After Sabre Wulf, Underwurlde is our second #1 game released by Ultimate Play the Game, and it won’t be last. What’s even more notable than Ultimate’s massive mid-’80s success is that they are that rare thing: a British games developer who have lasted decades, and are still creating #1 games, right up to 2018. It seems likely that more people have played Underwurlde and Sabre Wulf in recent years than almost any of the Spectrum games we’ll cover, thanks to their loving re-releases as part of 2015’s Rare Replay, a compilation celebrating 30 years of the company’s successors/continuation Rare. If all goes to plan with this blog, we’ll be playing that compilation and meeting these games again, sometime in 2023.
There’s an irony to the fact that Ultimate/Rare stuck around as a British success story in part because, unlike others, they predicted that UK home computers would prove a dead end. So they made a decision to pursue global reach by throwing themselves in with a Japanese company called Nintendo. More on that later, too. That was all ahead of them at the time of Underwurlde, a game which has a more precarious link to the future.
Underwurlde is a loose sequel to Sabre Wulf. Sabreman is back and dealing with more colourful randomly generated creatures, this time with an underworld theme, in a side-view flip screen platformer. His sabre is also gone, replaced initially by a bubble gun thing, and he has gained the ability to leap like an ungainly cartoon frog and get buffeted about like a crash test dummy. Where the nature of its sabre meant so much of Sabre Wulf’s emphasis was horizontal, Underwurlde’s focus is vertical, from the constant counter telling you deep underground you are onwards. Much of the time playing it involves climbing vertical passages via standing on improbably secure bubbles of volcanic gas, trying not to be knocked off.
Getting knocked off isn’t always deadly, but always a source of frustration. Lots of games of this era used hard-to-avoid game over failure states as a way of drawing out the length of time it would take to get through the game. Making players play through the same bits again and again can turn small amounts of content into hard-won rewards. Underwurlde has a slightly more forgiving attitude to failure, a large space to explore, and a system where you need to find particular weapons to reach new areas, all of which are ideas which would become a lot more widespread in time. But staying on its bubbles as they climb feels a lot more of a matter of chance than even the most chaotic moments of Sabre Wulf, and the scale of the game doesn’t do much to lessen its repetitiveness when it’s mostly screen after screen of the same drab caves. I found that my patience soon started running out well before my life counter.
