house, so the music came from Galway rather than from Sensible, though, as he pointed out, Hare and Yates were both accomplished musicians. He wrote much of it at Sensible’s office. They played him guitar and bass lines and he recreated them on the C64, “making it more massive-sounding than the plain guitar version”. For the game-over tune they agreed on a deliberately rude guitar lick, meant to jolt the player out of the game’s dreamy mood. The title music was Galway’s own. He said it carried “flavours” of Vangelis’s album China, and its change of mood halfway through comes from finishing it later, back at Ocean. Commodore User’s review compared the tunes to Jean-Michel Jarre. ZZAP!’s readers put its main theme seventh in their music chart in November 1987, and a year later it was still in their top ten, alongside Galway’s Parallax and Combat School.

Reviews

ZZAP!64 reviewed the Commodore 64 original in July 1987 and gave it 96%, with 98% for presentation. It became the cover game, but with a Sizzler rather than a Gold Medal, a decision that the magazine admitted in 1988 had “surprised many gamers (including several of the current ZZAP! team)”. Commodore User gave it a Screen Star. Its reviewer thought it “incredibly hard to master at first” but “immensely playable”.

Ocean’s in-house Spectrum version kept the whole game, with a tune for 128K machines. CRASH made it a Smash at 92% in October 1987. One reviewer found the controls “incredibly difficult to get to grips with” but called it “one of the most playable games I’ve ever seen”; another noted that the sound was “excellent on the 128s (but a bit limited on the 48s)”. Sinclair User called it an “arcade style game with more inventive ideas than just about everything else around at the moment put together”, and Your Sinclair gave it 8 out of 10. In November 1988 ZZAP!’s “Def Guide” to shoot-’em-ups ranked it first of the ten best on the Commodore 64, ahead of Dropzone, and one reviewer called it “nothing short of being a work of mad genius”. In January 1990, in a list of the decade’s best C64 games, ZZAP! put it seventh.

The game’s code has had a second life among C64 programmers. groepaz’s reference to the 6510’s undocumented instructions follows one of the unstable ones, LAX #imm, through Wizball’s code (see 6502).

Later releases and Wizkid

Ocean put Wizball on The Magnificent 7, a Christmas 1987 compilation, and in November 1990 ZZAP! listed it among the first £7.99 releases on Ocean’s new 16-bit budget label, The Hit Squad. Sensible returned to it with Wizkid (Ocean, 1992) on the Amiga and ST, in which the Wizard’s son sets out to rescue his father and the Wizball from Zark. Hare said the idea of the ball growing a body and walking around had been planned for the original, “but we didn’t have enough memory”, and that this time the model was Arkanoid rather than Nemesis and Defender. Asked by Amiga Format how long it had taken, he said two years; Yates corrected him: “23 months!”

Sources

ZZAP!64 issue 27, July 1987, pp. 14–15: Commodore 64 review (Wizworld, Zark, Nifta, the icons, the droplets and Filth Raid; overall 96%).
Commodore User, June 1987: Commodore 64 review by Mike Pattenden.
CRASH issue 45, October 1987, p. 22: Spectrum review (92%, Catelite, the 128K and 48K sound). CRASH issue 48, January 1988: review index.
Sinclair User issue 67, October 1987: Spectrum review (Ocean, in-house, £7.95).
Your Sinclair issue 23, November 1987: Spectrum review by Rachael Smith, 8/10.
The Games Machine issue 7, June 1988: Atari ST (£19.95) and Amiga (£24.95) versions, converted by Peter Johnson.
ZZAP!64 issue 57, January 1990: the best C64 games of the decade (Wizball seventh).
ZZAP! issue 61, May 1990: feature on Sensible Software (nine months, Dropzone, Nemesis and Salamander; the July 1987 cover and Sizzler).
Retro Gamer issue 31 (2006), pp. 38–41: “The Making of Wizball”, with Jon Hare and Martin Galway (the bouncing, the levels, Catelite and Nifta, the music, the Screen Star and Gold Medal, Wizkid).
Amiga Format issue 37, August 1992: Wizkid review, with Jon Hare and Chris Yates.
ZZAP!64 issue 31, November 1987: readers’ music chart (Wizball, Martin Galway).
ZZAP!64 issue 43, November 1988, pp. 105–108: “The Def Guide to Shoot ‘em Ups” (Wizball first; the missed Gold Medal); readers’ music chart.
ZZAP!64 issue 67, November 1990: Ocean’s 16-bit Hit Squad.
CRASH issue 48, January 1988: The Magnificent 7 compilation.
groepaz, NMOS 6510 Unintended Opcodes: No More Secrets (December 2025): LAX #imm in Wizball.