ANDROMEDA 1983

Marco Innocenti has just released ANDROMEDA 1983, an 80s'n'8-bit-styled fun-emphasising remake of his first Andromeda game, Andromeda Awakening from IFComp 2011. It's as if Andromeda Awakening had been released in 1983 for the Commodore 64, Apple II and ZX Spectrum as an adventure game with graphics and music. I produced the looping SID chippy soundtrack for the game.

1983 ain't heavy. As Marco said on intficiton.org,

"DISCLAIMER: this is not REALLY intended as a REAL GAME. It's 50% a joke and 50% nostalgia. You, Constant Readers, will tell me where do you fall. It's pretty short, it won't kill your time too much...

PS: Don't expect anything easy or polite to the player. What's actually there, trying and helping the player, was made by the Inform people and it's still there because it was too much struggle to remove. Honestly, it is a feeling I wanted to replicate, and that feeling had no synonyms, most of the time."

As a fan of the original game, I got an extra kick out of 1983, but play-wise it can stand on its own. It obviously wasn't worth trying to reproduce all the complexities of the original game in this format, so it's become a new, simpler game using some of the same basic story, locations and ingredients.

As a grizzled Apple II and Commodore 64 veteran, what really bowled me over when Marco first showed me this were the graphics. It's a very specific aesthetic he's recreated incorporating both the colour palette of the Commodore 64 and some of the pixel-dithering tricks used to produce textures on the considerably less colourful Apple II screen – as if the game's creators had indeed tried to port the game's graphics as consistently as they could across these different 8-bit machines.