#43: Spindizzy Worlds (Activision, Amiga, 1990) 

Spindizzy, a 1986 8-bit game designed by Paul Shirley, was itself an inspiration to Populous, because it features movement in a 3D isometric view. And… it doesn’t really develop anything beyond that. You move a spinning top/ball/CD-on-a-spindle around a very abstract landscape, work out how to get to places, and that’s about it. There are a couple of additional ideas, like spots that bounce your thingamajig upwards, but it is not far off being an extended tech demo. Which I can see the fun of in 1986 (I played it myself, if not that early), when just exploring the extent of the world, its size apparent via the concession of a map screen, was inspiring.

Spindizzy Worlds is an attempt to answer how you follow something like that up when technology has moved on. It’s a question that has made or ruined series, genres, careers, and we will come to versions of the question again and again, even if we’re only looking at the somewhat successful answers.

The answer in this case is, unsurprisingly, to expand on what Spindizzy did. The clue is in the title: splitting into levels is a concession to accessibility, but also a statement of variety. There will be a lot more to explore. Just fitting much more on the screen allows bigger structures to be parsed and made use of, and there is more complicated machinery along the way.

Presentationally, though, it still carries an unshakeable air of tech demo. The most satisfying thing is often the momentum with which its spinning top moves about and handles slopes and drops, just the right side of too fiddly. The worlds have some nice features — there’s water and lava and starfield backgrounds; one is called Gargoyle, and has grotesque heads blocking the way — but it’s still not a whole lot less abstract than the original. The top is still a robot named GERALD (because even non-anthropomorphised machines need male names!) and you move around each world until you are allowed to leave having found its fuel top-ups. It’s barely window dressing on that most fundamentally video gamey set of tasks: collect [things] and then go to [exit]. Because.