Costa Panayi worked with three-dimensional geometry every day as a design engineer, and when he took up programming he brought it with him. “I’m quite fascinated with 3D,” he told CRASH in 1986. “I’ve always liked to have things neatly arranged and geometrically correct, and I suppose my engineering background all tied in with programming.” He had bought a ZX81 at the end of 1982. Early in 1984 CRASH made his Android 2 its Game of the Month and said its graphics were “just about the best, possibly as good as any other game for the Spectrum to date”.
Every game he wrote for Vortex Software from then until Revolution in 1986 was in 3D, and he made a point of not repeating himself. “I like to take a completely different approach to the way I handle the 3D in each game,” he said. A jet seen from high above, a helicopter over islands that could be viewed from the north or the south, a road of droids seen from an oblique angle and a bouncing ball over bottomless ravines were each drawn a different way.
Fast facts
- Company: Vortex Software, Manchester, begun late in 1982 with his brother Crete Panayi and Luke Andrews.
- Before games: a mechanical engineer.
- Spectrum games: Android 1 (1983), Android 2 (1984), TLL (Tornado Low Level, 1984), Cyclone (1985), Highway Encounter (1985), Revolution (1986), Deflektor (1987), H.A.T.E. (1989).
- Not his: Alien Highway (1986), the Highway Encounter sequel, was written by Marc Haigh-Hutchinson.
- Pace: about two games a year, “about all Costa can handle on his own”, CRASH reported in 1986.
From Pontoon to Android
Panayi bought his ZX81 while still working as an engineer, 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. “Once we’d written and sold those games we bought books on machine code and started learning. Then the Spectrum came out and we wrote Cosmos and Android I.”
Android 1, for the 16K Spectrum, was a robot maze shooting game that CRASH compared to the arcade games Frenzy and Berserk, and recommended. It reached the charts early in 1983. When running a business on the side began to take up too much time, the programmers brought in Luke Andrews, then a teacher, to handle it.
Android 2 and TLL
Android 2 was Panayi’s first 3D game. CRASH scored it 90% in March 1984 and described a huge playing area, “part massively convoluted maze, part open space”, seen in “solid 3D, seen from well above and slightly to one side”. The angle was part of the challenge: one reviewer warned of “mean landmines, especially in passages where the floor is obscured by the perspective view”. Vortex licensed Ocean to produce the Commodore 64 version.
TLL (Tornado Low Level) followed in August 1984 and scored 81%. The player flies a swing-wing jet over a landscape of buildings, pylons, power lines, rivers and cliffs, about 36 times the size of the screen, seen from what CRASH called “a severe birds eye view perspective”. Height is shown by the plane’s shadow. “The 3D effect of your shadow works extremely well breaking up quite accurately if you are half over a building,” one reviewer wrote, although another noticed that the shadow did not grow or shrink as the plane climbed. Targets scored more the lower they were hit, so players flew under bridges and power cables. The game was “not quite simulation, not quite arcade, but somewhere in between”.
Cyclone
Cyclone put a helicopter over a group of islands, rescuing survivors and collecting crates with a winch while a cyclone roamed the map. The player could switch the view to look from the north or from the south, which CRASH found useful “especially when boxes are hidden on a beach under a cliff”. Its reviewers disagreed about it. One felt it “lacks real advances over TLL”; another thought it had “much more content”. It scored 79% in January 1985. Panayi later noticed the market following him: after Cyclone, he said, “there were dozens of helicopter games on the market suddenly”.
Highway Encounter
Highway Encounter was his highest-rated game. The player controls one of five droids, called Vortons, pushing a bomb down a straight road through 30 zones to the enemy base, “from an oblique aerial angle, seeing one complete section of road at a time”. The other droids follow automatically and stop at any obstacle, so the game is about clearing a path: nudging and shooting barrels and boxes into place to block the mines, while a laser that pauses after every three shots holds off enemy robots. CRASH gave it 95% in September 1985 and compared its 3D graphics to Ultimate’s, “both in design and quality”.
It did not reuse the earlier games’ routines. “Highway Encounter meant starting from scratch again,” CRASH reported. The sequel, Alien Highway (88% in June 1986), was Marc Haigh-Hutchinson’s remix of it, not Panayi’s work.
Revolution
Revolution was a deliberate change of subject. “With Revolution we thought there are no bouncing ball games, so why don’t we have a go?” Panayi said, and CRASH described it as “another fundamentally different style of display and programming”. The player bounces a ball around platforms over bottomless ravines, turning pairs of grey boxes white before the first turns grey again, and each new game shuffles the puzzles between levels. CRASH scored it 91% in October 1986. One reviewer found “most of the ‘Costa Magic’”; another thought it “still seems to have something that relates it to the Highway games”.
How he worked
Vortex worked without a storyboard. “It’s a process of continual design rather than continual refinement,” Andrews told CRASH, and he gave an example: “we might decide to do something that has two animation stages in it, and Costa goes away and works for about two weeks on it and comes back with five stages of animation.” Panayi could not see himself going back to flat games: “It just seems like a step backwards to return to 2D now. I find you get a feeling of space when you’re working in 3D, and I don’t think I could write in 2D.”
Deflektor and H.A.T.E.
In 1986 Vortex signed a marketing deal with U.S. Gold, and its later games came out with Gremlin Graphics. Deflektor was a puzzle game in which the player turns mirrors to guide a laser beam to energy cells, while gremlins wander about knocking the mirrors out of line. CRASH scored it 77% in December 1987. One reviewer found it “fiendishly addictive”; another “found it less addictive than most did”. Amstrad Action made the Amstrad version a Mastergame at 90%, calling it “an original concept, wonderfully implemented”, and was glad that “Vortex and Costa Panayi have lost none of their flair and originality since teaming up with Gremlin”.
H.A.T.E. (Hostile All Terrain Encounter), reviewed in 1989, was a return to the shoot-’em-up. ACE wrote that “Panayi has returned to the diagonal scrolling used to such great effect in his previous releases” and added “a heavy dose of Zaxxon”. It called the result “hugely unoriginal in its concept and execution”, but said it “still manages to provide a quality blast”.
In CRASH
CRASH’s October 1986 issue carried an interview with Panayi and Andrews alongside a separate interview with Jon Ritman, and the magazine’s back-issue lists summed up that issue as “Programmers: Jon Ritman, Costa Panayi”. By then, CRASH noted, the lowest overall rating any of Panayi’s games had collected was 79%.
Sources
- CRASH issue 2, March 1984, pp. 12–13: Android 2 review, 90%, Game of the Month; Android 1, “Recommended”.
- CRASH issue 3, April 1984, pp. 100–101: Vortex’s beginnings in late 1982, Costa and Crete Panayi and Luke Andrews, Android 1 in the charts early in 1983, Ocean’s Commodore 64 licence.
- CRASH issue 7, August 1984, pp. 14–15: TLL review, 81%.
- CRASH issue 12, January 1985, p. 76: Cyclone review, 79%.
- 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%; p. 84: the Jon Ritman interview; pp. 110–111: Graeme Kidd, “Vortex — A Whirl of 3D Games”, interview with Costa Panayi and Luke Andrews.
- CRASH issues 42–58 (1987–1988): back-issue listings, “33 OCT Programmers: Jon Ritman, Costa Panayi”.
- CRASH issue 47, December 1987, p. 123: Deflektor review, 77%.
- Amstrad Action issue 30, March 1988, pp. 41–43: Deflektor review, 90%, Mastergame.
- ACE issue 22, July 1989: H.A.T.E. review.