PARADROID POWER

Andrew Braybrook on his inventive 8-bit shooter

Paradroid successfully combines two distinct genres. Did you purposely try to create something different?

I always followed my nose, trying to design a game that I would enjoy playing. I was more interested in using the technology to do something new. I would start with building the scrolling system and see what dropped out. This game was designed almost overnight as I walked home. I wrote down all the ideas I wanted to incorporate on one sheet of paper and all of those ideas went in.

Where did Paradroid’s droidswapping originate?

I think the idea germinated from an arcade game we used to play where you played a commando who could leap into a tank and use it. When it got hit you had a couple of seconds to leap out before it blew up, and then you could go and find another tank. I quite liked the two different states and that you were protected by the tank. Having decided on the radar-style display for the robots, I could save all the complex graphical images for all the directions of movement. It also allowed a greater variety of weapons, though it wasn’t expressed fully until Paradroid 90. I understand that a number of games have used a similar system since, so it must be quite appealing.

What was the reasoning behind the update, Heavy Metal Paradroid?

I was writing Morpheus, and had a ‘curved metal’ graphical look that I had concocted in a graphics editor. It was early days for the game, and I didn’t have a game system to experiment with, so I decided to substitute the Paradroid

background graphics with the Morpheus ones. I had taken delivery of a Commodore 128, and one of the features on it was that you could switch the CPU into double-speed mode while the raster was off the screen, which bought about 30 per cent more processing time. So I wanted to get Paradroid’s

scrolling a bit smoother. It turned out that I could get it running smoother even on a Commodore 64, and I really liked the new graphical look, so we did a new turbo loader and re-released Paradroid.

Why do you think Paradroid remains so popular with gamers today?

I guess that everyone gets something different from a game. Maybe that’s it. Paradroid is a very dynamic game; even though each ship is set up broadly the same, it is running everything on each deck as you arrive so it plays differently every time. As a player, you also have a great deal of freedom as to how to tackle the ship as a whole and each deck individually.