The Evolution Of: Paradroid
Arguably, the C64’s finest moment, Andrew Braybrook’s Paradroid took inspiration from his earlier title Survive and influenced Steve Turner’s Quazatron, Ranarama and Magnetron before being adapted for 16-bit systems, as the developers explain
Andrew Braybrook and Steve Turner on the origins of Paradroid and the string of games it influenced
“We had six terminals in the main room, so a six-player game seemed right. There was no shortage of volunteers to test it!” Andrew Braybrook
Accountancy packages and videogames are about as far apart as computerbased experiences get, but during the early-eighties Andrew Braybrook found himself coding both after leaving school and working for the electronics firm GEC Marconi. However, Andrew’s games development was unpaid, took place after-hours and didn’t interfere with his day job, which likely explains why his employer tolerated it. “It was one of those offices that cleared pretty quickly at going-home time, and there were many long dark nights where I stayed behind,” Andrew remembers. “One of the development managers worked a bit later and saw what I was doing, but no one seemed to mind.
The security guard used to patrol around at about 10pm, and then I knew it was time to go home, get some kip and be back for the 8:30am start!”
One of the young coder’s late-night efforts that went down particularly well with his colleagues was Survive – a six-player, ten-level fight to the death that incorporated two Cpu-controlled assassins. “We had six terminals in the main room, so a six-player game seemed right,”
Andrew reasons. “There was no shortage of volunteers to test it! The original game was six levels of a building, with portals between the levels. The initial idea was to drop six players randomly into the levels and they would all try to be the last survivor. Slowly, I expanded it to ten levels. The players could input directions to move, and they could type an X anywhere on their level to fire at. I then added up to two assassins that tried to chase down the players. They followed hidden patrol routes around the rooms, and would then chase a player if they spotted them.”
Far from a mindless shoot-‘em-up, Survive included an ingenious mechanic where opponents couldn’t be seen when behind walls, although one player found a workaround. “Players
could only see other players by line of sight,” Andrew explains, “so shooting at empty space seemed pointless. My colleague Splodge, though, was being very successful and we couldn’t work out why. Then we found out that he was placing lots of Xs all over the screen, and my game was just taking away the first one each cycle, and not clearing the others. So he’d effectively invented his own machine gun! “
Cheating aside, Survive was enjoyed by both its author and his colleagues, but its core mechanics reached a wider audience two years after Andrew left GEC Marconi to join his friend Steve Turner making commercial games. “Paradroid was one of those rare games where the whole game concept was invented in one night and not changed much in implementation,” Andrew says of his second original C64 title for Graftgold. “It was Survive from the assassin’s point of view. And as everyone was out to get the assassin first, the player needed lots of robots to transfer to.”
The sub-game that Andrew devised to facilitate this second aspect of Paradroid would ultimately define his game, as well as being its greatest
evolution from Survive. “The transfer game just sort of happened,” Andrew admits modestly. “I didn’t want players to just grab any robot, nor have a random chance of achieving transfer, they had to earn it. Taking over another robot needed to be a risk, where the difference between the robots decided how many shots you and the opponent got to use in the transfer game.”
Andrew built on Survive further by giving Paradroid nine classes of robots in place of the earlier game’s two identical assassins. “Since the player could take over other robots, I implemented a hierarchy, with the numbering system being a simplistic way of viewing that hierarchy,” Andrew notes. “I wanted players to work their way up; the idea was to use the different robots against each other. It would also get them used to the different types of robot.”
As with Survive, Paradroid would be a fight to the last combatant, but this mechanic required an overhaul in order to work with Andrew’s latest project. “The assassins could change from level to level in Survive, just like the players, and so they had the ability to roam throughout the game,” Andrew reflects. “But the robots in Paradroid couldn’t, and so the last man standing objective was implemented in Paradroid per level and for the whole ship.”
But due to the limitations of the C64, another aspect of Survive didn’t feature in Paradroid at all. “Paradroid was always going to be single-player, just because of the limited number of sprites available,” Andrew points out. “Survive needed seven separate processes to run a six-player game, where each player had their own screen.”
But the single-player Paradroid did incorporate fresh concepts that Survive had lacked, such as energisers to recharge the player’s droid and an alert system to reflect their kill rate. Paradroid also dimmed the lights when decks were cleared of droids, although this idea wasn’t completely without precedence. “Survive was a shorter game, about five minutes would be enough to get a winner, so we didn’t need energisers,” Andrew observes. “Paradroid’s alert status gave a good bonus if you could kill lots of robots quickly. It gave you an idea of how well you were doing, and was the way to maximise your points score. The blackouts came from another game I wrote, called Dalek Hunt. In that one, you had to destroy the generator and then the lights would go out, but there would still be Daleks on the way to the exit, in the dark!”
Following its release, Paradroid became a great success, but a straight conversion to the popular ZX Spectrum was deemed impossible, and so Andrew’s Graftgold partner Steve Turner opted to create an isometric version for the system called Quazatron. “I thought I could make use of a 3D scenario by having some weapons use gravity,” Steve
“I put Paradroid’s collision routines in, so the big droids could smash through the little droids, and one just went off the edge by accident” Steve Turner
says of adapting Paradroid for three dimensions. “Paradroid was top-down, so lasers would fire straight, but if someone was on a slope beneath you in Quazatron I thought it would be fun to have things that you lobbed down the slopes!”
A further opportunity to leverage Quazatron’s isometric playfields followed when Steve implemented Paradroid’s robot-ramming mechanics. “I put Paradroid’s collision routines in, so that the big droids could smash through the little droids, and one just went off the edge by accident,” Steve remembers. “I thought that was really good, and because I had the Gribbly’s Day Out facial animations on KLP-2 I thought when he fell off I’d make him look scared, with his little hands going up. It was a bit like a cartoon where someone hangs in the air just before he falls.”
But a more profound deviation to Paradroid’s gameplay resulted when Steve took an aspect of Andrew’s C64 title to another level in Quazatron. “Andrew had designed Paradroid’s computer system so that you could look up all of the different droids,” Steve recalls. “So I was thinking he had got all of the system there with all of the droids’ parts, and that they would be quite easy to mix and match, and build your own robots out of in Quazatron.”
Much like Paradroid before it, Quazatron was well-received by both reviewers and players on its release, and so Steve decided to develop a Paradroid variant with a fantasy setting and hoards of disposable foes. “I put in Andrew’s system from Paradroid where a bullet killed the first opponent, which took energy off the bullet, but then the bullet kept going,” Steve recollects. “And I just thought it would be really nice to have lots and lots of enemies in Ranarama to really show that working, so when you got enemies lined up, and you had gotten really powerful, it was like rolling a bowling ball when you were killing several enemies in one scoop.”
In keeping with Paradroid, Ranarama was given a ‘last man standing’ objective, but Steve limited his game’s level-clearing to dispatching warlocks, and left the destruction of their minions as optional. “I was aware that because it took quite a while to get across some of the maps – perhaps more than Paradroid – that I didn’t want an empty level scenario where it became boring,” Steve says of finding an exit after clearing one of Ranarama’s levels. “So I thought why not have all of the little foes there, so they could chase after you, and maybe even have them madder because you had killed the bosses.”
When it hit shop shelves, Ranarama went down well with critics and gamers alike, but rather than produce a sequel Steve instead decided to follow-up Quazatron. Although the tile-swapping sub-games in Magnetron, KLP-2’S second adventure, did owe a lot to Ranarama’s anagrambased ones. “I’d used anagrams in Ranarama, where you swapped letters around, and I always loved those little plastic things were you made a picture!” Steve enthuses. “So it was really Ranarama’s sub-game done in 2D instead of a single dimension. You moved the anagram around in Ranarama, and in Magnetron it was doing that either across or up and down.”
The reward for winning Magnetron’s sub-games was control over the droid you’d defeated – with the twist being that KLP-2 waited behind as a
‘save point’ after transferring to another droid. “Paradroid’s Influence Device was like a collar that fitted on a droid, and when that ‘collar’ was transferred to another droid it was like a control device,” Steve explains. “But because I had KLP-2 as a complete droid, and you were controlling other droids in Magnetron, I thought you should go back to him. Otherwise, I would have had to resurrect him after a hijacked droid blew up.”
Magnetron’s gameplay also took influence from its isometric playfields – much like Quazatron had, with one of its notable innovations being the need to carry heavy magnetically charged rods over magnetic surfaces and up ramps. “I wanted to make it more useful getting a big engine than it was before, so it was giving a purpose to building your droids out of bits,” Steve reasons. “I was thinking that perhaps there could be different levels of slopes and some places you couldn’t get to. But then I thought about making KLP-2 carry something heavy. I also thought if I made the rods charged I could have positives and negatives around, but in the end I toned that down.”
Following a court case between Graftgold’s former and current publishers concerning Magnetron and Andrew’s latest work Morpheus, Magnetron came out to positive if not glowing reviews, by which point a 16-bit adaptation of Paradroid had become financially attractive. “I had a larger screen area, so I figured we could have larger rooms too,” Andrew says of his
Atari ST and Amiga title Paradroid 90. “The second Paradroid 90 ship was a copy of the C64 one, I had a smaller introductory ship before it, and it was logical to make the ships bigger as the game progressed. That, in turn, allowed me to put more robots on the decks. But I couldn’t go too mad, as the game was still one against many and it would have been easy to get overwhelmed.”
“I was thinking that perhaps there could be different levels of slopes and some places you couldn’t get to” Steve Turner
As well as making Paradroid 90 bigger than its 8-bit predecessor, Andrew also tasked Graftgold’s artists with depicting a wider variety of ships, enemy droids and weapons for the 16-bit interpretation. “The 16-bit machines offered more colours, more ‘sprites,’ and particle-plotting,” Andrew notes, “so I wanted to make the robots and weapons more graphic. So although we had less different robots in Paradroid 90, they had more different characteristics than the robots in the original. The four different grades of weapons in Paradroid were very last-minute; I’d have preferred more weapons and more variety. So I wanted more distinct weapons for Paradroid 90. I gave one robot the ability to leave trails of bombs. It wasn’t a particularly successful weapon, but it was a very strong robot.”
In terms of gameplay evolutions, Paradroid 90 introduced a nasty but effective solution to players taking too long to clear ships of droids in the form of spacefaring pirates, who even had their own ship. “Potentially when you were searching for the last few robots there was not as much to do and nothing much to fire at,” Andrew concedes. “The clock and the energy capacity were ticking down, but adding another time constraint didn’t hurt. If you cleared the ships quickly then you never saw the pirates. If you did, you realised that you couldn’t transfer to them. If you got through all of the other ships with the transfer game on, and you found the Graftgold Key on every ship, then you got the bonus ship. It had a lot of pirates from the start, and mean robots!”
Despite being limited to vertical scrolling, Paradroid 90 was a great success, and Graftgold subsequently worked on a PC Engine version, which sadly wasn’t completed. “We were most of the way through developing a two-player PC Engine version of Paradroid 90,” Andrew remembers. “We used the Amiga graphics for the core game, but we changed the transfer game layout a bit. We had to keep the two players together, so the screen would stop scrolling if they reached opposite sides of the screen. But we hadn’t crossed the bridge of how to handle two players having to take the same lift.”
Sadly, Graftgold’s abandoned PC Engine project was its last attempt to build on Paradroid, as Andrew notes when reviewing his game’s legacy. “It had good mileage,” Andrew reflects. “Steve worked hard on the isometric presentations on the Spectrum, and their 3D look was excellent. But unfortunately the 16-bit era was all too short-lived, as the console tsunami subsequently arrived.”
When asked for his final words on Paradroid and its successors, Steve explains that Graftgold could have continued to rework Andrew’s classic – if only publishers had been willing. “We were talking about joining Uridium and Paradroid together, where you would land on Uridium ships and then have Paradroid within them,” Steve reveals. “And we were toying around with a version for the Playstation, a top-down title with parallaxed walls. But it was a question of getting publishers interested, and by and large they didn’t want to know.”