Ultimate Guide: Skool Daze
35 years ago, publisher Microsphere took us back to the classroom with its tale of errant schoolboy Eric and his damning school report. Pick up your catapult – it’s time to… hit some shields?
Class clown Graeme Mason tells you all you need to know about this 8-bit classic
Eric has been a naughty boy. Unauthorised absences, scribbling on blackboards and the use of an offensive weapon have all led to an appalling term report. Should Eric knuckle down and study hard so that he can improve his grades? Or should he try and make sure that the derogatory report, locked away inside the school safe, never reaches his parents? We think we know the answer.
Set up not long after Sinclair announced the ZX Spectrum, north London software house Microsphere quickly established itself as a home for quality games on the popular computer. Run by the husband and wife team of Dave and Helen Reidy, the pair began by publishing utilities before realising the Spectrum’s potential as a games machine. After The Train Game, Microsphere’s breakthrough hit came with the motorcycle smash Wheelie in 1983. When thoughts turned to their next effort, the Reidys drew on both their experiences as school teachers, plotting and planning a game based around the so-called ‘happiest days of your life’. With Dave writing the code down on paper, Helen typing it in and their colleague Keith Warrington providing the graphics, there was a cosy feel to development at Microsphere. But the result was a classic 8-bit title that broke the mould with its sandbox-style game design before that term even existed.
In a move of genius, Skool Daze begins with each member of the cast strolling into the centre of the screen with an option to rename them in turn. Einstein, the bespectacled child know-it-all can become the school swot from your own class. Pudgy bully Angelface is transformed into your personal nemesis from the playground, alongside Mr Wacker the patriarchal headteacher, and of course you can cast yourself as the star of the story. The game then commences with playtime, and our hero is surrounded by the cast of his school, friends and enemies everywhere. During this break, the teachers stalk the building, making sure Eric and his cohorts maintain some semblance of good behaviour, and they’re named in a quaintly amusing Bash Street Kids style. There’s Mr Rockitt, the nerdy science teacher; Mr Creak, the history teacher who looks like he’s teaching most of history from his own first-hand experiences; and Mr Withit, the younger and friendlier geography teacher who addresses his pupils as ‘chaps’ and strolls around with his hands in his pockets. Finally, straight out of the pages of
The Demon Headmaster is Mr Wacker the cloaked
dark lord of the establishment, gliding menacingly throughout the classrooms, brandishing his cane and dispensing lines to any schoolboy foolish enough to misbehave in his presence.
These lines, given in random lots of hundred, are the unwanted currency of Skool Daze: accrue too many and Eric is expelled. Lines can be given for a variety of reasons, and not just the obvious ones, such as punching a fellow student or firing your catapult at a teacher. Sitting on the floor, being in the wrong classroom and wandering into the staff room will all net you a punishment, and sometimes it’s not even your fault. In the timehonoured tradition, Skool Daze enables its youthful inhabitants to be naughty and then get the rap pinned on another pupil. Alas, this works both ways as Eric is often collared for the antics of Boy Wander (the tearaway) or school bully, Angelface.
Gaining lines is an inevitability as Eric’s days at school pass by. Determined to extract the report from the headmaster’s safe, each of the school’s shields must be struck in order to make them flash. Only when all of them are flashing will the teachers become disorientated enough to reveal their secret combination letter, each one of which is required to prise open that safe. That’s not all however, as Eric must then cover his tracks and ‘unflash’ the shields by hitting them once more. Only when this is done can our hero breathe easily, until the next term that is.
As with another 8-bit sandbox classic, Ocean’s
The Great Escape, Skool Daze has a set timetable and routine to each cycle. Beginning with playtime, Eric’s day proceeds with a geography lesson, revision in the library, science, dinner time and so on. Failure to adhere to this schedule results in the relevant teacher chasing after the young man, itching to give out a stack of hateful lines. And to make things even trickier for Eric, there are several random events that occur throughout the game, presumably inspired by Helen and Dave’s real-life teaching experiences. For example, in one event, boffin Einstein has deduced your plan and is off to tell the head; the only way to prevent the resulting 2,000 lines should he reach Mr Wacker is to make sure the swot doesn’t make it to his study in one piece. Or Boy Wander is at it again, labelling an incriminating weapon (a pea-shooter) with Eric’s name and leaving it on the fire escape. Stop the headteacher before the tearaway can retrieve
“To have fun the game, you you could didn’t just need to beat play around within its own live and world” Roger Hulley
it or cop another 2,000 lines. But the worst is thanks to Angelface, who, in this pre-vaccine era has contracted the highly contagious mumps. Should Eric come in contact with the bully during this playtime, he’s sent home, resulting in game over for our plucky work-shy hero.
Upon release, Skool Daze became a smash hit for Microsphere. The game’s colourful and chirpy graphics, coupled with its groundbreaking sandbox game design ensured that both critics and ZX Spectrum owners alike flocked to the tale of Eric and his incriminatory report. A year later a Commodore 64 version appeared and was met with a little more indifference, probably because of its Spectrumesque graphics and roots. With Microsphere busy on a sequel, Skool Daze failed to make it to the Amstrad CPC until a 2015 homebrew effort. The Spectrum-only sequel, Back To Skool, proved just as popular, adding a girls’ school and a neat twist on the plot of the original, as Eric must place his forged report into the school safe in order to avoid another telling off.
Back To Skool (and its spiritual follow-up,
Contact Sam Cruise) raised the bar, yet it was with 1984’s Skool Daze where the mould was well and truly broken. With its then-complex layers of interaction, and the ability to move freely within a living and breathing world, most gamers found entertainment with going about their day as normal, avoiding lines and just having fun immersing themselves in school life. Microsphere may have called time after Contact Sam Cruise, yet it leaves behind a game that is not only hugely compelling but also, in many ways, a definition of the plucky nature of the ZX Spectrum itself. Now which one of you scoundrels wrote that rude word on the blackboard!?
“It was such an original idea at the time” Roger Hulley